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25 September 2007
Two bags in hand and three more hanging around my shoulders, I climbed onto the train—1008 Cascades.I glanced down the length of the car, sweeping the rows of colorless upholstery with my eyes. I piled my bags onto an empty seat and slumped down against the window, sighing in that way that marks both a beginning and an end. I smirked, amused by my own self-indulgence, then turned toward the window and squinted.
It was evening, and the sun was intense and orange. I faced it straight on, absorbing the heat while I waited for the train to pull away from the station.
After a minute I slouched backward, burrowing into my seat and tugging at the collar of my jacket. When the train began to move, it gently rocked me back and forth and from side to side. I focused my eyes off in the distance, passively recording the blurry images of the receding landscapes. The train found its pace, and I extracted a tangle of headphone wires from my pocket with my left hand.
Repeating patterns of fences, bridges, and warehouses rolled by rhythmically, falling in and out of synch with the music playing in my ears. Passing train cars turned into swaths of metallic gradients that stretched beyond my sight in both directions.
An hour went by, and the train slowed near a cluster of granaries and water towers. The sun poked between the buildings, and dusty streaks of light cut through the brownish haze. Telephone wires, running parallel with the tracks, traced the horizon, framing the band of bare dirt that separated me from the stacks of tired industry. The scene was overlaid with a crosshatching of grain elevators, light posts, and the spindly legs of the water towers, and a low, long concrete building with empty green windows extended to the right. The train had nearly stopped.
A sliver of sunlight jutted into the foreground, illuminating from behind two men standing in the dirt only a few yards from the tracks. Middle-aged and dressed in worn cotton pants and overalls, the men stared north, past the train. Their bodies, angled slightly toward each other, engaged in private and silent conversation. Neither man seemed to notice the train inching by.
My left hand reached instinctively for my camera, whose case I could feel pressing against my thigh.
My eyes remained focused on the men and the landscape as I pulled the camera from its padded case. I removed the lens cap and leaned closer to the window. I cradled the camera in my hands for a moment, carefully judging its weight and allowing my fingers to trace the contours of its buttons and dials. Bringing the camera up to my face, I looked through the viewfinder.
The glare of the sun sent spots of color cascading across the lens, and they stretched themselves out as I adjusted the angle of the camera. I muted the noise of the periphery with the crisp black edges of the viewfinder, trimming the before and the after from my view. The foreground and background continued to glide slowly past each other as I framed the scene through my lens, my finger hovering over the shutter release, hesitating.
I trapped the men’s heads in the bottom corner of the viewfinder, wedging them between the edge of the frame and the imposing mass of industrial architecture. I released the shutter and shifted the angle of the lens as the train, still rolling, withdrew the men from my view. The sun retreated behind a large warehouse, reappearing a moment later above the low concrete building and reflecting off the smooth metal rail of an adjacent track. The tiny imperfections in the train window caught the light, casting a reddish glaze that stained the landscape. A slender post topped with a flashing red light slid into the frame and in front of the buildings as I released the shutter again. I pulled the camera away from my face, squinting out the window at the scene for a second longer before relaxing back into my seat.
I set my camera down beside me, leaving my left hand resting against its grip.
[ posted by Matthew Chrislip at 03:09 :
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