September 08, 2003

Pennsylvania train of thought

We were splitting a ham and cheese sandwich. The phosphorous lights made the ham and the tomatoes and her lips look blue. she took the escalator down under the tile and chrome crust of Penn Station in the soot and steel mantle and onto the concrete platforms with peeling yellow paint. the slabs of concrete were worn smooth as ivory and sat like keys on a grand piano side by side between steel rails which forked out from there to every corner of the continent. There on the faded yellow line on the train platform she said goodbye. she didn't look back.

i know because i did.

The rails spliced off one another as the train careened through the dark corridors under Manhattan. By an understated feat of human ingenuity and modern engineering, the trained rolled out from under the hudson river and into the sunlight and swamp marshes of new jersey.

I searched for Jimmy hoffa's body in the brackish landscape that soaked through the rotting railroad ties and dilapidated trusswork. i sat alone on the burgandy and orange seats and was delighted by the exfoliating layers of typography and shaggy signage that blanketed the billboards and brick buildings and wooden water towers in Trenton.

The train station in Philidelphia is a marble monolith that was built too well and lasted too long for its own good. I walked up the stairs onto the polished floors under the chandeliers and walked out between the colossal columns into the sunlight. I stood there under big architecture and even bigger sun and found myself in that exhilirating but precarious position of realizing that everyone i know or have ever known that could ever possibly be thinking about me right then would not know where i was.

and for one of the first times in my life; they would also not know where i was going.

Harrisburg.time and space scrolled by the train window at seemingly equal pace and proportion. I began to work my way towards a conclusion, or at least an opinion as to what being alone in this way means. i thought about being alone, and being free, and if those two words mean - and can only mean - the same thing.

Altoona.I began to wonder if being alone and being free are mutually inclusive, or if they could exist in any other combination.

Johnstown. I started to understand the luxury, and question the sacrifice of my freedom to move, to see, and above all the think; and if being alone is the only way to have to this liberty.

Latrobe. As my freedom took me through the green appalachian summer, i thought about the screenplays in my head, what a circle could look like if it could be unfolded, and how the guy across the ailse ever decided to wear orange alligator skin cowboy boots.

and like so many other times, i was the lone witness to all of it. but for the first time in my life, no one; not even me, knew exactly where i was going.

for the first time in my life, i found myself questioning whether being alone was a benifit of being free, or a consequence of it.

and for the first time in my life, i found myself looking back.

Posted by Todd Roeth at September 8, 2003 08:33 PM