Traveling Outside of Time
I hear a passenger say the train is right on time. I haven’t looked at my watch for hours.
At dinner, the menu offers lamb shanks, T-bone steak, salmon, a chicken dish made with goat cheese and herbs and a vegetarian pasta. I am seated across from the Crawfords. David is a 60-ish part-time novelist, part-time designer of pharmaceutical facilities who spent formative years at Berkeley in the early 1960s. Pamela is a transplanted Canadian with a striking, luminous face that looks as if it was – as Jimmy Stewart said of Katherine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story” — “lit from within.”
They are traveling to Seattle on their way to a three-day stay at a B&B on Vancouver Island. It’s a trip they had planned to take in the spring, but a few weeks ago an oncologist told Pamela that she had a rare form of lung cancer that had already metastasized to her brain. He gave her eight months to live. So that is exactly what she and her husband are doing: living. I watched them an hour ago in the Parlour Car as they took in the eclipse. They were holding hands, their shoulders touching, their faces serene. The train is perfect for them, a metaphor for how they are choosing to live – a long, seamless, timeless moment, no past, no future, all present.
Sleeping on the train is a special joy, partly because the train cradles you with its motion, partly because there are no alarm clocks or phones or kids to drive to school in the morning.