#womenwhotravel ridingtrains travelwisdom

[joyfullyimportantyouth-blog]

What I’ve Found From Riding Trains, by Isabelle Hoonan

Even if countries were connected across oceans by trains, I still wouldn’t take them every day. Even if the gilded splendors of a Moscow mosque or the thin air of Everest were readily available, I would take caution to parcel out this privilege. Perhaps I would hop on once a month to preserve the delicacy of anonymity. Riding a train to a foreign locale is an act of accepting calm before unsettlement. It is an intentional act of leaving, followed by a chaotic thrush of discovery with each new thing you encounter: it is a gift to not waste. Should the opportunity arise to disappear on a train for a while, towards something you do not know, it should still be reserved in rarity so it doesn’t lose its meanings.

Imagine closing your eyes in the shady enclave of the Redwoods and waking up to the smell of creamy espresso in Budapest. Your face is welted by the imprints of your backpack zipper because you took care to sleep on your few belongings. Instead of the steadiness of an airplane ride, sitting on a train is to be a witness of the changing landscapes, of the people coming on and off the platform, the scrum of moving forward and learning how to sit still.

I have found three things I have faith in while riding on trains: love, solitude, and asking questions. They are, in ways, extensions of each other. To love is to embed within the grains of affirmation and failure. The humility and ego that come uninvited with these experiences of loving require asking questions of yourself and another, while also stepping away to remember who you are outside of someone else.

There’s no order to loving and being alone and asking questions: they are all a combustion of reacting to what must be done to be better, to be greater than what we think we are. To survive. They are our mirrors of experience deepened into no-name meaning. Clarity is not a guarantee, because we all are capable of lying, of having former selves answer for us.  But a train pulls us along to see what is to come.

To ask questions is not as intellectual as it may sound. It is to want to feel a situation outside of your life view, to know the stories that happened before the outcomes. It is to strive to not be trite no matter the hardships you’ve pillowed beneath the joys, because questions are not about who you are. To ask questions… is a loving choice of asking to know what you do not know, an act of saying you do not assume, that you will not judge, that you are listening. It is a gesture to surrender to the expanse of all that you may not ever know fully when you speak to someone. These moments of asking, in silence and the soft punctuation of voice, are interims of existing. They consist of an invisible transformation after everything that’s already been done but now voiced. They are a guiding prelude of everything you must do now. Hold onto them, let them go, and let them return.

I found love on a train in India. One morning, I was woken up by the strange strokes of small fingers against my dirty socks and the smell of burning trash when I blasted my eyes open. Three sets of children’s arms were half teetering on the ladder to my upper bunk, giggling as I twisted myself off of my lumpy backpack to face them. They ran away, bumping into old women in magenta and capsicum hued saris. They wove their way towards samosas being sold through the cracks of metal barred windows rusted from the 1950’s. I settled into my book, a pilfered find from a hostel back in Varanassi, Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” My boyfriend slept soundly on the bunk below. The thin plastic mattress creaked as I shifted to stretch a little before we would get off in a few hours to the mayhem of Mumbai.

It would have been 28 hours on the train, our route starting in Varanassi near the ghats and ending in Mumbai’s maze-like metropolis, where cows walked in the roads next to skyscrapers. This was our second full month together, which began in Nepal in October and would end in May in Mumbai after seven months of travel, without a single day spent apart.

When I look back at this relationship, my very first boyfriend, I cannot help but feel that it was more than just my first series of train rides: it was learning how to give trust to uncertainty, because things always seemed to work themselves out after 28 hours. We rode so many trains on that trip that became a stamp of first love, the gift of freedom that gave us mornings huddled together on a rain soaked train winding its way through the jungle of Sri Lanka and the promising endlessness of starched bright desert in Jasailmer. 

Sometimes we were quiet from the night before, when we argued about money or about small infractions, like how I wasn’t okay eating street food (so dumb, just get sick it’s fine, I think now). Sometimes we were so content drinking chai out of small ceramic cups, a rupee each. Sometimes I could feel the burst of my heart against the walls of fear when he would run off the train with not a minute before it left, swinging around the corner into our section with newspaper-wrapped samosas and I would wrap my arms around him with this melting relief.

Those trains led us all around India, all the way to the North of Thailand from Bangkok, where we worked for a month at a holistic rehabilitation center near Chiang Rai. We found our way back to India running onto trains that led us from Kolkata to Agra, to Rajasthan. It pierces me how much of the good and the bad were catalysts of the train, of losing money and stumbling upon conversations of what we wanted in our lives that would last for hours... the exchange of ideas of what we were reading swelling our need to move and find things out for ourselves, together and apart in our own thoughts. The mixture of sitting still while staring at the reel of passing desert into darkness, only to watch it all fall away, brought the next round of chai’s and holding each other’s gaze. It was as if to let the other know we were there without saying anything, that it was okay to be afraid sometimes, to trust, because that too would fall away. Home was far away but becoming wherever we were sleeping that night. I imagine this when I imagine how my traveling life began on trains. I was twenty.

I found solitude on a train from Seattle to Bellingham. Amtrak became my constant companion my first year of college, when each ambling walk to class became myself obsessed with figuring out who I was going to be, and who I was going to be was not where I was in this docile hippie college town. The swarms of joining and breaking social groups in the dorms, where girls would form quick alliances then herd from gym to cafeteria to class, confused me. I had dreamed college would be a slew of coffee dates and discussing pretentiously directed seminars on Camus. People who had lived in Paris would become my friends, and they would inquire about my time living in England as a thirteen-year-old loner who found solace reading in the musty library and asking strangers if I could eat with them. Basically, I expected my life to be like a low-budget indie feature film.

Each weekend became a disappointment of how lame the parties were, although I still wanted to go to them, and classes packed with four-hundred people discussing Murphy’s Law. I would go home to see my parents and unload my existential grief, but these train rides gave me a harsh glare of my entitlement, my craving for direction that I couldn’t create at that moment, a space for me to daydream of what was to come, which involved going to far off places where I would truly feel like an “artist.”

So I would draw and draw, write, think, listening to music and seeing the mountains meeting the Sound in a new way. I remember my first winter break lugging my duffel onto the train and settling at a window seat, the saltiness of the air and my feelings weighing heavy on my pen as I set myself on drawing my way into Juilliard or some New York bound school. I was all about the accolades, the rewards, recognition. 

Doing art made me tired of myself sometimes, and for good reason, because I asked so many questions but didn’t know what else to do with myself. Why couldn’t I just be someone who simply enjoyed things? If I was to accept my peripatetic leanings, I needed to decide what kind of artist I would be, which is probably why I posed like a judgmental-sensitive Kate Moss fascist in all black 24/7, dangling my Baudelaire book and willingness to take a tequila shot at a fake rave because I was so intent on being well-rounded COOL. Ugh.

Maybe I’d be an actress or a street artist or… I don’t know. At that moment, I was really into replaying the start and stop of the night before, which had transpired like a really shitty Boy Meets World revival that I thought was really, really deep. I had tried to kiss a boy I’d already kissed before, swirling in innocent dorm drinking, celebrating the end of finals and the ending legalization of Four Lokos. He was from Colorado, liked watching Planet Earth but had sworn off weed in favor of incense, and was very unattainable because he was in an open relationship. So… complicated, and thus very appealing to figure out. This was even before astrological compatibility was en vogue.

He made me want to do shrooms because apparently you could see the universe in a kaleidoscope and have some Jungian insight about your priorities. He was worldly and had lived in the Utah desert and was set to go to India and wrote Arabic on his notecards with my calligraphy pens when we would study together in the library. But yes, he had rejected my optioning that we could be a thing, because he was focused and that made me angry, because it meant that I had none if I was going after a boy who wouldn’t chase me. So I did what I always did when I fell down, which was to reject the rejector and still chase after them half-heartedly and be sort of apocalyptic about how my art would always be the most consistent and torturous thing to pursue. I filled so many afternoons drained with furiously typing poems that I later hated. I wish I had seen the sweetness of it all then, which now I see as beautiful for trying to make things matter, even if it was all a bit contrived and suburban girl angsty, like a bad 90′s sitcom spinoff doused in nice clothing and bad cocktail choices in a college town.

“I’m okay,” I would think after I would finish the train ride and disembark towards another destination: home, filled with heated coffee cups and roads I knew well enough to sleepwalk drive, even for a temporary time. I was nineteen.

I found asking questions on a train heading from Toulouse to Bordeaux to St. Foy La Grande. I was twenty-five, on the heels of a breakup, and headed to go meditate for a week straight to “get rid of” this self-antagonizing, self-fabling stewing. I wanted to stop screwing myself over. I couldn’t keep dwelling.

It was time to transfer at Bordeaux, a mad dash to get my ticket and run to the next train for St. Foy La Grande, where Buddhist nuns would be awaiting to bring a group of us to Thich Nhat Hahn’s “hamlets.”

I scanned the train times and asked a stern looking attendant where I was supposed to go in halting French, trying to rephrase before she threw her hands up and gave up. “Fuck… okay,” I got mad at myself then realized this was whatever, I’d figure it out. I decided to say c’est la vie and run to the platform I thought was usually the route, with an end stop of Bergerac. I ran through a bunch of peacoats and perfectly lipsticked French faces to the platform with an end stop of Bergerac and found it was my stop: ça roule.

“Is this the train to St. Foy La Grande?” a woman asked me in English. She was carrying a small luggage with her and had a twangy Australian accent, looked about in her sixties, and had sassy frosted pink lipstick and had matched her powder blue luggage to her cashmere sweater. She was also traveling alone and had a beautiful French train employee named Pierre carrying her other bag for her. Her name was Sheryl. I liked her immediately. She had the exact kind of throw caution to the wind but take care of yourself older woman allure that I wanted. We ended up talking the whole train ride to St. Foy La Grande, where I asked her questions and she asked me some and more.

I asked where she was from (New Zealand, my faulty mistake). I asked why she traveled (her husband had died a few years ago and she needed to move). She gave me the salt of the earth older woman advice that I so craved as a wandering but not quite so young but sometimes a beginner mid-twenty-something-year-old.

“I started traveling when I was young, but over the last few years I haven’t settled much until now,” she told me. “No matter how much I moved around after Alan’s death, the grief still followed me. I could be waking up in a villa in Santorini, greeted by the sun and the surf, looking fantastic in a white string bikini with sangria and pool boys surrounding me, and I would sometimes feel close to nothing. I would feel grateful while watching a sunset, but my head would be a haze of sadness. These things follow you, you know. Loss. You just have to learn how to sit still with time and somehow, after going through all of that hell, you find some light without needing to try so hard.”

Now she was having a light affair with her gardener and had the cut the bullshit and go be awesome attitude that was hard-earned with age and experience.

“Honey, as hard as it is, it’s important to learn how to keep it light. I was like you and tried to find the depth in questions.  I wondered how men who didn’t wonder so much about me could be figured out or try and find something that didn’t quite exist in them. Just learn to leave it. Just be an international woman of mystery, and the suitors will come calling, but they’re only the appetizer. The most important journeys, like train rides, are the ones where you ride alone or are accompanied by a friend to cut you up in laughter. Or the ones you stare out the window wondering where you’re meant to be. These journeys are the ones that sweeten the real love, that bring a friendship deeper to yourself or with a girlfriend. They are the ones where you discover yourself most that will give you the type of grace and grit that allow you to say hello and goodbye to places and people that don’t ask anything from you as long as you don’t ask anything from them. These sweeten the deal of life.”

When I headed back from St. Foy La Grande to Bordeaux to Toulouse Matabieu, I had spent a week meditating, especially on Sheryl’s life wisdom. I had thought a lot and not thought so much simultaneously. Who knew breathing could be breathing into something greater. It lightened my soul to feel the depth of being good enough for now again, of being curious, of realizing it wasn’t all about me, all these thoughts and feelings backstories but not the main show.

The main show was being right here, no dress rehearsal needed or discussing too much so as to not infringe upon instinct to act with that grace and grit Sheryl spoke of. I sipped a super fine glass of wine after a week of tea and watched a sheet of bright blue sky and laughed at and with myself, this me sitting at a cafe by the train station while the nuns waved, pretty damn happy with myself. Because being young and free can be a whole life thing if you can laugh a wild laughter in the heart of sadness, not to discredit, but to say “I’m back” even for just a second. I was twenty-six.

#womenwhotravel ridingtrains travelwisdom