The train is always the same and so are the vineyards, the trees just starting to change. Europe holds on to its roots. Once in Florence a guy said to me, in the States you live in the future; we live in the past. There’s a comfort in that, continuity. And yet everywhere you look, detours and construction. Projects that lag on for years. Plastic barricading with blinking lights and piles of dirt, men smoking in workmen’s garb. Big trucks. The sky’s stubborn steel gray and the cold cabling by the train tracks gives it all a wartime vibe like some POW camp. Concrete walls with streaks running down the sides and industrial-strength garbage cans, all business. Stacked on the mud, rows of concrete molds to shape wet concrete into columns. The sweet, prerecorded voice of the woman speaking overhead in the train about where we are now and where we’re headed next. Large pieces of volcanic-looking rock ballast to absorb and redistribute the weight and keep the train tracks from sinking. Graffiti, somehow more exotic in Europe. And then the copper-colored roof tiles and distant ridge tops with radio towers and tall apartment complexes, colorless. So far away and so similar to how it feels back home, everything just a bit different. Both thrilling and alienating.

There’s a time in the trip it tilts downwards if you let it. But that’s not living in the present, it’s the future.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Poetry, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, prose, travel