travel writing (2)

Minding the gap, I pull myself aboard, struggle through sliding doors as they close, and shimmy onto the platform. I ping-pong from wall to wall toward the next seat. Boarding trains with a forty-five pound pack is like playing human pinball. The advantage to train travel may be its ease—the conductors and crew appear to do all the work—but for a novice traveler, things are never as easy as they seem.

To my credit, I maneuver clear of fellow passengers—or they from me—flop my pack onto an empty seat, and slide across to the adjacent bench. With considerably less exertion, other riders take their seats too: scruffy olive-skinned men in slacks and open-chested flannels, women cradling the fixings for tonight’s pesto surprise, and a couple of intellectuals with noses buried in books. Everyone looks tired. It could be the weather; I’ve never known somewhere so humid. Where else can one make small talk like: ‘looks like another sweaty day.’ I’m melting, and maybe everyone else is too. Or perhaps everyone is aggravated at this American and his bulky pack—he’s certainly tired of it—filling an entire seat and muttering to himself in some foreign dialect.

Unfortunately, a foreign dialect is all I know, and—where’s my rail pass? As inconspicuously as possible, I frantically leaf through the many pockets of my Lowe Alpine Sirroco Classic® pack, ruing the day that I appraised an abundance of pockets as a convenience. The pleasant Seattle salesman said nothing about the inconvenience of something so convenient. A giant oversight if you ask me. I could be lost somewhere in the Tibetan highlands, mind a bit fuzzy from the altitude, wasting my last breaths in futile pursuit of an oxygen mask locked far away in some forgotten pocket, or, worse yet, I could be missing my rail pass! Where is it?

I’ve been riding the rails in Europe for a few months now. I first arrived in London with a group of university students from a small liberal arts college in Washington State. We toured Great Britain together, sharing our meals, lives, and love/hate relationships with Arthurian lit. And now I find myself prancing about Italy like a suddenly self-aware Don Quixote, a foolish spectacle for all to see. If my rail pass is lost, it might finally be time to doff the cap of traveler extraordinaire and face the facts. The carefree young man who left Seattle planned to embrace every little cultural unpleasantry with easygoing acceptance. No complaining, and most certainly no whining. I obviously didn’t anticipate this. Really, it’s unfathomable that a middle-class, white boy from the suburbs could expect to seamlessly blend into his surroundings and float effortlessly from place to place.

“Tickets please! Tickets,” hollers a voice in my mind. I’m convinced that any minute a train conductor will burst through the doors of our car with armed guards in tow. On the morning train from Switzerland, the train staff even searched some bags and checked our passports. Tossing shorts, socks, and underwear out of the way, I dig deeper. Hopefully, every Italian city is equipped with a friendly neighborhood US embassy. Although…I could probably write a darn good travel essay from a dank prison cell in Timbuktu, Italy.

[to be continued in a later post]

continued on the17pointscale