The Way of the Rails

I like to say that my life is like a train ride across the country. The days of my life are all there at once, the whole landscape, but I see only the part that’s right outside the window. I don’t say that the particulars of the future are foreordained but that the unfurling of it is here, embedded in the present. Riding the train is following a river that’s made of railroad tracks. Like floating on a raft, you ride from one moment to the next, in the flow of time. 

I don’t just talk about the train as a metaphor, I ride it. When I was a child, my parents took me and my siblings on the train from Boston to Chicago at least once a year to visit our grandparents. (I’m old enough that when I was very young, the train was a more commonly used method of travel than the plane.) I loved the clickety-clack, the white tablecloths in the dining car and how, when the waiter whisked the used cloth off the table before we sat down, there was a fresh one waiting underneath. I watched the fields and woods and towns go by, I was thrilled by the rattle of the bridges. I saw a world I couldn’t see from the road: backyards, laundry lines, mudflats, and junkyards.

A generation later, it was my turn to take my kids on the train.  For quite a few Christmas vacations, we rode the California Zephyr to Chicago, for them to visit their father—he had moved back to the city of his childhood after our divorce—and for me to visit my mother—she had moved back to the city of her childhood in her old age. Time goes in circles.

We would board the train at the beautiful old train station in Oakland, with its vaulted ceilings, high arched windows, a mural on the interior wall, and long wooden benches burnished by many bottoms over many years. 

In Sparks, Nevada, we took advantage of the chance to get off the train and stretch our legs. On the journey east, the kids would hide something special, like a Hot Wheels car, under a bush near one corner of the Sparks train station. On the westbound journey home, they would run to retrieve it, if it was still there—and it always was. We had been all the way to Chicago and back and had celebrated Christmas in the world of their father and the world of my mother, and the red Hot Wheels car had been waiting in secret the whole time. Magic. 

In those days, the California Zephyr stopped for about forty-five minutes in Salt Lake City. I discovered a great “western wear” store about five minutes’ walk from the train station, and I used to take the kids there to get cowboy shirts and jean jackets. My playing with time was like playing with fire. It was exciting, this adrenaline shopping, and it made the shirts we got there seem like precious trophies seized from a flying carpet adventure. We never missed the train, but one time we got back to the platform just as the conductor was about to take up the steps, and after that I stopped our Salt Lake City shopping. It made the kids too nervous. 

In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the old Oakland train station, forcing it to close down. It was boarded up and fenced off. 

Time goes in circles.

Years later, in 1998, I got serious about taking pictures, something I had loved to do since childhood, and I took photography classes wherever I could find them. I was particularly drawn to taking pictures of lost and forgotten spaces, like old warehouses, and walls covered with graffiti. Perhaps every budding photographer goes through this stage. A space that looks depressing and neglected in real life can look romantic in a photograph. Why is this? 

One of my favorite spots was the old Oakland train station, which had been suffering from the ravages of time ever since the quake. I had to sneak through a fence to get inside. One day, after photographing patterns of mold on a plaster wall, I turned to see a sweeper in a shaft of sunlight. Quick, before I could focus my lens, I shot a picture.

The place was sad and sacred to me. The grand beginning point of many great train journeys had become an exemplary reminder of the truth of impermanence.

Each of my sons lived in LA as young men, first one son and then the other, and I often took the train to visit. My departure point was now the new Emeryville station, which had the architectural charm of a Quonset hut and made me miss the grand old station. Still, the train ride was a perfect day’s journey, leaving Emeryville at 9:00 a.m. and arriving at LA’s beautiful Union Station at 9:00 p.m. Twelve hours to watch the world roll by, fields and mountains on the east side, ocean and bluffs on the west. Time to read or write, or, if I felt sociable, time to talk to friendly passengers in the bar car. People like to talk to strangers on the train, and a favorite topic of conversation is why they aren’t taking the plane. The train seems to put people in a reflective yet conversational mood. They are more likely to tell you their life story on the train than almost anywhere else. It could be because, as I said before, a train ride is like your life. Or, if you prefer, your life is like a train ride. As you see the landscape change, you understand that your own life changes. Your life is out the window of the train—where you’ve been and where you’re going. And your life is on the train, where you are.

I began to take photographs whenever I rode the train—it seemed like the obvious thing to do. At first I wanted to document the journey, to possess the window-framed view, to stop the crops in parallel rows from flipping by and to hold them still so I could see the fan shape they made.

We speak of taking a photo, and the word “taking” implies that we can get and keep something, a piece of our life. People often photograph their vacations as a way to keep their experiences from disappearing completely into the past. In places like Yosemite, there are road signs next to turnouts that say “View Spot,” with a picture of a camera on them. Sometimes you can get so obsessed with getting the right photo that you don’t really bother to look at the view in front of you. You snap the shot and get right back in the car.

Even though you can’t hold on to the past, it can be wonderful to hold photos of the past in your hands. Back in the days before digital photography, my kids loved to look at the photo albums I kept of their childhoods. They would look at them over and over again. I did the same when I was a child. I’d look at the photo of myself, at about 3, in a dress with big red flowers on it, standing in my grandmother’s garden holding a watering can. I seem to remember that afternoon, but do I just remember the photo? Does it matter? 

For me, the practice of photography is a practice of gratitude—gratitude for light itself and for how generous light is, to land on everything it meets. All you have to do is frame it. Taking pictures on the train has convinced me that photography is also the practice of gratitude for time, for the moments that keep being given. Time lands on you wherever you go and pours itself all over you, just like light. Each photograph is an image of space-time, as the physicists call it, or the time-being, as Dogen calls it: the joining of a specific time and a specific place in an immeasurable moment. 

I’m particularly fond of the Capitol Corridor ride between Berkeley and Sacramento, and I have taken many photos of the scenery out the window, in different seasons and at different times of day. I had a show of these photos some years ago, at a local bakery, and I offer a couple of them here, because they say something about time. They are photos of impermanence. Each click of the shutter is me saying “Now! Now! Now!” and as soon as I say it, it’s not that now anymore, it’s a new now. 

All we have is the present, and this is our practice, in zazen and in life, to keep returning to this moment even as it passes, just like looking out the train window, frame after frame. Photography can’t stop time from flowing, but it can take a piece of three-dimensional time and flatten it, like a pressed flower. 

A few months ago, for the first time in a long time, I took my beloved train ride from Sacramento to Berkeley in the late afternoon. I had spent the day talking with dharma brothers and sisters in a Sacramento Buddhist sangha about the subject of time, and I was happily tired and openhearted. The battery on my cell phone was low, so I decided not to take any pictures and I put it in my pocket. I would see what I saw when I saw it, that’s all; I would let the train window do the framing, not my camera.

Photography can’t stop time from flowing, but it can take a piece of three-dimensional time and flatten it, like a pressed flower. 

I was transported, literally and figuratively, by the flash of each bright frame. Out the window—and I had deliberately chosen a clean window to sit beside—I saw a flock of starlings lift from a flooded rice field and turn together, their wings mirroring the light from shifting angles. I was riding time, and time was a train. Time was a horse, an iron horse. We passed by green hills near Fairfield, with the late sun highlighting the contours with long shadows. I saw how I was gently cantering through the landscape of my life, and how, in that late winter light, everything was beautiful: the old pilings at the edge of the bay, a bait shack on a rickety dock. Each second was given to me as a gift, and then another and another. 

Early the next morning, sitting at home in my armchair by the window, I recalled, as if recalling the shred of a dream, the previous day’s feeling of riding time. I was still on the train of my life, riding the rails right there in my armchair, from one clickety-clack to the next. I was watching time pass. I could hear time passing, too, because a neighbor was practicing the piano. That proved that time was passing. 

But what if you can’t hear any sound or see any movement, then how do you know time is going by? Because you can’t hold your breath forever. Because you have a thought, and then it goes away and a different thought comes. The Train of Thought.

I am riding through the time-being of my life. When I got up to go into the kitchen and put the kettle on, I could feel myself being borne along on the train of time right through the dining room.