Remember that click clack soothing tone of trains from my childhood?

There’s something great about riding the train. That smooth ride.

Stretch out unlike the plane.

Read a little, won’t you? Write a little even. Here you don’t have to tuck in your elbows and feel the seat in front of you crash into your forehead.

Let’s watch the world go by. From a bucolic idyllic scene to that which harbors tools for the Anthropocene.

In Italy the train tickets show you how much less carbon you use as compared to a car or plane. Here there is no such sin tax. Only blood tax and amnesia.

I have loved trains since I was a child.

My mother said I almost died on my first train ride. Malaria. Tanzania. My fever spiked and I was vomiting and had diarrhea. She was sure I was a goner.

She all alone. Without any medical care nearby.

I made it.

I have G6PD deficiency which means my red blood cells are less susceptible to the malaria parasite. That might have had something to do with my survival.

I don’t remember this moment, I was too young. But growing up I remember having horrendous fevers and staying home and my mother would come from work to check on me and seemed a constant savior.

For a solid decade, from my teens until recently, I fell in love with the car and road trip. Perhaps it had something to do with my newly found freedom.

Now I’m on the train enjoying another kind of freedom.

No malaria here in the trip through the Pacific North West, but I do have to watch out for fava beans.

On this trip, however, I only need to read, write and relax. Watch the world go by.

Watch the words of the spray-can prophets come to life.

I wonder, sometimes, if I should have tried to speak to an audience through walls instead of paper and screens. But do people want to read long stories on walls? How about short ones?

Once upon a time there was a fool. He lived happily ever after.

I’m not sure that would work. And I’ll be honest, each time I have a pen and blank wall, I don’t write anything.

Too scared, I suppose.

There’s a big bold statement. I took a street art tour in LA and the tour guide talked to us about the can control needed to make such curves.

The train, then, is a rolling art show.

Better than any museum.

All for free when you ride on Amtrak.

When I was a teen, I took the train from Chicago to Montana. Glacier Park. It rises like cool white jagged peaks in the brown horizon; just as you’ve grown tired of that eastern Montana song of flat dryness stuck on repeat.

It’s a gray day on this train ride. So you don’t get to see peaks in the distance. Instead it’s a closeness with the land that I only now appreciate.

Beauty, after all, is apparent in the smallest and largest of things. It’s also apparent inside or outside that train window or its reflections. So let your thoughts go where they may.