Queen: “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?” King: “Step by step.”
—The Lion in Winter
After all the years, all the lovers, and a few significant relationships that broke my heart so it could open; after late nights spent greasing the wheels of corporate America and enduring the inadequacies of the public sector; after making a million mistakes, hurting and being hurt, I still sleep well at night.
I don’t know if it’s because my conscience is clear or if I’ve simply lost count of all the lovers that comprised the landscape of my life. Sleep comes no matter what, and all things lived, big and small, are folded into my body’s history.
Illusions and disillusions, doing and undoing, creating and destroying, it all leads to the same place.
The 19 Crescent rattles the tracks and cradles my sleep. The journey is long from New York to New Orleans. The landscape is foreign to me. The South unravels. It is far wilder than the North. I recognize the state of entropy reflected in the rail-side chaos washing up to the tracks. I mourn the loss of passenger trains in Mexico. I remember the sleeper train from Laredo to Mexico City. The luxurious dining car with waiters carrying towering trays of porcelain dishes and wearing ill-fitted tuxedos, serving fine foods, whiskey, and wine. The towers of clanking dishes swaying foretold of dish implosions and a chaos that never came. I still blush remembering the gentle knock at my compartment door by a stranger briefly encountered in the bar asking to spend the night. The tracks cut across the Mexican desert. The value of the land lies in the placement of these tracks. Otherwise, the land is dry and cracked, and only cactus, snakes, and lizards have a chance to thrive. Defying the uninhabitable nature of the landscape, socially invisible people construct wooden dwellings. Scattered across the shores of the railroad, these wooden shacks squat on federal lands. In other areas, the squatters constitute the underbelly suburbs that hide the secrets of larger cities. Standing in the open-air cars of the train, we passed anthills of existence. Kids run alongside the train the moment the engine slows down. Their dissimulated smiles veiled desperation, a hopelessness trailing in the poisonous smoke, only to be left behind with the whining and elongated sounds of the screeching steel. I never knew how to feel or what to think, there wasn’t time. Well-dressed passengers standing beside me waved imperiously and smiled at the hordes of half-naked and dusty children. Standing among the bourgeois in the open-air cars, I was just as guilty.
Cutting through the lower 48, the changes in the soil evoke imagery of a geographic crosscutting, with layers representing time. The soil has turned from mossy green to black, from black to red, from red to yellow, and now from yellow to white. Buried in metaphysical layers are the histories of the places, from the beginning of time to the present. In this part of the country, the calcified history of slavery and injustice sustains the tracks that carry us. Cold steel grows hot and sparks fly at high speeds. As we hug the curves following the contours of rivers, opposite trains pass at the same speed, somehow without colliding into us. The physics is truly poetic.
The unraveling of the South loosens my ties to Alaska. The more I lose, the more of myself I regain. Retracing my steps from the tropics, to the sandy deserts, to the creeping fog of San Francisco, north to the arctic desert, and to now, I am humbled by the realization that I am an orphan. My greatest consolation is that I am among a family of orphans like me. Friends become family. At home we say that one doesn’t know what one is made of until one learns to love God in a foreign land. I am an atheist, but I think I understand. Love is the beginning, the sustaining force and what we look forward to in the end—but along the way there is the responsibility to be outside one’s self, no matter the heartache, we owe the world more than it will ever owe us. I have no right to complain.
The farther south we go, the more frequent the delays. A passenger complains that he has to be somewhere and will now be late. I think he should get off and push. It’s curious that the temperature in the train drops whenever we’re at a standstill. There are parts of the South that are rusty, the trains are rusty, and machinery is left to rot on the backside of lands along the tracks. There are old or badly damaged cars that sit in lots waiting to vanish with the ages. In contrast, the Meridian Mississippi Union Station stands proud and well loved amid manicured lawns like a red-brick gatekeeper. The South is a cross-section of American history that, like the geographic layers of a riverbed, has in its folds the remnant histories of the past. The industrial America piled on agricultural and Civil War America, with LNG cars rolling on top—manufacturing skeletons on top of displaced farming roots. The firm soil gives way to swamps, the trees are drier and the light is brighter.
Nestled into the southern wilderness are pockets of affluence. From tee to green, far in the distance small speckles of white fly toward flags dancing on skinny poles. In the lounge car a man sits alone playing solitaire. He seems frustrated, his opponent must be better than he. The lazy sun throbs through the curtain of trees like it does in the tropics.
The heartbeat of the earth is never felt as strongly as on the nights of zafra, the sugarcane harvest. As soon as the sun goes down and the moon is ready, we ignite the fields. The fire pulses, the cinders dance, the air becomes drunken and sweet. A heat so strong, it can melt glaciers.
A few years ago You and I went to the archaeological site at Tajín, about a five-hour drive from town. On the way back, I took a wrong turn at the lighthouse and we ended up lost for hours and hours. When we finally found our way, we were amid the biggest zafra of the season. There was fire on the roadside for miles, to our left towering flames, to our right, the same. I drove fast and steadily until the scent and heat that hung around us palpitated in my chest and my heart gave. I pulled over and was sick with overwhelming emotion. I sweated cold in the middle of the fire, and in an instant I confused the sweet odor of the night with the blue smell of snow about to fall in Alaska.
The fire turned me inside out, and my skin burned along with the sugarcane. I felt as exposed as the tender cane itself. It was then that I realized the transformative power of the harvest. I could not drive, so You did. The darkness grew as we distanced ourselves from the fire, and my head, which had previously expanded and felt detached, came back into place.
We are now racing the dusk to New Orleans. I suspect we will lose. The sun sets faster than we can travel. We’re almost to the Louisiana border. I hallucinate the smell of sea salt. I haven’t been back to New Orleans for years. There are no friends with me this time. The air is warm and moist. Past lovers fade, making way for new ones. I sleep well, I dream of my Mother, I dream of friends, and my dogs. I also dream of the mischievous brunette who delighted me with conversation, a Rochester “garbage plate,” and her company.