About Leaving and Arriving

I've been thinking about leaving and arriving. When I depart or arrive by plane, I feel like I've annihlated a place so quickly, so totally, it doesn't make sense. A sudden filing to memory.

I tried the train alternative to experience leaving and arriving in a more grounded way, so to speak, with time to create new memories and to reflect, all the features of geography slowly unspooling.

It was wonderful. Departing from the magnificent, eclectic Union Station in LA (an artifact from the 1930s), being pampered not harrassed. (If you have a sleeper booked, as I fortunately did, they treat you like a first class passenger and collect your ticket at the Traxx Bar, to the immediate right of the station entrance. They offer you juice and coffee - self-serve - gather up your luggage and whiz you through the station in a golf cart, all the way to the door of your carriage. The uniformed conductor and coach attendant standing on the platform, watching over the proceedings).

Arriving at the gracious station in Seattle, I saw my cousins' faces rushing towards me - not the impersonal wall of faces that first greets you at an airport.

I remember what it was like to leave a place or to arrive, when I was a child in the fifties. All dressed up and trotting by my mother's side. Mother striding in high heels, usually in train stations like this. A couple of times, when we'd travelled across the USA, we DID arrive in LA's Union Station. The high ceiling, the distinctive waiting-area seating, the patterns of tiles, everything exactly the same - and the original ticket counter (now sealed off and used only for movie sets) was in service then.

I live in Canada now, where the passenger rail infrastructure has largely been de-commissioned, and what's left is luxury-priced (I'm talking about sleeper service comparable to what I affordably had on the Coast Starlight).  

It was a huge treat to discover that Amtrak has brought back the rail experience, preserved not exactly how it was (the meals no longer cooked fresh from scratch on the trains like they once were, for instance), but close enough to be memorable.