June 17th, 2004
108742684845119396
5/14/04
There’s something very calming about moving a hundred and eighty miles per hour in a soft, reclining chair. You have to set you focus a little farther out the window than you normally would, things two to fifteen feet move impossibly fast and you’ll get eye strain trying to keep up. I wonder of those who only know Tokyo or Osaka, for outside the sprawling metropolis are wide seas of green and rice, patched together with bleached plank footbridges and dirt paths. The mountains always loom shrouded by fog in the back of any view, forty or fifty miles behind serenely calm tiled houses and bowed power lines. These are mountains like Rainier, or McKinley; mountains made from long sleeping fire and the angry earth, an array of eroded green brushes spiraling upward.
On the Shinkansen there are moments of black, dimly whistling night for five to twenty seconds, miles of perfectly straight holes “punched through mountains” as Rodney says, then in a flash exploding again to some leafy valley or narrow pass, a shock like The Time Machine, an age of darkness brought to light.
