autumn tactics

Once you change trains at Soga, it’s not so bad. The Sotobo Line is about as classic JR as you can get: the curved headlight mounts and compartment seating. Inner Chiba feels close to country; the rice fields and roadside bars, the waiting at stations and leisurely lumbering pace.

It’s not polite to say so really, but there is an overpowering atmosphere that causes me to label Chiba as depressing. It’s virtually always overcast or hazy, endless flat tracks of land strung togetehr by giant warehouses, outlet centers and parking lots. The entire infrastructure is drab and tasteless, not in a charmingly classic way, but old in a “lost future oh I could have been something” kind of way.

The trains and stations are just as depressing, stations just far enough apart that it seems you should get somewhere for all the time, but no, it never changes. The same faded, pastel people at every station, the same deflated expressions. They live in Chiba, they know they’re trapped by family or cheap real estate or a lost promise of tomorrow. The lost dreams of the once righteous now quiet Chiba, acquiescence drains its residents daily like it does me just riding this train. The endless hours they spend waiting in traffic for the most mundane of errands weigh upon every eyelid in the prefecture.

Kanagawa is infinitely more interesting and Chiba knows it.

There is another force inside of me, it rests. It waits and sleeps, sleeps for the sunlight, sleeps for the cold, sleeps for the metallic verve to caress and stroke its latent kinetic.

Down into the ground, to a world of concerte and plastic, to a capillary of transit, a translucent valve into a pulsing network. The guards slide open and I step across to join the stream, and again I’m racing to a land of illusion.

Forests, mountains, and fields. Color blurs and the residual image of my footsteps melts across soil and brick. The noonday sun is enveloped like me, and both are made to move, cutting through nonlinear planes.

What need have I for a home? Why assign meaning to concepts best left vague? Already we’ve broken at so many junctions, two meters apart and gazing into different stars. The impermanence of everything is atmospheric, and the awareness of that humidity has already cast fates down in the sand. But freedom is movement in four dimensions, and from fifty miles above unchanged but here in the grass a number of paths can be cut.

So today I leave the hours and minutes behind, and only move; moving forward, moving up, moving still while the current runs circles in my mind. Snake, dart, jump, and devour. Tonight I’ll go looking for contrast in life once more.

Riding on trains is one of my favorite parts of living in Japan, though I’m not sure how much of it is nostalgia and how much is due to the actual fantasy of the system. I don’t think it realls matters though. What sells people is the way they feel. Of course, we ride in trains because need to get places in a timely and cost-effective manner, but the benefits and splendor are immeasurable. I could probably make a life out of writing about Japanese trains, albeit a questionably profitable one.

Every destination has a meaning. If things are left to me for utility, I’ll probably ride my bicycle because that’s free, and time for arrival and in transit is entirely under my control. However, if I’m riding a train, and it’s more than once, then I have a chance to stew a little emotionally and put some sort of significance on the travelling. Who am I going to see? Whoever it is, I probably have a really good reason to take the time for the trip. I’ve waited so long for this journey to take place. And now there’s just the waiting. But as the cliche’ goes, getting there is half the fun.

I have a multitude of advetisements to read, of stations names to ponder, and a score of ever-changing families and lovers, elderly and school children, all of which I can study from the corner of my eye through half-disguised glances. The clack of the wheels the gentle rocking of the cars, the heat radiating through the worn, fabric-covered benches. So many communities, so many dreams, so many lives hurrying and shuffling, dawdling and meandering. Oh quiet trains and gentle deparature music, oh soothingly nasal conductors and streaming scenery– Whatever dreams I end up chasing after, I’ll always have a home on the rails.