Shouldn't…but Do

On a train trip not so long ago, I saw…

• Cars stopped for the train
• A small poodle-mix dog, pawing at a gate in a wet backyard full of abandoned equipment.  Children on the outside of the gate board a school bus.
• Quiet understory trees, evenly spaced, waiting for a sunny break
• Fields of wet and muck
• Remnant tracks and trails
• The regular, but not unwelcome, call of the train
• Trees in various phases of dress, from bare to almost fully leafed
• Christmas lights, strung and lit
• Ditches, makeshift bridges
• Fields of logged trees, massive trunks, cut, piled and strewn like a child’s Lincoln Logs
• Sleeping blueberry fields
• Crop fields yet unplanted, with irrigation laid
• A coal train, its cars full and uncovered, moving quickly in the opposite direction, seemingly feet from my viewing window
• Leafless hybrid apple trees clutching their trellis with arms akimbo
• A toppled creche, half the holy family bleached by sun lying face down in spring mud
• Prefabricated greenhouse, lit from within by a pink-red glow
• Topless storage tanks, in various moods, from full to empty. Piping, planks, tires and RV parts that have seen better days.
• A leggy black dog with awhite-tipped tail nosing grass
• Through a window, a woman lies abed in an Urgent Care facility, waiting attention
• Canada goose, slowly rippling across an otherwise still pond
• Fallow fields of chaff
• A courageous patch of volunteer daffodils thriving at the edge of an industrial debris pile
• Red-winged blackbird clinging to a reed, swaying with the wind
• Cement pad, maybe once a parking lot, almost entirely reclaimed by grass
• A male mallard duck navigating water under a trestle bridge
• Jittery seated train passenger, knees ceaselessly moving, eyes closed, head turning to run his mouth rhythmically along a finger held horizontally to his closely cropped beard
• Hills, shorn of shrubs, eroding downward
• Two turkeys in a field
• A weathered plastic high chair decaying in a ditch miles from anywhere
• In a lot, semi-trucks, lined up like teeth
• Rusted swings aside a rusted backhoe, near a rusting gate
• Post-holiday, Easter rabbit cutouts fill every empty space of an impressively bedecked yard
• Endless industrial sheds, rust swarming the siding and coloring the surrounding concrete pads
• Algae blooms in drainage ditches
• Startled white-tail deer
• Flare stacks flame skyward on a dystopian landscape littered with piles of tailings and pipe fittings.  The sky is choked with smokestacks and silos.
• Rounded colorful graffiti on rail cars, surprisingly similar wherever it is found
• Sets of high voltage towers stretch into the distance
• Low hanging clouds with only a bird now and then to punctuate the weight
• High top coal cars open to the sky, parked and piled full
• Aged, black and rust, steaming industrial silos, lifeless but for the pollution spilling skyward, coal piles, girdles of pipes, smokestacks, and gas flares
• The Golden Arches soaring above a freeway exit
• Peeling cement silos standing mid-river, topped with iron bridgework and a multi-lane freeway

Flashing by, each scene holds a place in the arc of a narrative whose endpoints I cannot see. Homeopathic doses of a bigger world only guessed at.