Epic Inconveniences [jessi]

Three weeks ago I was sitting on a train pointed West toward Genoa. I don’t say moving West, because the train had not been moving for quite some time. We were about 20 miles outside of Milan, and before a pesky wire fell across our train tracks, had been bound for the Cinque Terre town of Riomaggiore, where an elderly and decidedly non-English speaking Ugo was waiting for us to call from the train station so that he could guide us to our apartment. But the train (as mentioned before) was not moving.

The rocky Ligurian coast and a hot bath to cleanse my travel weary self were both visible in my mind’s eye, but the only things I could see out the window were a burning field, and several Trenitalia employees milling about in groups, pointing at the train, the wires, and the tracks. One of them bore a remarkable resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones.

Sitting on the train that stubbornly refused to carry me to my destination, I realized the my Romantic Ideal of Travel, the poetry of motion, if you will, does not actually exist. My rose-tinted, soft-focused lenses shattered.

I’ve always been in love with the idea of travel. Setting out for places unknown evokes feelings of excitement and adventure. It makes me feel like Shasta and Bree journeying across the vast ocean of desert to Narnia and the North. It’s poetic, this idea of setting out taking neither cloak nor staff nor pocket handkerchief, until you try it out in real life and you realize on your first international flight that travel can sometimes involve very long stretches without showers or changes of underwear. That, my friends, is not very romantic at all.

In reality, traveling in a foreign country is stressful. Simple things like finding food, or figuring out which track your train is leaving from become infinitely more complicated when you can only communicate through hand gestures and phrasebook Italian. But I stood in the doorway of our train compartment, watching the field burn, Tommy Lee talk on his cell phone, and 90% of the train passengers hiking along the tracks to the next town 5 km away, and the thought came distinctly to my mind that in my greasy, smelly state, 7 hours behind schedule, I was having fun anyway. We had given up hope of ever reaching the Cinque Terre. We were destined to stay forever on this stupid non-moving vehicle that had hundreds of wheels, and we would no doubt perish shortly after our granola and water bottle supply ran out.

Every expectation I had for my vacation went out the door—had maybe even left 24 hours earlier when we got the news of our first 5 hour flight delay. At any rate, me—expectations—gone. I remembered something G.K. Chesterton wrote in a newspaper column in the early 20th: “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered”—this was his response to half of London being flooded! This travel day had started with a sunrise over the Mediterranean from the plane window. The sun set in that field outside of Milan, and midnight saw us finally reaching our apartment, being meekly led by Ugo, who was scolding us for leaving the train station.

“There was no phone, and everything was closed, and it was raining,” I said.His hand gestures and mixed English and Italian indicated that hiking to the top of the hill in search of a phone booth, and waiting, shivering in an electrical storm on the steps of San Giovanni was not acceptable behavior. We apologized.

But in spite of the rain and the cold and the dark and the locked church doors, and in spite of how glad we were to see Ugo come up the street with the umbrella that dwarfed his small stature, I would trade none of those “inconveniences.” It was here that I remembered Chesterton, again. In the same essay, he writes,

Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter.

I swear I am not making any of this up, but huddled against the side of the building with the rain gusting, and the lightening crashing out over the sea, choral music started echoing lightly from inside the church like a surreal anointing. It sounded like it was coming from heaven.