Railroad Landscapes: West Virginia — Cleveland — China — Hokkaido — Western U.S. — Portland
I lived in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, for one and a half years. I rode all of its remaining 2500 kilometers of railway, and I even bought books that I couldn’t read to try to learn more. Once, I showed one of those books to a Japanese couple that my wife and I often visited. I was nearly overwhelmed by their intense curiosity.
“Scott brought a very good book,” Goto-san told his wife.
She took it and began turning the pages, half mindlessly at first, then stopping suddenly as a long-forgotten scene flashed afresh before her.
“I know what they are doing!” she pointed excitedly to a photo of a family at a rural station, a picnic basket on the mother’s shoulder. “I know this station. They will ride to the next station where they can pick wild vegetables. I did this often with my family. We did not have a car, you see, so we always traveled by train.”
And then it all clicked. I suddenly understood how these two people, with no special interest in trains, could get so excited over a book of old train photos. For these were not merely old train photos to them, not anymore than a photo of a 1963 Ford station wagon is just a picture of an old car to the American woman who rode in one a hundred times to Grandma’s house, a thousand times to school, and twice to Myrtle Beach. In that book of old train photos, they glimpsed their own past.
