We switch trains at a single-platform station, moving from one empty carriage to another. Both trains were clean and quiet and clinical, marvels of modern transport but far removed from the rattling cages that I remember from the homeland. The tracks are wider and newer here, so we lounge on comfortable seats in diode light and slide across the landscape with barely a sound. The passing freight trains hiss by the windows in near silence.
The train eases from the urban sprawl through suburbia and out into the mountainous blue haze that surrounds the city. The greens and silvers of the gum trees that grow like claws are punched through with caramel shades of rock faces, worn by millennia of storms and ashen through bushfires. As we pull to a stop, the doors open without a touch and emit a single beep. The floor of the train melts into the platform, and we head down to the waterfront.
Waves pull at strips of sand that form at the mouth of the bay as boats roll against the shifting tide. Beyond the trees, the bay narrows into a river that climbs backwards up into the mountains, but from the bay, the river is large enough to seem like an ocean, and there are houses on the far side that are reachable only by boat. We buy fish and chips, freshly caught, and eat them looking over the boats; a real estate agent owns one, their face smiling from the half-submerged hull of the boat.
The train arrives to take us back. It’s wheel easing to halt with little more than a sigh. We talk about the trains we remember. We talk about the rattle of wheels on tracks and of pulsing lights; we talk about graffiti scratched into plastic and knotted cotton from cigarette burns. We talk about a childhood of just a few years ago.
nomadic snapshots 