The Precise Emotion
I have trouble with the exact emotion. I was too present to form the right words at the time. Now, so soon afterwards, the feeling is already slipping away. What remains most vividly is a succession of wide-eyed moments, vignettes into the larger experience. I’m going to write those down before I forget them, and hope that maybe, in the future when even more is lost, I will be able to extrapolate back to what I felt when I rode the mining train, a thousand kilometers in an open-topped ore-car through the empty desert of Mauritania. What I remember is this:
The departure station was a small concrete building, little more than cinderblock shade. There was a man selling tickets for the crowded passenger car, but no ticket was needed to ride with the freight. So we sat in the sand and the sun, until finally a distant rumbling announced the arrival of the huge empty train, which screeched to a clattering stop in front of us. In the harsh light of the desert we climbed with our packs up the rough ladder into our car, a chest-deep steel bucket returning empty to the mine, covered in brown metal dust. Three strong men threw empty oil barrels into the car behind us; the car in front was loaded with crates of mandarins. As soon as the train began to move, bits of ore blew in all directions, embedding metal particles in every crevasse of object and skin. Undeterred, we pulled our turbans over our faces to shield ourselves and whooped in the unfettered wind. In ten minutes we had passed the suburban shacks of Nouhadibou, into the unimaginably open spaces of the Western Sahara.
That afternoon is an ochre-colored motion blur of impressions seen through dusty sunglasses. Lone shacks streamed past, solitary in the sandy glare, and I wondered why anyone would choose to build a house out here in nowhere, and why they would want to be near to the tracks if the train never stopped there. Two Mauritanians stood in the next car with their grimy sky-blue turbans and bright orange mandarins, just their head and shoulders poking above the lip of their container. I thought this was a perfect metaphor for the distance between my world and theirs: I could see them, they were so close I could have clambered over at any moment and touched them, but they seemed so far away in the roar of the wind that real communication felt impossible. Late in the day we rolled through a dust storm in the desert, a small one that nonetheless turned the sky brown and forced us to cower in the corner of our car with our eyes clenched shut against the sand and metal. When the train slowed down and the wind slackened we made tuna sandwiches, hurrying to prepare our simple dinner before the iron began blowing again. At the next lull in our speed I climbed over the edge of the car and held onto the little ladder for dear life while I peed off the side, but the wind blew it all over the trailing car no matter how I tried. Back inside our home I felt inviolably safe, invulnerable in our steel car, part of a vehicle so long that I couldn’t see the end of it in either direction. The longest train in the world, we’d been told. More like a spaceship than a train: there was nothing out here, nothing but flat tan scrub desert for at least hundreds of kilometers in every direction. A rare and purifying emptiness.
At night at a stop, a long train stood opposite us on a siding, like our silent twin. An old automobile ran up between the trains, headlights piercing the otherwise completely natural darkness, an apparition that took a long time to arrive beside us, crawling along the length of the cars between the two silent giants, finally passing us in a wash of dust. Then the other train started up and we could hear the clang of the couplings pulling from car to car, rolling over a kilometer or more just like thunder, then past us and away. Most of all there was the tremendous grind and bang of our own train starting, the rumble we learned preceded the jolt of acceleration that frightened and startled us every time. It really was like thunder, we thought as we held onto the forward edge of our car and strained to hear it coming. An incredible sound, an immense sound like the end of the world approaching, better than any THX trailer when the growling crescendoed into an explosive clang that threw you off your feet. And then we were moving, and there were other, smaller shocks as the unseen engineer opened his enormous throttles.
Outside of our spaceship was the space of the desert itself, mostly hamada that gradually dried out and gave way to the occasional dune on the horizon. The train never went under a bridge or over a road or stopped at any collection of buildings that could be called a town; and when it did halt at some forlorn cluster, the buildings were far away from us in our rearward car, probably the whole kilometer length of the train away. For that reason we never saw anything man-made go past at less than full speed. The best stretches of track were those where there really was no visible evidence of human presence in the landscape, not much of anything at all really. Sometimes the occasional tree, which gave rhythm and velocity to the landscape, or even a clump of trees which was excitement. And the journey wasn’t stingy with such spaces, not like so many compromised trips where the scenery is only good for a particular bit. Here it was almost all good, hours on end of nothing at all in the vast yellowing light. And then the night fell, and I thrilled to recognize the moment before full dark when we first noticed our shadows in the moonlight. The walls of our car cast shadows too, half of our floor in darkness to the rising moon, and I thought of how rarely I had stayed outside at night long enough to watch the moon-shade move. In the darkness I stood and held onto the edge of our car as I stared out into the blur of invisible space, clinging to the rumbling metal ever more dearly. We carried our life support with us, water and food and shelter that could keep us alive just long enough to cross the interstellar desolation to another island. If one of us fell off, we might die as we watched the train fly past right in front of our face in the very few days we’d have left to live. But there was no better way to see the Sahara, I concluded, and wished the train ran for another thousand kilometers through the heart of a great dune sea. Our ore train was the most minimal of powered transportation methods, stripped of all luxury in exchange for simply being somewhere that is normally, thankfully, finally out of human reach.
When we reached our destination we had to leave suddenly; I awoke to the stillness of the very early morning just as our Mauritanian companion in the next car yelled to us. Across the huge abyss between cars, he signaled frantically that we were at Choom, that we had to get off. Dazedly we began preparing to leave. “Vit! Vit!†said the Mauritanian, and we scrambled to throw everything throwable over the side, my bedroll, our remaining food, bottles of water. As I clambered over the side with my pack, I knew that any second I’d hear that thunder and I would have to hang on for dear life in anticipation of the jolt – and then, worse, jump off of a moving train between cars, avoiding the grinding wheels. But we got off in the end a full half-minute before the sound rolled along the cars and exploded where we just were, then rumbled down the line behind us as the train began to roll. Half awake on the featureless sand beside the tracks, we wondered what next as we stared at the few and faraway lights of tiny Choom, up where the engines had stopped a kilometer or more away. But the distant headlights of 4×4s were already rolling towards us, and our nocturnal adventure on the cold and empty plain continued in other directions. Our train ride was over.
