The Platform

The man was tall, and cold, very cold. Under a coffee colored cowboy hat, his hair had grown long. Too long, and he desired a haircut, but that would have to wait. It was just before 4 AM and he milled about on the train platform, willing time to pass faster. A yellow light bathed his immediate surroundings and nothing more. Across the tracks, he could see a line of BNSF railcars. Beyond that, nothing. It seemed as if all that was was darkness and he existed in the one small lighted area in the entire plain of existence, a lonely outdoor train station. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets in a vain attempt to stay warm and cursed circumstance for forcing him to arrive 12 hours before his train was scheduled to depart. 

The man turned around to face the Germanic train station. In bold, white letters the name of the town was the only reminder that he was indeed in a real place. Whitefish. Whitefish. A sleepy town, or so was the impression upon the man since he had been at the train station since 9 o'clock, so he was sleepy, and hadn't seen any people. Talked to nobody. The man again wished time would hurry up. Or at least that the sun would crest the horizon. He knew there were mountains out there in the dark and he rather liked mountains. Not that they were a new sight to him, but he still liked to see them, and the sight of them would dispel the notion that there was absolute nothingness out there in the dark, peering at him with an otherworldly hostility. He brought his hands out of his pockets in case the need to ward off the dark arose.

Photo by Yoyo Hins Itta on Unsplash

The man walked down the platform. Every fifty feet was a lamp post and the man passed seven of them, walking idly and thinking about what he ought to do when his journey concluded. He had no clear ideas, or even a starting point, but that didn't bother him noticeably at this early hour. He just wanted the train to arrive, to step on board and warm his sorry, cold bones. He stopped under the glow of the seventh lamp post on the long platform and peered into the dim. There must have been nearly thirty more lamp posts. It seemed like a needlessly long train platform, considering the lack of popularity of train travel. But, the man reasoned, trains tend to be very long in nature.

Presently, the man’s attention was unceremoniously yanked from his musings about the vast length of the small station's platform and was hurled back into the dark train yard and the impenetrable beyond. Voices, or maybe just a single voice, were sounding off from not far away. It sounded like an argument, but may have been an argument with self. Whatever it was, it sounded menacing, and the man fancied it may have been directed at him or induced by his presence. He felt as if he could not get away, the lighted portion of the world would not allow him enough space to escape. He cursed himself for not carrying a pocket knife and hurried back in the direction of the station building. He was as relieved as a lost man finding an oasis to see a train's lights approaching in the distance.

The man watched from the false security of the station as the freight train loomed closer and closer, and wondered if his dissipating panic was akin to what Parisians felt when the allies finally got to their magnificent but battered city. It was probably not on the same level, he admitted inwardly, but he felt comforted by the movement and distraction nonetheless.

Train car after train car passed in front of him and his panic was steadily replaced by curiosity. Where had these train cars come from? What had they seen? If they could tell stories, what would they say? He marveled at the fact that any one thing could have ever been in so many places, and wished that he had seen as much fodder for storytelling as any one of the uncountable number of fast moving train cars that passed nonchalantly in front of him had seen. Car after car, coming and just as quickly going, the man’s head constantly moving from side to side, began to make him slightly sad as he stood there in the dark, thinking in that way that moves quickly from quiet reflection to melancholy longing. 

Of course, the man told himself, these cars are not alive, they couldn’t appreciate what they had seen, the precarious mountain railways with million dollar views, the barren expanse of the plains full of life. The cars knew not where they were going nor where they’d been, and that, the man realized with a pitiful resignation, is why he studied them so, why he willed them to tell stories they were incapable of telling. They knew not where they had been nor where they were going and neither did he. 

The man sighed and turned slowly around as the train cars creaked rhythmically by behind his turned back. He made for a bench underneath a downturned light, casting the solitary seat set against the train station wall in a particularly bright glow at the center of the island in the darkness. The station would be opening in a few hours, coming alive with the sun and revealing that there was indeed a wider, brighter world out there somewhere. The train he was to take would arrive shortly after. The man knew where the train was going, but with another resigned sigh, the man still had no idea where he was supposed to go.