We stood on the platform at 1 am. It was dark and the only signs of life nearby were an old run down building and a flickering lamp post. You know the kind…the sputtering ones with a moth circling below it and sparks intermittently flying …. the ones you see near people who are about to be attacked in the woods at night?? Yep. That kind.
It nearly felt like something out of a dream but it was very much our reality and according to my mother……it was supposed to be “an adventure”.
My family, having recently attended my college graduation in Ohio were enroute to Texas for a family trip. Instead of flying my mother got the grand idea that it would be fun to take a sleeper car style cross country train to Dallas.
You need to understand that a formative part of my childhood swirls around a Sunday afternoon ritual of my sisters and I watching old movies with our mother. These old Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn flicks were a huge reason why I had a period of time during middle school that I believed roof top chases were a legitimate possibility for someone to encounter, and in effort to prepare myself….. for what I can only assume was an assume job as a sleuth or the actual caper themselves….I would of course practice the art, by running from my room to the roofs of my neighbors homes.
In case you are not certain the flat roof tops of Europe do not really exist in American architecture and thus the risks involved in this hobby were greatly elevated. Im still unclear why my parents allowed me to participate in such risky behavior.
My mother it would seem had also had developed her own romanticized idea of train as a form of transport, and thus had booked us tickets on this orient express infused excursion. In this moment as we stood waiting for a train to stop and for us to board it in the back country woods of Ohio….I was feeling like this whole thing was a tad more MURDER on the orient express.
At this point, I was not completely confident the train would even come to a full and complete stop. Speculating that we’d be forced to toss our bags and possibly even our body’s onto its slow crawl in an effort to get aboard. Thankfully it did actually stop but as I stepped aboard my skepticism level was still very high.
Trains, not unlike any other form of long distance transportation have modern conveniences, but they are…..compact. Everything is small, and for a nearly 6 foot tall women small is less than ideal.
We slid open the door of the sleeper car that my sisters and I were expected to share. There were two benches facing each other, and then a door off to the left. This was all that we could see. I pushed the little door open…..sure enough it was the bathroom.
So small….that the skins was positioned directly in front of the toilet….not unlike an airplane fold down table. You would have to sit and slide your legs beneath it. The shower head……which I recall being an upgrade feature was located directly above the toilet. Making your two options for using it to involve sitting on the toilet or startlingly it.
We’d still not located the beds but with some quick observation I’d spotted a lever in the wall and with a tug it released a compression driven PSSSTTTT as the bed unfolded bunk bed style out of the wall in front of us ultimately consuming the vast majority of the room. This my friends was our sleeper car.
My mother never once confessed this was not quite what she had anticipated. It’s possible now that ive reached adulthood but i would still argue very unlikely…..that is was exactly what she anticipated but at the time I was certain this was one step away from camping. And Camping was something my mother never cared for and merely tolerated when we were kids. Her silence over this train situation was very loud in my childhood memory. Ready or not this adventure was about to pull away from the station.
We had to make the best of it because we were on the train for a better part of three days. So the next morning after breakfast, my sisters decided to go exploring. In an effort to pass time, we were going to play cards in the lounge car, and in order to do that we first pass through the dining car.
Trains…you see….move not just in a forward momentum but also not unlike a ship…they tend to sway. It takes a little time to recalibrate your equilibrium. As a tall person with elevation struggles throughout my teen years and motion sickness consuming my childhood….my equilibrium had historically always been subpar.
We’d barely made it a 1/3 of the way through the dining car when the train unexpectedly pulled harder to the left. I was falling…..I felt time stop and saw everything around me in slow motion. How could I save this????? Just catch myself and avoid wiping out across someone’s entire breakfast meal felt Iike the only safe plan.
The deck of cards went flying from my right hand as time sped back up and both of my arms went wildly spinning through the air like a giraffe on skates struggling to catch themselves from what was about to be an epic wipeout.
Both of my hands SMACKED firmly on the leather bench seats. One on either side of a gentleman I now found myself nose to nose with. I closed my eyes slowly. Mortified by this entire scene and began to slowly push myself back up to a standing position. Mid push back “I am…….so…….sorry,” started to come across my lips….. as he interjected with “SO…is this always how you meet men my dear?”
Dying. Yep I was dying….a slow death. And then I pushed my self to full standing only to discover, not unlike the amenities on the sleeper train he too was……..small. Let me clear…had we been standing he would have been half my size. Okay you can see it now….this man of particularly small stature was sitting across from his equally diminutive wife and they had just had the worst kind of breakfast disruption.
I tallest women ever……had come limbs flying, nose to nose with this poor unsuspecting man whom im fairly confident in a parallel universe is standing right now promoting his own book and telling a story of the time he was pinned down in the dining car of a sleeper train by a giant woman with deadly and unnatural limbs on a cross country adventure his wife had assured him would be a good idea.
I scooped up my playing cards and I prayed that I would never have to see this couple again. They were in the sleeper car directly next to us. Because the universe is HYSTERICAL like that. There may not have been murder on the orient express but mortification was at a pretty chart topping level.
As delightful as I’m sad to inform you not isolated moment of personal embarrassment might have been you may now be wondering why this was the story I chose to share tonight.
When I look back on this whole experience…. I see my mother in every scene even the ones she was not actually present for. Calling for me to see this trip as an adventure, and never once admitting defeat even though I still contend this was not at all what she had envisioned in her romanticized notion of train travel.
Motherhood is so much like that analogy. There are many women with dreamy notions of what motherhood might entail. And then you get into it and realize that personal space is a huge issue in motherhood, expectations are often not matched with reality, and you get thrown off balance much more often than you would like to admit happens.
No matter what my mother wasn’t wrong about one thing……its most certainly is an adventure. The call for each of us is to keep our humor, to surround ourselves wisely with traveling companions, and most of all to embrace the magic of a life lived in glorious technicolor.
Summer Smith is a speaker, writer, and motherhood blogger. She and her family are currently navigating the suburbs of Northern Virginia. As the mother to four young children, Summer maintains her sanity thanks to her sense of humor, copious amounts of coffee, and Amazon Prime. Maya Angelou once said, when reflecting on her childhood, that her mother left an impression like technicolor stars in the midnight sky. Influenced by these words, Summer blogs at her website Motherhood in Technicolor, and can also be found on her Motherhood in Technicolor Facebook page.