Time in Training
Photo by Heather Korbulic.
By Michael Martone
At 11:30 pm Mountain Time the night before, I will catch Train 5, The California Zephyr, westbound, in Salt Lake City (I splurged on a sleeper) and ride through the night, over the famous Overland Route, to arrive in Reno, if I am on time (and there is a good chance I will not be on time) at 8:35 am Pacific Time to attend the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl.
“Crawl” is an interesting word choice to describe the event, and is meant, I believe, to convey a dedicated and deliberate means of locomotion between venues offering contemplative, thought provoking subject matter, the thoughtful progress (though slow passage through) the study of “the humanities” provides. This isn’t a day for “speed” reading, but is on pace to be a change of pace—no instantaneous texts, no ceaseless magnified messages our new media’s miniaturized electronic devices provide.
What better way to arrive in Reno for such an event but by train, the hobbled leg of our transportation triad, the slow sister to the plane and car? How out-of-date! Not time sensitive at all! But I will have all this time on my hands or, more exactly, in my eyes. It will be a time to contemplate time. I will see stars (not “as if” for the first time but really for the first time) over the desert of the Great Basin, the darkest of dark territory, through the big train windows of my sleeper, crawling through the endless night.
That new telescope up there somewhere, the Webb, caught up in the web of the milky ways, we are told, is not seeing stars so much as “seeing” (and it sends to us what it is seeing) back into time. The billions and billions of lights it registers are billions and billions of years in the past, back and back to the newly born universe, to the nurseries of galaxies. Think about that: That crawl of light! That crawl of time!
In her amazing book, River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit, points out that until the invention of the steam locomotive in the 19th Century no human had gone faster than 30-some miles per hour on the back of a horse. The train changed all that. She relates an anecdote of a mayor killed while dedicating a new rail line, unable to get out of the way of the “speeding” train, unable to judge the speed of something going so fast. The railroads “standardized” time too, gave us “zones” in order to schedule. I will leave Mountain Time and arrive in Reno in Pacific Time (Gaining! Gaining an hour of time!). We, now, in our machines, out race the sun, the rotation of the earth.
Humans flatter themselves, says Solnit, that they have and will adapt to these amplifications and accelerations of time. But perhaps, she suggests, we have reached our biological, our human limit. It is something to think about as I take the midnight train to Reno.
Photo courtesy of Michael Martone.
Michael Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds an MA from The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, edited by Michael Martone, The Moon Over Wapakoneta, and Brooding. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Michael will present “The Bad Writing Workshop” at 12:15 pm at the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl in Reno on September 10, 2022.