Nonfiction Essay: On Trains

I refused to use Stuttgart’s train system upon moving to Germany for high school. I was thirteen, stubborn as hell, and terrified of living in a foreign city. Even after learning how to buy a ticket and how to orient myself with maps of the rail system, the blue and red and green lines intersecting across long, unpronounceable stop names, I would not travel without a bilingual friend. Now, years later, I not only prefer to take the train alone, enjoying the time to think or write or listen to music, but I admit I often don’t even buy a ticket.           

The first time I got caught as a Schwarzfahrer (literally a ‘black rider’, meaning a ‘fare-dodger’) was ironically enough not in Stuttgart, where I had ridden black numerous times. It was in Berlin, a few years after moving to Germany, with five of my best friends; it was our last day of Euro-railing after visiting Belgium, Brussels, and Amsterdam. We were on the subway to the main station, the very last leg of our journey, where we would catch a regional train home south to Stuttgart. Some of us tried to pretend we didn’t know German, because sometimes the ticket-checkers would be lenient with foreigners who fret about not having been able to figure out the ticket machine (despite it offering instructions in eight languages), but my German friends discovered it is very difficult to fake not knowing your native language when you are being berated and very badly want to defend yourself. We surrendered our addresses and when we were each mailed eighty euro fines two weeks later, we stupidly laughed about how fines like that would probably never deter young people, including ourselves, from taking the risk of riding black. 

‘Train’ derives from the Latin trahere, ‘to pull’ or ‘to draw’, and in the later sense of the noun, it referred to ‘a connected series of things.’ Have you been on a plane, looking at all the backs of heads as you wait for the bathroom, or driving along the highway, seeing the mass of headlights traveling in the other direction, and wondered what events led them to being on that plane or on that road that very moment? What their story might be, why they are traveling, too? It is a curious thing, this idea of connectedness, considering most of the time we are surprised when strangers cross our paths or pause, for a moment, in our own little worlds. More than once, I have waved to strangers waiting on platforms as the train I’m on passes them by; I quickly remember, though, that through the thick tinted windows, they cannot see my half-hearted attempt at a hello. Failed acknowledgments aside, I am beginning to believe we are pulled and pushed and drawn, ever so gently, in certain directions more often than we realize.
   
I have memorized Stuttgart’s routes. I know there are seven stops to school, four to my favorite Irish pub downtown, six to the city park where I read on warm days. Yet I have learned only a fragment of what is a global transportation network. Since the London Underground, the first rapid transit system, was built in 1863, roughly 5,000 miles of track and 7,000 stations have been constructed worldwide. Thousands of transit routes connect countries and travelers, and while I have so enjoyed jumping countries and encountering hundreds of travelers, I am by no means an expert at slipping in and out of trains in foreign countries. Every time I step on the subway, I am acutely aware and anxious about being the foreigner. I’ll never really feel at home being surrounded by people whose culture says it is normal to stare; I will often keep my ticket (when I have one) tightly in hand, nervous about being checked; and when I’m riding around the city with a friend and speaking English, I talk very quietly so as to not draw attention to myself.          

I will probably always be somewhat apprehensive traveling on trains. But that won’t stop me from doing so. Stuttgart’s main train station, or Hauptbahnhof, was constructed in 1922 and features a quote by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born in Stuttgart in the late eighteenth century. The quote, in the form of a lit inscription, reads “…daß diese Furcht zu irren schon der Irrtum selbst ist”  – loosely translated as “…to be fooled by this fear is foolishness itself.” How ironic, I recall thinking when I first read this on the rust-colored brick. I have come to welcome the quasi-trepidation I feel when traveling from one place to the next as being part of the overall experience.
 
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Natalie Lampert

April 28th, 2009