The Transylvania Joem: A Young Peace Corps Volunteer in Romania

There are beautiful things in this world that I am well aware of, but that I do not truly understand.

One of my best friends, Angel, has described the dusk-time call to prayer in major Middle-Eastern cities. Time stills as crackling speakers across innumerable city blocks play the same, haunting song, and thousands of worshipers dutifully perform a meticulous and precise ritual. Angel has described it to me, with beauty and style, but I haven’t felt that feeling the way she has. I haven’t experienced it first hand. This is the realm where words fall just short–in capturing the brilliant and mostly unpredictable flashes of human spirit that occur in the lapses of our daily lives.

As a devoted student of American Poetry, I am aware of the importance of trains. To a locomotive (in winter), Walt Whitman once wrote “(you) emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!/ For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee.” He urges this great thing that he reveres to come into his song.

I have read these leaves, and I can imagine the great thing, and the reverence is apparent. But the feeling Whitman felt at that moment always escaped me.

See–I had never been on a train. As a Colorado native, trains are a sort of superfluous thing: they exist, but only for those who would chose that form of transportation over others ‘more practical.’ Therefore, Whitman’s verse was an unfounded idea for me–I hadn’t had the experience to nurture his words with my own subjective emotions.

But, happily, this has recently changed. In Romania, trains are a cheap, reliable, and ubiquitous form of transportation. They’re slower than cars, and less comfortable than buses, but they are consistent, and more frequent. Hence, I have found myself on many 4+ hour tracked trips, criss-crossing the plains on either side of the drifting Carpathian swoosh that runs across this country.

Last weekend, I took a train home from Lugoj, and took itinerary of what I saw:

– One doe, with two fawns, gently stepping through the crumbling rows of a winter field.
– Two pheasants, crouched uneasily, in the long blooms of grass along drainage ditches.
– A handful of soccer games, in hidden fields with crooked, rusting goal posts.
– A citadel, hanging spookily on an overgrown cliff above a small town clinging to the earth between rock and river.
– A score of Roma (Gyspy) enclaves on the outside of any large town. Tiny, half room, scrap-metal huts with fences made by binding thin branches together. Livestock and camp fires. Innumerable, beautiful pieces of bright clothing frozen on drying lines.
– One late-winter sunset of rose and gold that ripped through snow clouds hanging over peaks approximately 2,000 meters tall.

I now understand Whitman’s adoration for the locomotive. You sit quietly at the window, listening to the train grumble and cry as it rolls around the earth. The details rip by, incessantly arriving only to be shoved away by what are immediately behind them. And this happens before the backdrop of fortitudinous mountains, rivers, forests. Over all of it is a still and watchful sky.

And Whitman writes:

Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding;
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide—across the lakes,
To the free skies, unpent, and glad, and strong.

And now I understand.

Poem Cited:
Whitman, Walt. “To a Locomotive in Winter.” LEAVES OF GRASS. 1900.