Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel The Spirit of the Place by Samuel Shem (©2008 by Stephen J. Bergman).

“Columbia! Next stop Columbia!”

With an iron inevitability, the Hudson Highlander, northbound out of Grand Central Station, was veering from a trestle out over the Hudson River back onto land. Orville glanced out the right-hand window. At the top of a hill he saw Olana, the Persian-turreted mansion built by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederick Church. Its limestone face was a creamy gold against the lowering sun, and he felt the bite of nostalgia. Grabbing his backpack from the overhead rack, he walked to the space between the cars. He would be home in a couple of minutes.

No he would not. The train screeched, slowed, re-screeched with a lot more oomph, shuddered, and fought itself to a stop.

Orville and the other passengers waited. No information was forthcoming. The air conditioning clicked off. Figures, Orville thought, I come 4,000 miles from Orta to Milan to Zurich to Kennedy to Grand Central and then up the Hudson 128 miles—a whole day’s journey—and as soon as we poke up into the southern tip of this hole of a town, things break.

After another fifteen minutes Orville had had enough of the sweltering Amtrak car. Figuring it was only a mile or so to town, he decided to walk. He opened the door and jumped down from the car. The wet heat smacked him in the face likes a big sweaty hand. Shouldering his backpack, he walked along the cinders to the front of the train. There were two tracks.

Feeling good out in the unconditioned World, his shoes striking the cross ties with soft, firm thunks, Orville stretched his arms out to the dome of sky. Taking a deep breath, he let his eyes ease down the slopes of the Catskill mountains through; the green, shadowed foothills to the inlet at Catskill Creek with its oil tanks and red neon sign for Mike’s Pizza and to the river itself.

He heard a whistle, a train coming toward him, southbound from Columbia. He moved off the inside track to the track next to the river and patched it approach. The engineer was Waving at him in what at first seemed a greeting, but as the train screamed past he realized it was a warning. He jerked around. The northbound train he’d just left was bearing down on him, its own whistle masked by the other’s Orville jumped feet first into the river. The train thundered past, shrieking like a lunatic.

Orville found his footing in the rocky shallows, feeling the beats of hot air on his face. The train whistles echoed back off the mountains. He was sore but okay. As he hauled himself up onto the tracks, he caught the acrid scent of creosote.

Creosote. All at once he saw himself as a six-year-old, one summer’s day, lying on his back in a neglected grassy field down the street from his house on Ten Broek Lane. The scent of creosote was strong from the railroad tracks running nearby. Alone, he stared up at the clouds passing across the sky and suddenly had the sense that the world as he was seeing it was only a part of something else. For the first time in his life he saw himself as part of some whole, some whole world to which his own being was seamlessly connected. He felt tighter, more alive, as if something else had clicked on—or in. He leapt to his feet, making his legs go as fast as they .could, and ran home to tell his mother. He burst into the kitchen and blurted out his discovery as the screen door slammed—bam!—behind him.

Selma Ariel Fleischer Rose, a large, aproned shape looming over the stove, didn’t respond.

He persisted, dragging a chair over, climbing up, and telling her again, slowly and loudly.

“Something else! Mom, I’m part of something else!”

Selma stared at him. He saw a cloud pass across her gaze. She sighed. “Orville-doll, there’s nothing else but this.”

The boy felt a rough, twisting pain in his chest. He clenched down on it, trying to make it go away. He fought back tears.

“What’s wrong, honey-bunny?”

Dread was rising, the pain was going. He felt himself numbing up, like his mouth did when he was at the dentist’s. He broke eye contact. Feeling her fearful concern, he said, “Nothing.” He turned and ran back out the door.

Now, standing on the tracks, he realized how that moment had been one end of the thread that had unspooled all these years in a life spent running, a restless with questions.

Realizing that now there would be a breakage—the train arriving, his sisters meeting it and not finding him on it—he hurried on. As he rounded Mount Pecora, the vista north opened up. There across the marsh was his hometown, Columbia.