Riding the Iron Rooster

Then he told me his nickname was Blind Bob and that he was from Barstow in California. When I looked around this train I realized that I was one of a large group and that I did not know any of these people. All I had to go on were their faces. But faces say a great deal. Theirs certainly did. The sight made me very apprehensive.

They stared out of the train windows at the houses, and the houses returned the stares. One of the disconcerting aspects of a railway journey is that the houses near the line seem to have their backs turned to the traveler—you see rear entrances and drains and kitchens and laundry. But these are more telling than porticoes and lawns. The depressing thing about the London suburbs is not that they look seedy, but rather that they also look eternal. It is a relief to look inside those houses and see lives being lived—the man redecorating the bathroom, the woman feeding the cat, the girl upstairs combing her hair, the boy fiddling with his radio, the old lady with her nose in the Express. It is wrong to pass by in a train and not wish them well. They are unaware that they are being scrutinized. It is one of the paradoxes of railway lines that the passengers can see the people in the houses, but those people cannot see anything of the train passengers.

We were ferried across the Channel. Morris and Kicker reminisced about D Day and the Normandy landings and how the American troops got the worst of it.

The water was leaden looking and it slopped against the ferry. The wind from the northeast was cold. It blew hard across the quay when we landed, and we shuffled through customs to have our passports examined. Our luggage was searched.

At Boulogne, the people in the tour amused each other by calling out, "All aboard! All aboard!" and I discovered myself next to an English woman who was fat and entirely bald and wore mittens and said she was planning to immigrate to New Zealand. Her name was Wilma Perrick and she was about thirty-two. She said she had just lost her job. She seemed very sad, and I was on the point of sympathizing with her about her baldness when she leaned over and said, "What are you writing?"

When the Paris train started, the man known as Morthole said, "You were probably wondering what I was doing in the train yard on those tracks."

No one had been wondering. No one had seen him. Anyway, who was Morthole talking to?

"I was collecting rocks," he said. "I collect rocks from every country. Listen, in a lot of places it's illegal—the South Pole for example. I've got some rocks from the South Pole. They could put me in jail for that. I've got them from everywhere. Canada. Ohio. London. Each one is the size of a golf ball. I've got hundreds. I'm a kind of geologist, I guess."

In Elmer Gantry I read, "Set in between the larger boulders [of the fireplace] were pebbles, pink and brown and earth-colored, which the good bishop had picked up all over the world. This pebble, the bishop would chirp, guiding you about the room, was from the shore of the Jordan; this was a fragment of the Great Wall of China..."

The east wind that had blown coldly across the Channel that morning had brought a dusting of snow to Picardy. Snow in April! It lay in a thin covering on hillsides, like long, torn bed sheets, the earth showing through in black streaks. It made the ordinary-looking landscape seem dramatic, the way New Jersey looks in bad weather, made houses and fences emphatic, and brought a sort of cubism to villages that would otherwise have been unmemorable. Each place became a little frozen portrait in black and white.

It seemed to me that railway lines like this needed a little variation. It was almost as if these hills and villages had been seen by so many people passing by that they had been worn away from being looked at. One of the attractions of China to me was that it had been closed to outsiders for such a long time that even the most hackneyed sight of a pagoda would seem fresh, and in distant Xinjiang a traveler might feel like Marco Polo, because no foreigner had been there for years. But this part of heavily traveled France had been rubbed away by the eyes of sightseers and railway passengers: most landscapes near busy railway lines had that same look of simplification, as if in a matter of time they would disappear from being looked at so much.

The people on the tour were still getting acquainted with each other. They asked me questions, too. Where was I from? What did I do? Was I married? Did I have children? Why was I taking this trip? What was that book in my lap? What were my plans in Paris? First time in China?

I was Paul, I was unemployed, I was evasive, and—how does Baudelaire put it?—"The real travelers are those who leave for the sake of leaving," and something about not knowing why but always saying Allons! An appropriate sentiment here in the environs of Amiens.