I met a man on a steam train

...and I didn't even ask his name

October 31, 2023

I went to Switzerland to attend a Swiss Air Force demonstration at seven thousand feet, above the high alpine pasture of Axalp. I wrote pages and pages of notes, trying to find the narrative of the airshow and the people attending it. What was the core story?

The best travel writers manage to make it look easy, like they are just telling you about a place they’ve been. It’s only truly obvious how much skill is involved when you read it done badly, haphazardly, a text full of dry facts and loosely flapping connective tissue.

The airshow was cancelled on the third day when the Föhn winds started blowing. These dry mountain winds have different names in different places; you may know the Alpine Föhn as the Chinook in the Rockies or the Zonda flowing down from the Andes or the Ghibli blowing from Libya towards the Mediterranean.

I want to be up there with the masters, which is why I spent so much time trying to combine the different aspects of Harz Mountains into one narrative, even though I knew it didn’t matter and that no one else cared what I wrote. The great writers encapsulate a place and the people within it as if their pen were a paintbrush. But what do I do with the pieces I can’t bear to leave out?

The standard advice is to kill your darlings. Are the Föhn winds relevant to the story of an airshow? What about the touristy train ride I took that day, a steam train struggling up the Rothorn mountain on the opposite side of the lake where F-18s circled, their performance canceled. Does it move the narrative forward?

I met a Swiss gentleman on my way back down the mountain. He was nothing to do with the airshow, didn’t even know the airshow was taking place, let alone that it was cancelled.

In my Creative Nonfiction workshop, I share three examples of travel writing. I chose these three because they all describe the same place from the same vantage point: driving down the highway in the American Southwest.

I love how each excerpt pulls you in while giving a completely different impression of the same place. Now, I read them again, underlining the telling details. What is important and what is trivial?

Martin Padget (Travels in the American Southwest)

Located along Highway 68, which runs between Santa Fe and Taos, Big Pile of Bones was a roadside venture run by a powerfully built and big-bearded man named Stan Bulis. Here, tourists could purchase Georgia O’Keefee-esque cow skulls to place on their patios in California, Illinois, and Germany. I just happened to visit at the same time as a young man whose artificial arm replaced one hand while only three fingers remained on his other hand. Bulis could not help but ask how the man had lost his limb. Making fireworks, came the reply. With a bullish laugh, Bulis quipped that he would have paid a good price for what remained after the accident. I liked Big Pile of Bones because the process of creating objects for the tourist market was laid bare. Here tourists could bypass the galleries in Santa Fe and Taos with their hefty mark-ups and purchase, well, skulls and bones for a decent price. A Mexican immigrant was employed out back to boil the remnants of cows that, presumably, had been purchased from the slaughterhouse. His job was to separate bone from skin and viscera. It was a dirty, stinking task. A contributor to the roadsideamerica.com website reported that a woman had told him of Bulis: “The EPA came and made that old hoot clean up his sick hobby.”

  • Padget pushes against traditional travelogue because he is telling you about an attraction that is no longer there. There’s no sense of arrival or departure; he is not introducing you to a place where you will ever go. The excerpt is nothing but tiny details. I love how Padget shows his admiration for Big Pile of Bones but then pulls it together with the reference to the old hoot and his sick hobby.

Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

We left Sacramento at dawn and were crossing the Nevada desert by noon. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and all the towns along the Nevada road rolled by one after another. By the evening we could see the lights of Salt Lake City almost a hundred miles away across the flat country. Suddenly Dean stopped the car and fell back in the corner of the seat. I looked at him and saw that he was asleep.

  • Kerouac quickly skips over the first six hours of the drive (trivial) to get to this defining moment. The scenery is fleeting, especially in contrast to Padget’s detail. But those six hours still have a sense of motion: driving since dawn, the scenery going past in the midday sun until evening falls. Then, suddenly, the car stops. Even without context, Kerouac builds tension: We are in the car and we can see the lights of Salt Lake City but we’re no longer moving towards them.

Hunter S Thompson (title unknown)

You drive thru the blue dusk, between empty mountains and a cold sea, past little tin roof shacks where dark skinned men in baggy pants and sandals sit around drinking beer, past rusty wrecks of old American autos, and you keep going until there’s nothing to see but cactus and dust and a few lizards beside the road. And soon or later you turn around and go back, because sooner or later you have to.

  • Thompson wrote this as the conclusion to an otherwise straightforward travel piece written for the Chicago Tribune in 1961. We never stop moving but the blue dusk seems to last forever, languid and melancholy. The tin roofs, the men’s baggy pants and sandals, the cactus and the dust: every detail could be considered trivial and yet the paragraph would be weakened if any single one was taken out.

Each of these excerpts is a collection of details that somehow define the piece, as if these stories just couldn’t exist anywhere else. You can almost feel the greater narrative that must be wrapped around it. I want to be able to write like that.

“Is that why the hotels were all full,” said the man on the train. I never thought to ask his name. “I didn’t know.” He laughed. “Well, I heard the fighter jets, of course. Where does one find out about such a thing?”

I smiled knowingly, as if the airshow, attended by over ten thousand people, were a great secret.

What happens to the stories that I leave behind, existing only in my notes where they wait and wither and eventually waste away entirely?

The man on the steam train asked where I was from and I told him I’d grown up in California. He’d been there, he told me. It was 1964. His sister had moved to the States and he went to visit her in Connecticut. He bought a car there and drove west for two weeks.

“Was it a cool car?” I asked. “Like a big American car?”

“Of course.” He laughed and started swiping at his phone. “I’ll show you.”

He gave me permission to take a photograph of his photograph, holding his phone and leaning over it so that he appeared in the reflection.

He was just a man sitting next to me, who had once been to a place that I had been. He had nothing to do with my trip or the airshow or even, really, the train.

And yet, I don’t think his story was trivial. And I refuse to leave it behind.