The first long train trip that really challenged my conceptualization of travel took place in June 2023, after I visited Barcelona for my internship at the time. When I mentioned my interest in train travel to my train-enthusiast supervisor during one lunch break, he eagerly presented my many options. I took his advice, and launched myself on my first solo voyage for my return to Brussels.
First, I took a regional commuter line from Barcelona to Girona, where I spent approximately twenty-four hours. In beautiful Girona, I experienced being a visitor to a city by myself for the first time. I wandered up and down streets that interested me, with no destination in mind and no companion to inconvenience with indirect routes. I ate by myself and parsed pamphlets in Catalan while doing so. I visited a house museum of an architect I’d never heard of. And I left with a quickly-cultivated fondness for the city.
Next, I went to Llançà, a town along the Mediterranean coast that had perhaps never before received an American tourist; I quickly realized that French would take me further than English. Here, marks of the Spanish Civil War are easily visible and even openly sign-posted, which is a significant departure from other places I’ve visited in the Iberian Peninsula. The somewhat pathetic dinner I threw together at my hostel was supplemented by wine and salad from my unexpected dining companion, a Catalan man from inland who came to the hostel for several weeks every year to be by the sea. We chatted for over an hour in a combination of French, Catalan, English, and Spanish—which was mostly mutually comprehensible.
Before leaving Llançà, I visited a rocky beach to swim, doing my best to avoid the jellyfish floating in the water and stranded on the coast. As I walked along the waterline, I made eye-contact with a little girl whose form of play that day was building small rock confinements around the beached creatures. “Medusa,” she said to me, pointing—the word for “jellyfish” in many Romance languages, nevertheless an eerie proclamation.
My onward journey from Llançà left me with one last connection that day in Portbou, the last Catalan town before the French border. There, I extended my stopover and trekked uphill to visit a memorial to German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose attempted escape from the Nazi regime to the United States through Spain and Portugal was thwarted by the Franco regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and Vichy France. Faced with the news that he would be deported back to France and thus into the power of the Nazis, Benjamin instead committed suicide. Benjamin’s death ended up ensuring the safe escape of his companions, as Spanish officials were so shocked in response to his death—so the most common narrative goes. The memorial and Benjamin’s story was made yet more moving to me by my recent reading of his writings on Parisian arcades and the flâneur in an urban sociology class. In Portbou, I was suddenly faced with the full personhood of this academic author. The night train to Paris and the landscape of Occitania subsequently became the sites of a revisit to these writings.
Traveling slowly by train is like stepping into a choropleth map. From a window seat, mountains turn to forests turn to floodplains. Languages melt into one another: Castilian Spanish becomes Catalan becomes French, or Dutch turns to German to Danish to Swedish to Norwegian during a later Christmastime trip from Brussels to Norway. During this same trip, the daylight shrank by an hour for each of my travel days, a 5 p.m. sunset replaced by an absurd 3 p.m., a visualization of increasing shadow as one moves further north.
I’m obsessed with the context that traveling by land brings to my destination, in a similar way that visiting a friend in their hometown is such a joy. Intellectual knowledge becomes informed by experience; crossing the Mediterranean border between Spain and France gains meaning not only through the physical geography of the Pyrenees and time spent in the dark of tunnels through the mountains, but also through Walter Benjamin’s memorial. By shifting from planes to trains and breaking up my journey, my travel has gained the dimension of depth, spaces re-expanding into places with meaning instead of simply miles to be traveled in as short a time as possible.
Given how revolutionary of an experience this shift has been for me, it’s funny to think that it was the steam-powered railroad that kicked off the shrinking of space and time in earnest. My hometown of Abilene was created as a direct result of the Texas and Pacific Railway, which transported cattle up to Chicago, adopting the Great Plains into the ranks of the Windy City’s growing hinterland. American policymakers and industrialists collaborated to realize the manifest destiny of the United States by means of railway lines, while King Leopold II of Belgium lay claim to the Congo as his personal property (to loot) by the same means. A line of railway track or a locomotive were symbols dizzying in their varied implications—of innovation and efficiency, of power and dominance, and of a permanent shift in our perception of time and distance. Each minute must yield maximum output, including distance traveled.
If the railway held national power within its symbolic capacity, which in some ways it continues to do—consider the re-nationalization of Scottish train lines, the privatization of English railways, the struggling Deutsche Bahn—then I shall make the airplane my representative of the worst parts of globalist consumerism. The airplane is, of course, an essential part of my life as an American living abroad, allowing me to attend my friends’ weddings and my sisters’ graduations. At the same time, however, it is as two-dimensional a means of travel as one can get, the passenger moving between an arrival and destination airport. Given the liminality of airports and airplane interiors, where homogeneity meets maximized consumption meets securitization, air travel is arguably even one-dimensional, a slow-motion teleportation from one point on the globe to another. The complexities of the places in between are simply deleted from one’s experience.
I’m still figuring out the third-dimensional sort of travel, this decompression of time and space. How, for example, can I bring this approach and my curiosity within it to my own country, in my return trips to the United States?
In my most recent trip back to the U.S., I visited New York City for the first time, and then made the trip to Grand Rapids for a friend’s wedding overland, by train until Michigan. I traveled from New York City to Albany, watching the urban slowly fade as we moved north along the Hudson. From Albany to Toronto the next day, we passed through the gaps between farms, the Maple Leaf line granting an intimate view of western New York. I experienced the continued significance of North American borders, a reminder of what a treat the Schengen zone is, as I waited outside in 20 degrees Fahrenheit with my fellow passengers at the Niagara Falls border crossing. My previously under-cultivated interest in Canada grew as I eavesdropped from Toronto to Windsor.
The choropleth-map-of-it-all is less clear to me when it comes to the United States, at least in terms of language and culture. It perhaps reveals the flipside of a long and slow train journey—if you feel you already know a place, each step is less an exciting opportunity for discovery and more a tedium that you wouldn’t mind deleting. Then again, I think a bit of forced slowness and entry into complexities is healthy, especially in an era of quick answers.
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My overland travel inspiration in this season of my life comes from The Man in Seat 61, an incredible train travel blog-slash-wiki, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America.
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
