by Jameson Draper
Outside the glass window of my economy seat in the third car from the front of this RegioJet train I watch the northwestern countryside of Hungary pass by like a slow film. We just crossed the Austrian border, twenty miles south of Bratislava. It looks different here than does its neighbor. Eastern Austria is bucolic, small farmhouses on rolling verdant hills, lived-in pastoral tableaus of history and mirth. The sun hid behind the central clouds when we crossed the border into that empty Magyar town without a name. The green hills turn to brown fields, tree-lined farms to a wide and flat expanse of unforgiving earth with a smattering of lonely trees bared for all to see. Industrial buildings are visible in the distance, yes, but only through the haze of some malingering clouds or smoke or both. Though I did not see any people walking the Austrian countryside either, here it feels dead, somewhere no souls may roam. I don’t even see any cars. Only empty dachas that are somehow small and cavernous at once. Rain from days passed drips off the rusted eaves and dances on the cracked concrete below, beating a brooding rhythm. I swear I can hear the rotted wood beams creaking from the inside of this train car. We go further and from the opposite window the Danube comes into view, its concrete aqueducts a far cry from the picturesque canals of Vienna, where I’m coming from, or the wide and shallow swathe that cuts through Budapest, where I’m going. It looks like the L.A. River if it had a bit more water and far less people. Back to my side. The single trees look sad. They’re alone in the dirt with no men to tend to them, drooping and barren of their leaves, crying for companionship in unforgiving soil. This terrain feels shallow, flimsy, like what you see is what you get, though inhabited for millennia it never seemed to become anything worth noting, like once this train passes by it will cease to exist, the batteries of its barren sky removed for the evening, turning everything black, only returned to their compartment just in time for the next passing train. A brown and drab and flat place with no past, no future and only a fleeting wisp of the present. Who am I, though, but an American, traveling across foreign lands, barely stopping for a breath, judging from the comfortable warm seat of a cheap regional train, listening to the shake and rattle of the wheels on the track, wishing I could find anything but heartache, anything but despair in a place that isn’t even my own? As night falls the train rages on and nears the city, leaving the desolate country in its wake. I look back and see the terrific holocaust of a scarlet sunset splaying across the flatlands and its spasmodic bursts of ecstatic light that bandage beautifully the ravaged fields of sludge.
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Jameson Draper is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He loves his gray cat, a crisp negroni and a baseball game on a summer night. He is endlessly frightened, and is wondering if he could maybe have a bite of your shawarma. Follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.