After spending all yesterday walking around Dijon choosing which place we would go to for our coq au vin, and then eating it too late, we were too full to sleep. We must have dozed off at some point though because we woke up late and had to rush to get to the train station only to find our train was late as well, which wasn’t such bad news until we heard it wouldn’t be leaving for another four hours! By the time we got moving, the clouds hung heavy and hot and we were claustrophobic in our carriage, crushingly full. We didn’t dare go to the washroom for fear someone sitting in the aisle would take our seats. I’m sure glad neither of us has her period right now! I wondered what it would be like if there was suddenly an emergency like a fire, and I tried to work out the French wording on the window so I could get it open if I had to. Dreadful to end your life crushed against a window in a train. We did not have any food with us, and worse, nothing to drink, thinking we’d be able to get something on the train, but even if there was a food car there’s no way to get to it.
We missed our train connection in Lyon and finally pulled into Geneva seven hours late, and with another long wait in front of us. Niki went off to get something to eat. I was too hot to eat and felt a little sick. We slept a bit on a bench, then awoke with a start to find our train was leaving in five minutes. Just barely made it running with our heavy bags to find ourselves in another full train, this time with us standing in the aisle. There were two Italian guys who started to press up against us, pretending there was no room except in our direction. I feel their hands moving around my hips, that's four hands! Niki turned to face one of them and started to flirt but I just pretended they didn’t exist, looking out the window and hoping they'd get bored with me. In such a crowded train I was sure they couldn't rape us, but my imagination had them robbing us, leaping out the window and getting away. I decided to conjure up ‘Fakira the brave’, who is still sometimes useful, and made what I hoped was a fierce look, when I noticed Niki was allowing one of them to kiss her neck. Actually kiss her! Fakira the brave instantly vanished. Oh my goodness, what was going on? It was like a bad movie. My heart was beating so fast and my mind was whirling with fear.
Everytime I start to feel this way my mind goes back to that terrible time I had in London so many years ago, when I had to run away from a guy who I am convinced was a rapist, and I get breathless and panicky. I don’t think Niki is totally blind to temptation because suddenly she slapped the face of the guy kissing her and pushed him away. Both guys laughed and then pressed past us to move along the aisle. My knees went wobbly with relief and I realized I’d been gripping the window rail so hard my hand was dented. She told me ‘her guy’ made her rub his balls all the while he pinched her on her bottom, which hurt, but the real end came when he called her a "delicious whore" and she decided not to take the relationship further. She seemed kind of proud at the same time to have flirted with an Italian. How on earth could she have found that situation seductive? Is there something wrong with me? Will I ever understand this whole sex thing?
We finally arrived in Bern early this morning. What a relief! I had no idea it would take so long or that we’d have to change trains as much as we did, but picturesque scenery made up for it. Immaculate fields of lush green, full of extremely happy cows. Little houses that looked like they had been sprinkled over the hills at random, some on flat land and some at precarious angles on steep slopes. They all had overhanging roofs and shutters and window boxes filled with pink and red geraniums. Church bells rang through the valleys. It was magical, like part of some fairy tale. I half expected to see Heidi with her goat gamboling along. It's like a surreal painting, especially after our fraught journey.
Travel is full of extreme moments and the fact they can follow on from each other so quickly makes them all the more unforgetable. I think about Magellan and Cook and Columbus and all sorts of other early explorers that didn't have train schedules go wrong because they didn't have trains to take. No one had been to where they were going and each journey was brand new. They would have met with storms that blew them off schedule, and foreign peoples who caused them discomfort and entered delightfully and unexpectedly picturesque surroundings just like we did. Even though our explorations are nothing as important or world changing as theirs, I can't imagine that each person on those long ago ships didn't go through some of the same kinds of emotions and revelations about the world that Niki and I go through on this trip. And each person must respond slightly differently according to their characters, just as Niki and I do. I feel very connected to those people I've read about, humanities' ancestors, my ancestors. Are we all reincarnations of people who lived and died centuries ago? Are we just reliving the same explorations and voyages again and again but in different eras and throught different means? Do we humans actually learn anything new about ourselves or our place in the universe or do we just go round and round like hamsters on a wheel at night, doing what we do without thought or insight, passing on our findings that mean nothing to anyone else because we have to see things for ourselves to really learn them, to feel them. On a science level we might learn more but on a personal level maybe we don't, and perhaps we have to somehow break through and really learn on a personal level in order to move on to the next level of life, which might be moving to a different kind of solar system or dimensional plane or something. Is it God that oversees all this and makes the call? Or maybe there is more than one God, or some force that we call God but is really something else entirely. Or perhaps it's not some entity or entities at all but something within us, that has to pass through the chain of generations, representing some form of internal knowledge, something that replaces instinct perhaps but isn't so leisurely as faith. Perhaps we must arrive at a point where we don't have to travel anywhere because this sense of knowledge is inside us all the time. That would mean no desire to physically travel, no yearning for movement.
Well, I'm sure not there yet.
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