….there’s a light at the end of that tunnel.
I have taken to watching train videos while on the treadmill: someone sets up a GoPro camera in the cab for a driver’s-eye view and I go along for the ride. Er, run.
I have traveled from France to Italy. Through the Swiss alps. Capljina to Sarajevo in the Czech Republic. And since I have always dreamed of visiting New Zealand, today I “ran” from Wellington to Masterson.
I confess that I was disappointed. We traveled through a lot of industrial areas. I saw lots of freeways. Then, just outside of Featherston, we entered the Rimutaka Tunnel.
A digression: Dear friend Lisa emailed yesterday to say her 2020 was craptastic. Like us all, she is Covid-19 weary. This winter her son who was visiting fell and broke his ankle. She needed orthopedic hand surgery. Then, late this spring, a family emergency mandated a sudden trip to the mainland which has been indefinitely extended.
Yesterday, while riding her bike, she fell (into a busy road) and fractured her wrist. Today she had surgery, including a bone graft because the radius was shattered.
I worried about her all day, and fretted about all those calamities, and relaxed when she texted that she was out of surgery and recovering.
So, back to that train “trip.” We entered the Rimutaka Tunnel, 5.5 miles long. Narrow. Dark. Claustrophobic. Just when I thought we must be near the end…..we weren’t, and the darkness continued. My anxiety level was climbing with each kilometer traveled, despite the fact that I was watching a damned video while on my treadmill.
Finally, we rounded a gentle curve and I could see it…..the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. We burst out of the blackness in to startlingly bright sunlight. Gone was the industrial corridor: now we were high in the hills, a huge body of water off to the right and beautiful hills and forests all around and I was traveling through the New Zealand I had always pictured.
For all of us….may the bad memories fade. May our isolation be eliminated. May we burst out of confining darkness into beauty and light.
And may Lisa see light at the end of the “craptastic” tunnel of 2020.
i love that you have figured out a wayto access someoneʻs gopro of train travel while you stationary bicycle.
i dont often feel as low as i have this past few months. i could count the ways, but why? it brought tears to think that someone else was distressed for my pain.
and if i was to count the miseries of this past year, i would in fairness, have to count the moments of ineffable joy that are the direct result of the trajedies. Like seeing my daughter upright a life that she had nearly destroyed with her own hands. like having my 5 year old grandson ask me to tellhim about my parents, and
want to know if missed him when we lived states apart. like working in the garden with my oldest son who had estranged himself from us for years, and have him tell me he will enjoy this garden time in his memory for the rest of his life. like having another son come to realize the havoc certain habits had been creating in his life and relationships, and let them go. like being gobsmacked by the natural beauty oof an entirely new place to live. like having a friend who caes enough about my pain do do something actually fucking poetic. the end of the rainbow is always a long ride