The Train

On sound, space, and learning to let things just be.

The train hugs the Gorge, tracing the waterfront like it owns the place. In a way, it does. It’s been here longer than all of us, laying its tracks in the early 1880s, before towns like Bingen even had names. It carved the first path through this landscape and claimed the best view in the house, the kind of view people now pay millions for.

Around here, everyone warns you about the train. But the sound doesn’t bother me.

In college, I rented a house much like this one, a triplex perched above Bellingham Bay, each level its own small world, all of it overlooking an abandoned pier. The place had history. It was once a bustling port for trade, with mills and canneries lining the waterfront. By the time I lived there, that energy had faded, but the trains remained. Every night, they wailed as they passed, a low, guttural reminder of the lives they carried beyond my small window.

Back then, the noise barely registered. College is loud. Music spills out of windows, footsteps move up and down the stairs, the late-night conversations of neighbors with no concept of time. You learn to live with sound, to share space with it, to let it skim across your skin without sinking in.

Now, as I lie in this house in Bingen, the train calls out again. It feels different, though not disruptive. I’m older now. The horn cuts through the stillness and echoes against the cliffs, carrying something it didn’t before. It’s not a polite sound, but it isn’t trying to be. It’s unapologetically there, dragging its weight across the landscape. I let it fill the room.

The train comforts me. It pulls me back to those younger nights, when everything felt vast and possible, but it also anchors me here in the present. I fall asleep easily in this house, lulled by its rhythm. It reminds me that life keeps moving. All you can do is move with it.