Today’s installment of The Trainjotting Reader looks at Netherland, a novel by the New York-based Irishman Joseph O’Neill. It’s about a Dutch guy named Hans who finds that revisiting his former pastime of cricket helps him deal with anxieties stemming from 9/11 and the dissolution of his marriage. In this bit he hops an Amtrak heading up the Hudson, and views the vista in a way that daily Hudson Line riders probably overlook.
Oh, and there’s a near-naked man in there, just short of Poughkeepsie. Call it a bonus.
**
A few days later, I caught the Maple Leaf Express, bound for Toronto, to Albany, where a group of investors waited. It was a brown November morning. Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side. At Harlem, the Hudson, flowing parallel to the track, came into view. I had taken this journey before, yet I was startled afresh by the existence of this waterside vista, which on a blurred morning such as this had the effect, once we passed under the George Washington Bridge, of canceling out centuries. The far side of the river was a wild bank of forest. Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that i saw distant and fabulously high mountains. I fell asleep. When I awoke, the river had turned into an indeterminate gray lake. Three swans on the water were the white of phosphor. Then the Tappan Zee Bridge came clumsily out of the mist, and soon afterward the far bank reappeared and the Hudson again was itself. Tarrytown, a whoosh of parking lots and ballfields, came and went. The valley slipped back into timelessness. As the morning lightened, the shadows of the purple and bronze trees became more distinct on the water. The brown river, now very still, was glossed in places, as if immense silver tires had skidded there. Soon we were inland, amid trees. I stared queasily into their depths. Perhaps because I grew up in the Low Countries, where trees grow either out of sidewalks or in tame copses, I only have to look at New York forests to begin to feel lost in them. I drove upstate numerous times with Rachel, and I strongly associate those trips with the fauna whose corpses lay around the road in great numbers: skunks, deer, and enormous indecipherable rodents that one never found in Europe. (And at night, when we sat on a porch, gigantic moths and other repulsive night-flyers would thickly congregate on the screen, and my English wife and I would shrink into the house in amazement and fear.) My thoughts went back to a train journey I’d often made, in my student days, between Leiden and The Hague. The yellow commuter train rain through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. Here, in the first American valley, was the contrary phenomenon: you went for miles without seeing a house. The forest, filled with slender and thick trunks fighting silently for light and land, went emptily on and on. Then, gazing out of the window, my eye sagged on something pink. I sat up and stared.
I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.
I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterward of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game–Poughkeepsie!–for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we traveled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match–marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably–every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half-following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse–such pioneering effort had gone into them!
Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents.