I’ve been riding the train a lot these days. While Olivia and I have an apartment in Seattle now and will be moving soon, I’m still coming down to Portland every weekend for the next few weeks. Obviously, I enjoy that fact that I’m riding Amtrak weekly, but yesterday I was moved to tears seeing a train platform reunion in Centralia. The strong reaction was certainly influenced by my general lack of being settled, but I think seeing things like this is part of why I love travel by train so much.

It’s rare – especially these days – for our only other train station equivalent, the airport, to host this kind of tender reunion. I’m not old enough to remember pre 9/11 air travel (though I do think I flew to Florida once as a kid beforehand, I don’t have any notes to share on account of being three years old), so most of my airport reunions have taken place in a vaguely stressful car pickup area. But on the train, you can still see people waiting in the station (or on the platform) for their friends and loved ones. You can see the human experience of coming home happen all around you.

I find this to be deeply comforting after a long week. As much as I like my new job, and as excited as I am to move to Seattle, the last few months of long commutes have definitely taken a toll. I’m tired, and I miss Olivia and the kitties. When I see a few people I’ve never met and will likely never see again warmly embrace on the platform in Centralia, it does more than just elicit a vague nostalgia for the halcyon days when train travel was ubiquitous, it reminds me that I’m going home to see the most important person in my life.

But on a societal level, I think that public spaces like train stations serve an important role beyond my own obvious pro-train station bias. It seems like everywhere else I go, the public space is eroded by security theater¹, by jingoistic surveillance tech², and by the constant “need” to make things hostile to push away the “wrong crowd”. The train station, while not immune to these societal tides, remains a stubborn reminder of the value of having spaces where people can live their lives in public. When I’m in a train station and I see a couple reunite after a long journey, or when I see parents reunite with their kids, it reminds me that we’re all in this together, and that life is short and beautiful.

Before my friend Connor moved to Japan, he worked for the City of Portland. He’s getting a Master’s in Public Policy in Tokyo now so of course he has political thoughts about the world, but he wasn’t generally inclined to share them. I always found this to be interesting, but I don’t think I fully understood it until entering the workforce in vaguely public work. I’m still getting a feel for my own job, but I feel a certain pressure to not rock the boat too much, to self-censor, and to hide behind the false promise of anonymity.

Part of living in a functional and free society involves being who you are, publicly³. There’s still room for tact, and for knowing when and how to approach difficult or contentious topics, but you can’t hide from society forever. In a world where surveillance capitalism and an increasingly authoritarian political climate conspire to force dissent out of the public sphere, the only result is the complete erosion of a legitimate public sphere. The choice to self-censor is often warranted and wise, but it shouldn’t be the only way you operate.

A train station reunion is more than just a nice thing to see when you’re pining for bed after a week away, it’s part of a fundamental building block of our society. It’s a reminder that there should be no shame for existing in public, and that our world is better when people can freely express the basic human experience of a reunion without being hassled by a mall cop or subjecting themselves to the indignity of an airport pickup line. And while there are always looming threats to this reality – from poorly thought out security measures on Amtrak to bad station hours – for now I’m taking solace in the fact that somewhere out there, loved ones are reuniting at a train station.

Footnotes

1. Stuff like taking your shoes off in a security line ↩︎
2. I’m excited about moving to Seattle, but man this news really sucks ↩︎
3. There are obvious, practical limits to this for so many people. But that’s a reflection of the brutality of a society that isn’t nearly as free as it has historically purported itself to be. If you aren’t a citizen, or if you’re Black, or if you’re LGBTQ+, or if you’re Latino, or if you’re Indigenous, or if you don’t speak English, or any you identify with any other identity that cuts against the mainstream, self-preservation takes on a different meaning than it does when you’re a straight White man like me. But presumably you don’t need me to tell you this. ↩︎