Riding West, Looking East

Prague is hazy again as we board the train.

We picked Prague as a three-day diversion on our Christmas vacation—after much discussion—because it was historic and unfamiliar and should probably be covered in snow during the last week of December.  I’d argued strenuously that the parts of Italy we could reach by train from Austria wouldn’t be a sun-saturated, sipping-wine-on-a-piazza sort of Italy.  It would be a rainy mess that reminded us all too much of the Seattle we’d left behind.  Prague had in its favor a far-north latitude and seductive foreignness.

It’s not snowing, and in fact the city is living up to the other reputation we read sometime later.  “In the winter, Prague can be quite grey with poor air quality.”  On our first morning here, the spires of the medieval city peered mysteriously at us from behind a champagne-colored veil of lingering fog, smoke, and tourists’ breath.  One clear day, glorious to see from the top of the Old Town Hall clock tower, and now we are leaving, and again this city is sneaking glances at us through the gloom.

After the haste of a hundred people assembling themselves on the late train, the haste of saying goodbye to a dear friend who’s traveled with us for the last week or so, there is the ground-to-a-halt stillness of staring out of the train window.  The dreamy, quiet city slides past as my sister and I share a set of headphones, and soon we’re beyond the streets of pastel Baroque buildings, threading our way through the Czech countryside.

As I’d hoped, it is incredibly cold here, though the Czech Republic in general did not provide the snow of which I'd dreamed.  I watch as frost-enveloped pastures, chicken-restless yards and monochrome cars breathe behind curtains of fog, their outlines sometimes half imagination.  Whole ponds are frozen, their surfaces snapped to an unnatural halt.  I’ve never been anywhere so consistently frigid, and it’s never stopped fascinating me.

This southwest train journey eventually takes us out of the whites and greys of Eastern Europe, back to the green neatness of Bavaria, where friends are waiting with supper.  I’m thankful for a safe destination, thankful to see them after several years.  Still, I can’t deny that there is something irresistible about the empty tracks that run beside us, the ones that would take us further east, into places I’ve only read about.  Perhaps it’s childish or provincial, or maybe just the alloy of vivid imagination, compulsive reading and safe Western traveling habits.  I want to see more.

I’m remembering on the train, remembering these other ambitions that involved exploring.  There was writing, or teaching, or learning, all of them far away.  It’s usually easy to go home, whether home is Seattle—as it mostly is—or just a golden-windowed house in Augsburg, home for a few days.  And yet there are times when home as I know it isn’t the easy path, when coming back asks me solemnly to recall the faces and names, the calling and love that make life glorious wherever in the world I find myself, even if those places seem to be the familiar, the rainy, the predictable.  Glorious and, I know, not entirely mine to begin with.

My parents are talking across from us, but my sister and I can only hear tones over the exuberant notes of the Wicked soundtrack.  Holly snaps their picture and laughs.  Mom leans over to see a frozen river glowing dully behind the spiny fingers of a leafless tree.  Dad highlights the book of Czech history he bought in the Communism Museum yesterday.  It’s beautiful out there, strange and wild as it demands that I ask again what it would mean to live life on another continent for a while.  But in here, on the train with most of my family—a family of love and loyalty, faith and humor—it’s not so easy to imagine.  

Nicht so einfach, as my friends back on a well-loved Austrian farm would remind me.

So I can only pray, as the frost turns to grass, the snow to rain, can only peer through the fog and ask for the next step.