A Train through Time. Elizabeth Farnsworth
gust of wind shook windows behind me, and then—the deep rumble of a diesel engine. We walked outside and watched as it approached, brakes squealing, headlight probing the dark.
This train will take us to another world—like Dorothy’s tornado I thought.
A porter took our bags and showed us to our bedroom, which he called a compartment. He had made up the berths so we could go back to sleep. It was five o’clock in the morning.
As we pulled out of Topeka, my father said, “The locomotive has the power of more than a thousand horses.”
I imagined them pulling us across the prairie, my beloved home.
l
Cambodia—1993
I take in the smells of Phnom Penh as we drive through dark streets—wood fires, river, rotting fish. We’re headed for a military base just outside of town, where we’ll catch an early-morning ride to Banteay Meanchey, a province bordering Thailand in the north. The helicopter, a Russian Mi-17, painted white with “UN” in black letters on both sides, is warming up on the tarmac when we arrive. We’ll leave at first light.
I’m excited about the trip but keep flashing back in my mind to Topeka (sorrel horse, hedge apples along a fence line), which means I’m more nervous than I thought.
Remnants of the Khmer Rouge still control some places we’re going. The group’s leaders signed a peace agreement and cooperated at first in the run-up to UN-sponsored elections, but now they’re trying to stop the vote. This is the largest UN nation-building operation to date, and many countries have contributed troops and equipment, including the chopper. But no head of state wants to take losses, so UN soldiers have been ordered to avoid confrontations with any of the warring parties, including Khmer Rouge guerrillas.
Cambodia feels different than when we were here for The NewsHour two years ago. Hope lies heavy around us like the pre-monsoon air.
We board the helicopter, and the Russian pilot takes off toward the rising sun, banks north and a little west, and crosses the junction of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers, which are flowing slowly in these last weeks before monsoon rains begin. In the dim light, I can barely see the great lake fed by the Tonle Sap River, which now flows southeast but will reverse direction when the drenched Mekong backs up.
As the sun rises higher, I see jungle, water, and occasional towns. Then the pilot noses down the copter, and the towers of Angkor Wat shimmer in the early light. No one speaks as we circle. Someone cowers in a courtyard below. After three ever-wider passes, we fly northwest again. The pilot points to another helicopter, a white Mi-17, lying wrecked on the ground.
“Was it shot down?” I can’t decipher his answer over the engine’s noise.
A platoon of Dutch marines is waiting for us in Banteay Meanchey. They load cameraman John Knoop, soundman Jaime Kibben, an interpreter, and me into a Land Rover with a mounted, manned machine gun behind the driver. The marines form a three-vehicle convoy with us in the middle, and we drive northwest on a dirt road that has been mined by one of the competing Cambodian factions. John points to sandbags under our feet with a wry smile and begins to film. We head for villages where Khmer Rouge soldiers have threatened to kill anyone who votes in the elections for a constituent assembly, now two weeks away.
Thirty-six UN employees in Cambodia have died as a result of hostile actions.
After about an hour, the convoy stops, and we walk single file down a narrow path to a cliff overlooking a deep and verdant valley, a place where the competing Cambodian factions have not yet denuded a large forest. Using binoculars, the soldiers check for signs of cutting, because the UN has placed an embargo on timber exports to block a source of income for the warring groups. In this place, at least, a green canopy stretches for miles before us, undisturbed in the hot, midday light.
On the way back to rejoin the convoy, a sergeant warns us again to stay on the narrow path; the surrounding area has been mined—by whom he doesn’t say. We stop to reconnoiter an open-air temple—a thatched roof sheltering a large statue of Buddha surrounded by unlit candles. In the shadow of the Buddha, a snake hisses and uncoils, rising thin and scaly green. None of us knows what kind of snake it is. A sergeant steps between me and the snake, and I nod my thanks.
The memory repeats like a stuck tape. The snake rises. The Dutch sergeant moves to my side. Again and again.
The convoy travels farther along the mined road and then turns toward one of the threatened villages. We pass huts and a warehouse where Khmer Rouge soldiers in ragged uniforms are loading bags of rice onto a truck. Are they stealing it? One raises his Kalashnikov and aims it at our car. He looks about sixteen. As we pass, he lowers the weapon and laughs.
On another day, we film a UN volunteer from Milwaukee, tall and stately with freckles and straw-colored hair, teaching peasants how to mark a ballot and assuring them that the Khmer Rouge are lying. “No satellite in the sky will be able to reveal how a person votes,” she tells them.
“If the village chief tells you to vote for this or that party, you say, ‘No, it’s my choice.’ A human right is something all of us are born with. No one can give or take it away. It’s yours from the time you are born.”
The villagers squatting before the makeshift stage are illiterate. Few have ever held a pencil. Some look weak from hunger. Does the volunteer note the chasm between her experience and theirs? It would be easy to mock her, but I am surprised to feel moved, even hopeful. I admire her courage and the UN’s determination to press forward with elections in spite of threats from the Khmer Rouge.
“Thomas Jefferson meets Pol Pot,” a reporter from The Guardian says later over dinner. “Bloody fine show if you ask me.”
l
When light seeped around the window shade that first morning on the train, I climbed down the ladder and looked outside. Wind blew sleet hard against the glass. The clickety-clack of the wheels on the track reminded me of a metronome keeping time. Looking around, I saw that my upper berth could be folded into the wall, and my father’s bed would make a seat big enough for two. There was a chair in the corner. I liked the way everything fit just so—like a playhouse. Even the sink could be stowed. My father watched, smiling, from his berth.
He wanted me to love trains like he did.
His father had left high school to lay track for the Santa Fe and was now an executive with that railroad, but we were traveling on the Union Pacific to experience the northern route to San Francisco. My father liked dramatic weather, and the year before we had watched news reports about a train stuck in a blizzard in the mountains of California. “Maybe it will happen to us,” he’d teased before we left home.
Sitting next to him on the bed, I held Louie up to the window to see cows and horses in fields along the tracks. He was a small brown bear whose fur had worn thin from years of hugging. Next to me were Mother’s hand mirror, my new Toni doll, and a book, The Road to Oz.
I wanted them close when so much was changing.
Before reading to Louie, I described what he’d missed in the story so far. The orphan Dorothy Gale had wandered away from the farm in Kansas where she lived with her aunt and uncle and gotten lost “somewhere near to Oz.” Now she and her companions were walking down an enchanted road toward the Emerald City in search of a princess with the power to send them home.
I read aloud, “Turning the bend in the road, there came advancing slowly toward them a funny round man made of burnished copper, gleaming brightly in the sun. Perched on the copper man’s shoulder sat a yellow hen, with fluffy feathers and a pearl necklace around her throat.
“‘Oh Tik-tok,’ cried Dorothy, running forward. When she came to him the copper man lifted the little girl in his copper arms and kissed her cheek with his copper lips. . . . ‘This,’ turning to her traveling companions, ‘is Mr. Tik-tok, who works by machinery, ’cause his thoughts wind up, and his talk