BECOMING A TRAIN LEGEND

You know that kind of day when the laws of probability as they pertain to you specifically are just thrown out some cosmic window while all around you everyone else is carrying on normally in their normal world, talking, living, laughing normally, completely unaware of the presence of a Twilight Zone resident in their midst, i. e., you - a certified Zone citizen since you got out of bed this morning (cue TZ theme song) - well I had one of those days yesterday and it was a long one, longer even than the current US administration, so I'll spare you the gruesome details and just cut to the long closer...

I’d been reading a favorite Chandler mystery amidst the big city rush-hour crowd jostle while waiting for the train home in my usual pole position on the train platform at the big station and hadn't really been paying attention to the time, when a fuzzy announcement came over the speaker to the effect that the train I happened to be waiting for – no other train, just that train – would be delayed for an indefinite time in a black hole or something at which point everyone in line on the jammed platform streaked for the jammed train on the other side that was just about to close its doors and since I had been first in line I was now last - just as in that old Dylan song - but I've had some wrestling experience so I managed to push my way into the variously clothed flesh that bulged out of the door nearest me. Sort of like entering The Matrix.

The doors then attempted to close, but my rucksack and my left leg were still outside, so the doors popped open briefly and I pulled everything in, or so I thought, and the doors closed. I couldn’t move anyway, since this train now held double the usual number of passengers (formula: packed x 2), so it wasn’t until the first stop and the release of a bit of the pressure, via the doors on the other side, that I attempted to move and found that I couldn't. I was trapped in: The Twilight Zone...

Elbowing some space, I slipped off my rucksack and found that the carabiners and compass I have attached to the zipper tags were outside the train, along with a good deal of the rucksack, caught in the godzilla grip of the doors; I tried to pull twist pry snatch jerk, but it was unmovable. The rucksack was attached to the train, and I was the owner of the rucksack; ergo I was attached to the train. I pondered my future in The Zone...

The only practical solution was to simply hold on to the rucksack and wait till the train reached a platform on my side. That would be... not the first stop, or the second, or the third... by the time we reached Kyoto it might be on my side! Half an hour later the train pulled into Kyoto and the doors opened on the other side, the side that is never in... The Twilight Zone...

Ok, Yamashina then: at Yamashina station (Yamashina-Kyoto was the setting for the movie Rashomon) I could still catch the train that travels along my side of Lake Biwa. At Yamashina the doors opened on the other side, then closed and on the train went, into you know what...

So I was heading over to the other side of the Lake with my rucksack stuck in the door with my money and identification, people were beginning to wonder why that foreigner was just standing there so oddly when there were seats becoming available, why doesn't he take his rucksack and sit down and relax, instead of just leaning against the door in that unusual posture, unsuited to one so tall, never moving, as though he were in some kind of other Zone or something...

From there to the end of the line was about dozen more stops, surely one of them... but no, every single one - one--by---one, with five minutes in between - exited on the non-Zone side, the doors opening with a taunting fluidity and ease that tended to mock anyone whose rucksack happened to be stuck in the opposite doors, people breezing through the open ones as though there weren't a single stuck rucksack anywhere in the universe, I had never felt envy upon seeing doors open before and people walk through them so blithely... but that’s the way things are in The Zone...

At the last stop I was going to have to abandon my rucksack, leave the car and go find a station attendant or someone who could open all the doors on the Zone side of the train, thereby enabling me to... "free my rucksack back there in the train," I could hear myself explaining to a skeptically tilted head in a tilted cap, my words elevating the reputation of foreign visitors to this distant Asian nation... I would be a conductor' s legend... and maybe while I was looking for someone the train doors would close and the deadhead train would pull out into the darkness and leave me rucksackless, moneyless and without identity, in you know where...

I was pondering these increasingly likely eventualities when the train pulled into the last stop, the doors opened and I fell out onto the platform with my unchanged rucksack. Take another hour to get home, on another train, perhaps ever deeper into...