Another American Adventure: The West Palm Train Station

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The West Palm Train Station

Always a fun place, but especially at 6AM. Eric and I put John on the train this morning, bound for the Fort Lauderdale airport. So sad to see him go ...

Looks deserted from here, but it's not ...

... lots of folks up early on Saturday morning waiting for the train.

There's John, over on the southbound side of the tracks ...

Jubilee watching him go ...

Train is here ...

and on its way ... John will be back in PA before noon!

2 comments:

BarbaraAugust 11, 2012 at 9:36 AM
Touching. Reminds me of airport departures in my past.
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beth cioffolettiAugust 15, 2012 at 11:13 AM
yes ... reminds me of a lot of them, too. seems these places of departure (and arrival) carry a lot of emotion.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.