Знаци поред пута/ Signs by the road

Amtrak trains were a letdown. Not a big one, not the end of some candy-paper-wrapped illusion, no, nothing like that. But in my humble opinion they can't really be compared to Via Rail's long-distance trains. They are more cramped, they don't offer the skydome car, and, worst of all, they are pervaded by this slightly nauseating sweet-wet odour of public-place urine.

The scenery wasn't much more promising. After the initial excitement of saluting silently my favourite landmarks in Montreal (Farine Five Roses being the all-time winner), I had to settle for the rather drab early-spring-in-the-northern-latitudes type of landscape. The more we headed south, the dirtier, the more dislocated, and the more neglected places looked. At the Canadian-American border (just short of Plattsburg), the train stopped and remained motionless for over an hour, as a few of us lucky ones with the unconventional passports had to file into the restaurant car, answer additional questions, fill out an extra form, and pay $6 (I suppose for these additional administrative procedures). An older big man with a green passport (maybe Egyptian?) had to have his fingerprints taken, to boot. When we were jerked back into the steady plodding rhythm of the train, we were a little worse for the wear, but now finally ready to see the marvels of this new world, announced by the snowy tip of the Adirondack mountains hazy in the distance. Instead, the tracks winding along the banks of the Champlain Lake revealed half-submerged electric poles sadly leaning forward in the shallows of the lake; a little further on, an entire grove of some trees I didn't recognize was drowning in what looked like the flooded area. The terrain assumed a sudden inclination down into the lake, and the train slowed down noticeably, especially as we passed by the rust-eaten carcass of an abandoned train wagon, its nose almost dipped into the water at an unpleasant angle.

And then, a little further on, as the lake stayed behind and to the left, I saw it. In the middle of this industrial anonymous greyness interspersed with metallic-coloured heavy-duty trucks and occasional sickly naked-looking bushes, it stood its ground, unintrusively but with a smile. As in a dream, while through some fortuitous circumstance the train moved in slow-motion, I looked, mesmerized, at a young leafless tree (more like a bunch of overgrown shoots) by the railroad, decked abundantly with Christmas decorations. The red and white balls hung like strange fruit from its slender branches -- a whiff of magic nestling gratuitously in wilderness. The train was picking up speed, I craned my neck, glued my face to the window, and kept it in sight as long as I could, smiling back.

The most beautiful thing about this is that someone did it. Someone, some day, for some reason, or no reason, brought a bag of decorations and chose that scrawny little bush and placed the balls all over it, waving silent hello's to the passing trains.

What else could you ever hope for but such a small kindness on any old day?