Train no. 449: a coach class car, a cafe car with tables and bench seats, a business class car, and that’s all.

We sit just out of Back Bay station waiting for a signal. The conductor announces there will be 40 mph speed limit after one o’clock; CSX owns the track and has this speed restriction when temperatures go up over 90.

Winding in among the hills of central mass, we follow the courses of streams and rivers. Sometimes there’s a highway too, but seems like there’s almost always a river or stream nearby. The rivers are not the rivers I grew up on: these are swift and shallow, with rocky bottoms, class one and two rapids at least; a few flat millponds behind dams; not the flatwater, navigable rivers I learned to canoe.

In some tight (but not very deep) valleys, we pass flat ground beside the river with agricultural fields: corn not quite up to your knee; hay fields with bales of hay; markers of the season.

The man who was talking on his cell phone about “alternative radio” gets off at Springfield. quite a few more people get on, and now the train is nearly full.

We get into the Berkshires. The hills get higher and steeper; they stand out against the sky now. Going through one rock cut, the small wild pink rhododendrons in full bloom cling to the top of the rock face right where the soil starts. Some trees are not yet in full leaf. The streams keep getting smaller until what we’re following is nothing more than a brook flowing back the way we’ve come.

At the high point in the road, we pass along the side of an extensive swamp. Newly dead trees mark where beavers have recently come; then sure enough the beaver lodge, then their long dam. Blue flags blooming in clumps in the midst of the swamp. Red-wing blackbirds perced on cattails about to bloom. The beginnings of a stream winding convolutedly through the marsh. The marsh passes out of view. We go through a village, then the stream returns, bigger now, and flowing in our direction.

A line of blue mountains glimpsed through the trees, barely visible. Now I can see them over the buildings, over a lumberyard, over houses spread down the slope beside the tracks. Then trees hide that blue line of mountains.

The pittsfield station has been rebuilt since I last rode through here, in winter of 2003. Now there is what looks like a big parking garage labeled “Joseph Scelsi Intermodal Transportation Center.” It’s ugly.

After Pittsfield, pockets of decayed industrial landscape, woodlands, a shopping strip, more woods, glimpse of a big house, more woods. Always hills around us. The sky gets dark, darker, wind bending over trees (we whiz through a tunnel), the sky even darker, almost as if it’s night out, no rain yet, then I see dimples in a stream (the stream looks black in the gloom), a trip of bright sky for a moment between the lowering clouds and a line of dark hills, then all is dark. Drops on the window, steady rain now, dark enough that I can watch the computer monitor of the person sitting in front of me reflected in the window (he’s playing a video game). A strip of lightning. Thunder. Behind me the young man says: “Hey babe, you dropped out of service… yeah… there’s a big storm overhead…can you hear me?… hello?… ok. I’m about to switch trains in Albany, I’ll call you… I – I love you.”

Another hour to Albany, where we transfer onto train number 49, the Lakeshore Limited out of New York. The hills get smaller and smaller as we head west.