Sometimes the train stops unexpectedly and you can find yourself shunted off onto a siding, not knowing where you are or why. In this new place dark falls at four p.m. The nights are long and the children fractious. People try to contain their anxiety but do not always succeed. The woman beside me grows ragged with waiting. I try to help but I also know that in that can lie madness.
The heating shuts down at midnight and begins again at dawn. In the silence between you can sometimes hear coyotes in the hills, or elk on the snow outside. I have not heard a coyote for several nights now but others have continued to mention them. That is how I know that I am not alone, not merely imagining. When one of us is sleeping there is always another who is awake, putting their mind on the line.
There is an inside to this inside. And inside that there is a further in. No barrier, no mark between them, just territory, ground that is invisible but still ground, thoughts with their obverse, their swamps, their sea. And yet in the morning there are always coffee, light, bread rolls, honey, confirmation that there is an outside to all of this also, as well as an in.
Later, walking through the pine trees, I see tracks in the snow. They tell me these are deer tracks but they are larger than that. They tell me that elk don�t exist here, but on an old photograph I found of this place I can see them, a small herd, moving steadily from the left to the right, in a blur of midnight silver. At the centre is a young man staring eastward. He has a steady, determined look on his face. He seems to know that if only he can continue placing one foot carefully in front of the other, he can get through this thing.
From Black Sea, Allen & Unwin, 1997