The train from Milan to Venice was packed. Crammed, jammed, heaped, piled, stuffed and shoehorned with people. To liken the Second-Class compartments that day to a string of sardine cans on wheels would leave the false impression that the cars were commodious affairs with their human cargo arranged in orderly fashion.
But sardines, even those bound for Venice, don’t travel with coats and bags. And they have the foresight to avoid the Italian train system on a national holiday.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of Italians and I did not.
When I boarded, I had to climb, luggage and all, over people perched in the stepwell in order to squeeze into the only standing room left: the companionway connecting the last two cars, which began to shift like a carnival ride when the train started moving.
I was laughing out loud, my initial reaction to intolerable circumstances over which I have no control, when the eyes of a young woman half a dozen bodies away from me began to shine; she had an idea! Suddenly the door she was pressed against opened–she must have known it was a lavatory–and as she backed into it she commandeered the baggage of those around her and began stacking it on a toilet and sink I couldn’t see. Those of us standing in the companionway could now inch to relative safety inside the car.
Safety yes. Space no. People engaged in sex don’t get as close to one another as those of us on the train did that day. For propriety’s sake it was just as well that no one could maneuver enough to remove his coat–Houdini himself couldn’t have done it. I began to endure, then meditate upon, the exponential quality of the thermodynamic effects of an infinite number of humans lodged in a finite metal compartment. I thought of straitjackets. I stopped laughing. I felt a cold coming on. I got off at Verona.
It’s odd, the things you remember most vividly from a trip. You see the famous sights and check them off the list, but it’s the unplanned hardship, the chance encounter, the spontaneous moment, the private joke you hold dear.
In Venice–I finally did make it there–I beheld the Bridge of Sighs, but I cherish the experience of buying cough drops there.
In Paris, I photographed the Eiffel Tower, but I remember the people who mistook me for a Parisian.
From Texas to Italy, Hawaii to France, my whole year was that way. A scrapbook of things they don’t print on postcards.
In Ft. Worth in early February, I watched cowboys herd Texas longhorns down East Exchange Avenue in the world’s only twice-daily cattle drive. But I’m haunted by the still-boarded-up windows of the tornado-damaged Bank One building there. And I can still taste the combination of spices, chicken and avocado chunks that make the tortilla soup at El Rancho Grande the world’s best.
On Hawaii’s Big Island in late February, I circumnavigated Kilauea Crater, the world’s only drive-in volcano. But I’ll never forget the wizened gaze of the green sea turtle that studied me as I snorkeled on the Kohala Coast–or being given the finger by a group of prisoners who were cleaning the washrooms at Rainbow Falls in Hilo.
Those encounters in Paris I was telling you about were in early May. Twice while I was walking Boulevard St-Germaine, I was approached by traveling pairs of French women who asked me, in French, for directions. What a rush! I passed for Parisian.
In Chartres, not far from Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the city’s famous cathedral, one of the world’s most striking Gothic constructs. My timed-exposure photos of its incomparable Chartres-blue windows will never be as vivid in my mind as the sound my camera made when it toppled from its tripod and crashed, dented but thank God unbroken, to the centuries-old stone floor.
Near Traverse City, Mich., in June, I sampled the local wines and took country drives past many of the orchards that help the region produce three-quarters of the nation’s tart cherry crop. But I tend to remember my first game of euchre in the galley of the tall ship Manitou, or my first lesson in how to look for Petoskey stones and finding eight of them my first time out.
In Dallas in July, I visited family who took me to see marine life from around the world at the multi-level Dallas World Aquarium. But I treasure two things more: the afternoon I went with my sister to the place near Waxahachie where they make custom-built concrete Quonset huts, and the night my niece treated me to “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”
When I went to Portland, Ore., in September, I saw the International Rose Test Garden and Japanese Garden the city is so proud of. But there also was one night when three punked-out teens set me laughing–my sense of humor this time, not frustration–because they were out for a downtown stroll with a ferret on a leash. Once they realized I was laughing at the leash and not at their spiked hair, ragged fishnet stockings or pierced what-have-yous, they let me hold and pet the ferret, which did indeed smell like vanilla, just as the teens told me it would.
In Italy, I survived the Nov. 1 train ride as far as Verona, continuing on to Venice the following evening–ah, sweet justice–in a First-Class compartment I had all to myself. But a few days later, the cold that only threatened me during the first train ride had overtaken me full force.
I must have been running a fever when I stood with flushed cheeks before the bare counter in a Venetian pharmacy somewhere between Piazza San Marco and the Accademia. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to speak because of my sore throat. But the pharmacy’s shelves were lined with things like shampoo and baby items, nothing that looked medicinal.
In raspy voice I asked for cough drops. The white-smocked clerk inquired with great concern whether it was a dry cough. She seemed eager to offer me something liquid, taken by spoon; I wanted something dry and portable.
She slid her hand beneath the counter and produced a red-and-blue box of Iodosan TosseMed lozenges, 20 count, for which I paid 5 euros and change. In Venice, over-the-counter drugs are still sold precisely that way: over the counter.
That’s a discovery I wouldn’t have made if I’d never wandered beyond postcard-perfect Piazza San Marco, if I’d stayed the picture of health as planned, if I hadn’t realized that cough drops can be as meaningful as monuments if you let them.
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Meet the staff
Toni Stroud always wondered what it would be like to have a job where she could work in her pajamas. She got the chance to find out during a week in Paris, where she researched rooms for the Chicago Tribune’s series on affordable hotels. She was recognized as one of North America’s top travel writers when her body of work won the Grand Award, bronze, in the 2002 Lowell Thomas Travel Writer of the Year Awards, bestowed by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Write her at tstroud@tribune.com.
