earth on foot 26
5 November 2025
Monte Verità, Switzerland
We all have stories to tell. Back on the Northeast Regional to NYC, I open my journal as the sun glows across its unruled page—the same sage green journal I purchased on another trip to the Big Apple in September. It’s now three-quarters full of scribbles and drawings, and looking worse for wear. It’s been a few places stateside and now has returned from Switzerland with me (thankfully not lost), where, among other things, it was subjected to café tables overlooking Lago Maggiore; a bus ride to 13th-century stone villages with houses made warm for shepherds sleeping by wood flooring built above their huddled flock; rockslides on a rainy, misty day in Cavergno, Switzerland, where a waterfall sliced down a steep mountain; and slippery leaf-laden tracks scaled into the mists for a view. The journal had no complaints.
The train route alters slightly and the sunshine now lights up the seat diagonal from me. A white-haired man in a baseball cap holds his phone at eye level, the distance to his peepers the same length as his beak. I’d noted this man earlier as he read a newspaper the same way. I decided, remarking on his overly thick spectacles, that his eyesight was fading. I even invented that the woman across from him was his partner because she, too, was reading—in her case, a pre-release novel. She looked serious. She must be an editor, I thought, and this man her erudite husband. Despite his difficulty seeing, he holds a minuscule-typed newspaper, open to the Books section.
The sun has landed its eastern slant, blinking on the laptops, phones, water bottles, a plastic clamshell housing an egg sandwich, a mustachioed man tapping his temple and looking at his phone, and a blond woman fast at her keyboard with bejeweled fingers adorned and manicured nails painted with foxes and other animals.
What, I wonder, are your stories, oh fascinating ersatz café car family? And where are we going now?
