How to Jump Off a Moving Train

There’s a reason I was so out of it that morning. I had just returned from a grueling weekend trip — what was supposed to be a leisurely four days in Vietnam curtailed to a hasty 28 hours, nightmarish visa troubles on either side. Granted, it was no one’s fault but mine that I failed to procure a Vietnamese visa ahead of time. In my defense, it was my first time traveling between Asian countries. The only intercontinental travel I’d done up to this point in my life had been European, so the question of whether or not I should get a visa didn’t even occur to me.

When I arrived at the Bangkok airport and jogged up jolly-faced to the VietJet check-in counter, I didn’t even understand what the lady meant when she kept repeating “visa.” I just opened my passport to different pages and showed her all the places I’d been. “This one’s Belize!” I may as well have said. 

I did eventually make it to Vietnam, but not before scrambling for a night’s lodging in Bangkok, procuring an emergency visa through a questionably above-board WhatsApp hotline, and negotiating for a minimally up-charged rebooking the following evening. And a day-and-change later, I did make it back, safely and with a smile on my face, happy that I hadn’t “cut my losses” and nixed the weekend altogether.

Of course, upon re-entering Thailand, I found myself in the interrogation office across a table from two mild-mannered officials, curious about my exploits as an allegedly Thai-based American “vacationing” for a single day in Vietnam.

It took a while, and a lot of gesturing, to explain that my brief sojourn was not a contraband run — apparently, their main concern — but in fact, a vacation which I had reduced, by clerical error, to an admittedly suspicious time frame. After two hours of inefficient, yet exceptionally cordial, bureaucratic proceedings, I was free to go.

In truth, I was disappointed. There had been no good-cop bad-cop routine, no hostile appraisal of my economic beliefs, no foreheads smashed into the cold, metal table. (There wasn’t even a cold, metal table; it was plastic and retained the air’s warmth well.) 

Suffice it to say, by the time I’d left the interrogation office and completed the 25-minute cross-airport trek to Don Mueang Railway Station, I was running on fumes. The overpacked duffel slung over my shoulder had produced a deep, asymmetrical twinge in my upper back, and I was sweating profusely, my body capitalizing on the opportunity to expel leftover alcohol from my system.

I hummed a short, unmelodic ode of relief as I boarded the train, heaved my duffel onto the overhead rack, and slunk down onto the seat. I wedged my backpack between my knees, positioned my palm as my pillow, and queued up a couple songs. The old woman across from me — maybe 5’1”, lying horizontal, already half-asleep — tucked her bare feet behind her and wriggled herself comfortable.

I have always enjoyed the train. It provides the community and luxury of a plane, without the inconvenience and stress of the airport. Crucially, you feel removed from the world when you’re on it. You are forced to acclimate to the inaction of traveling — the limiting of movement, the concentration on an unchanging landscape. You can feel your heart slow down. 

I swayed inertly with the undulations of the train, resting my overworked eyes in the passing browns and greens. My back was bent over slightly, and unpleasantly damp, but unburdened for the first time in over 30 hours. Hot bursts of wind thumped around the train car like shoes in a laundry machine, whipping beads of sweat off my face and lightening the shade of my sweat-soaked collar.

You couldn’t hear anything over the wind or the rattling of the old machinery below. Other passengers moved, even spoke, like a TV show on mute. Albeit full, the train was private and quiet. I watched out the window, my face snug in my upturned palm. My eyes drifted from the sky down to the brush and then into a bleary appreciation of just the motion itself. 

I imagined, outside the train, a version of myself running alongside it. My legs pumped with an equine rhythm beneath me, expending no effort — the spinning turbines of a plane taking flight. Meanwhile, up in my brain, I sat in the cockpit, enjoying the ride. The cattails around me faded until it was just the train and me, chugging along side by side, moving without sight.

I don’t know how long it was until the crunch of a staticky voice swelled around me and jolted me to a lurch. The voice soon clarified into recognizable human speech, and then into recognizable Thai. The visual world materialized before me, as sunlight pried my stubborn eyes open. The woman across from me was gone.

I perked my ears up and caught a jumble of conductor-speak concluding with “Ayutthaya,” the name of my destination. I realized from the absolute stillness of the train, and from the few passengers who had reached the platform about thirty feet away, that we’d been stopped for at least a minute now. The platform looked familiar, too, and it finally occurred to me that this was my stop. 

Just as I was putting the pieces together, whistles announced the locomotive’s departure and the outside world began to move again. Hotwired with adrenaline, I clenched my jaw, shot my eyes open, combed my hair back, and catapulted myself into go-mode. I sprung up from the seat, grabbed my duffel from overhead, and lowered it onto my chest, knocking an earbud loose in the process. Making good use of my 2010 karate lessons, I dropped down into a push-up, half-mooned up the floor, and recovered the dusty earbud from beneath a seat across the aisle.

When I jumped back to my feet, I looked out the window and noticed we’d picked up considerable pace. I judged I had maybe one or two seconds before injury would become the likeliest outcome. Meaning, I had one or two seconds before I’d have to pull the plug and go back to my seat — which, after the scene I’d just made, would be unavoidably embarrassing.

I also knew exactly what would happen if I missed my station. Just two weeks earlier, I’d slept through this very stop and learned that the next one wasn’t for another thirty minutes, in an even smaller town with no English at all. (That time, it was at night, and it took me three hours to hitchhike back.) I had no intention of doing that nonsense again, and so I knew every second I spent deliberating only made matters worse. 

Duffel over my shoulder and earbuds in one hand, I snatched my backpack up with my free hand and ran down the aisle. When I reached the three-stair exit, I looked out in horror at the ground speeding through view, blurry with motion. I leaned out and peered back at the station, which was only getting farther and farther away. My mind raced as I patted my pockets. Phone. Wallet. Backpack. Duffel. Anything else? I don’t know. Go. But then, Wait. Which way do I lean? Am I going to smack forward or back? Should I throw the duffel down first? Am I going to break my legs? And finally, Go. 

I intuited that in order to minimize impact, I should try to land on one leg and plant the other after, to kickstart a running motion. This was a poor intuition, it turned out, as the train was moving too quickly for me to “catch up.” I ragdolled onto the pavement, opening up the skin on my elbows, forearms, shins, and one unlucky side of my head.

Luckily, the duffel helped break my fall and slowed the somersault that inevitably followed. A few curious eyes from the caboose stared down at me, and from behind, a man in uniform hurriedly approached. He was shouting something which I couldn’t quite make out with the train still roaring in the distance. It sounded like he was saying “Ayutthaya.” 

“Ayutthaya,” I affirmed. We both said it a few times, which provided me great relief, but seemed to only cause him more concern. 

He crossed his arms in an X and pointed in the direction of the train. “Ayutthaya,” he reiterated, nearly grabbing my head to redirect my gaze toward the train I’d just adamantly disembarked. 

The reality was crushing. The age-old insult to injury. I could not face it. 

“I am here for water and a little snack,” I improvised. 

Perplexed, he ushered me back toward the station and, I suppose, in the direction of water and snacks. The town was a few grades smaller and less developed than Ayutthaya, with few cars in sight and only dirt roads. Feeling the station worker’s eyes on me, I walked confidently to a small convenience shack across the road and bought a single bottle of water, which I did in fact need. I took stock of my surroundings — an ecosystem of handmade signs, strictly in Thai, directing traffic and advertising food, amid strips of hut-like homes and looming jujubes.

With truly nowhere else to go, I returned to a bench outside the station and looked myself up on the map. It was now around noon and I had wound up in a district called Bang Pa-In — a quiet, windy place with few people walking around. I was 16 kilometers outside of Ayutthaya, which I calculated would take me a little over 3 hours to walk, if not longer given the heat and luggage. However, it would only be a 20-minute drive, and it was the middle of the day. Naturally, I checked to see how much a Grab would cost. It was cheap enough, about $6 US, and so I ordered one. It was then that the station worker came out and asked me if I would be needing a ticket on the next train.

I told him no thank you, and he stepped back inside. I stared at my phone, refreshing the app, eager for a ride to show up. I estimated that it might take twenty, thirty minutes for someone to show up, given how remote I was.

In actual fact, my estimation proved overly optimistic. Thirty minutes passed and not a single car or motorbike appeared on the map. By this time, I began to realize that no one in the whole world was going to want to go to Bang Pa-In, pick me up, and then drive me all the way to Ayutthaya — at least not for the money they’d be making. So I breathed a deep sigh, swallowed a big gulp of pride, and approached the station worker’s office, where he sat smoking cigarettes with two other men in uniform.

I hung my head and asked, humbly, when the next train might be, at which his co-workers laughed and to which he replied, “15:50.” It was half past noon, which meant that I had over three hours. Asking the station worker for just a moment, I consulted Grab again. I held it up to the sky like in early 2000s movies, but the problem wasn’t my service. There was simply no one who was going to drive me.

I did some mental math. Even if I had the kind of full-body, full-mind fight in me that could power a 16-kilometer, load-bearing, 95°F journey on foot, it wouldn’t save me much time. I’d get home around 4:30 either way. And so in utter resignation, I indicated a shameful “one” to the station worker and he handed me my ticket. The 16-cent, 20-minute ride would commence in just three short hours. I could hardly contain my excitement.

In those three hours, I perched myself back onto my bench and alternated between sitting upright, lying on my back, and lying on my side with my head hanging crooked off the seat. Occasionally a northbound train would pass, an express that did not stop in Bang Pa-In, but was instead holding out for Ayutthaya or perhaps somewhere even higher up.

In my delirious state, I imagined myself again running alongside the tracks, getting up to speed and then jumping onto the same three-stair entrance I knew all too well from my last descent. As I ran through this fantasy over and over, the train’s black expulsions of polluted air filled my ears and eyes until they were all I could sense around me. The world fell dark and I found myself as still as I had been when I first sat down on the train that morning. 

Invisibly in front of me, a man’s voice, clear as day, spoke out with alarm. My eyes remained ardently shut while my legs instinctively swung to the floor. My head, unprecedentedly heavy from excess blood flow, craned itself up from its dangle to reveal an acute tweak that had worked into my neck. I supported my head with a ginger hand and peeled my eyes open to see the station worker frantically gesturing to the train he could not believe I was about to miss.

At this point, I knew the drill. All of my belongings either strapped to my person or hanging from an outstretched hand, I sprinted to the track, where the train benevolently lingered in place. I boarded, tossed my duffel overhead, slumped down into an empty seat, and waved thank you to the station worker, who shook his head incredulously as he waved back. A familiar warm wind blasted through the cabin, drying my greasy hair and providing just enough ambient noise to breathe in. I propped my feet up on the empty seat across from me and set my alarm just in case, but resolved to stay awake for the twenty minutes it would take to get home. 

The only way to rationalize such inexcusable errors is to remember that you’re not born with any of the knowledge you “lack.” Of course, intuition makes up for some of it, but ultimately you don’t get to choose your own strengths and weaknesses. I have a strong intuition for math, for instance, but a horrible intuition for trains and visas.

A friend of mine whose rich, essayistic writing never fails to impress me recently pronounced archipelago “archipe-lah-go.”

Another friend, whose competence and diligence have already gained her considerable esteem in her field, once flew to the wrong country because it had a city with the same name as her intended destination.

Ineptitude comes in many amusing forms. The more painfully obvious the mistake, the more memorable the lesson. It’s a simple and straightforward one this time: if you’re on the verge of ejecting from a high-speed vehicle, at least make sure you’re in the right rural province first. You shouldn’t need someone to tell you that, but at the same time, it’s not like you’re born knowing it. All you can do is try your best not to learn it twice.