Some time ago I bought a new camera and drove around photographing in unfamiliar places.

I loved stopping to capture curious roadside landscapes, and soon found it was something I could do from a moving car if someone else was driving. I was also taking the train, and began shooting pictures through train windows. I did it for the first time on the Number 7 train in Queens, New York.

I liked the challenge to capture at high speed—solving how to shoot from a moving vehicle. I had to decide how I felt about reflections on the glass, and come to accept dirty windows. In much of the country there’s considerable vegetation along the track, and the still camera has no persistence of vision. But the occasional motion blur is a nice dividend.

It’s a luxury not having to debate too long about any one photo, but I recall so many I didn’t get in time (most painfully the four-year-old stock-still behind the crossing gate, agape at the wonder of the passing train).  I can rarely decide which side of the train to be looking out—the mountains of shipping pallets often seem taller through the other window. But the big challenge is to get the picture when there’s no warning it’s coming, often at more than 70 mph. What’s closest to the train moves by so much faster than what’s further off.

You’re likely to see the unexpected along the tracks. When I was a young teen, I took the overnight train from Virginia to Miami to meet my parents one December. And sat enthralled in my dark roomette that night, as a Christmas tree glimmered in almost every house we passed. No one had closed their curtains.

The view from a train is often raw.  Prettified only by graffiti—oh people, how you decorate the trackside!  I’m partial to the visual disorder and all the things we’re not supposed to see: the backyards, machine shops, derelict signs, hanging laundry, abandoned gas stations—is everyone taking the train?  The sinking boats, the old storm door reflecting my passing train, and the streets named Railroad Avenue. If the trains disappear, we’ll know where they once went by.

It’s like watching the most wonderful road movie streaming past and grabbing out the stills I like the most.  Pictures that capture the American landscape from the entirely unselfconscious trackside.  I want the real, unimproved, country.

The iconic American scenery is still with us—farms, marshlands, silhouetted palm trees, stark deserts, country roads, vibrant cities, automobile graveyards.  There is also the new landscape, where partially-clad baristas serve espresso from roadside shacks.  We are a motherland of innovators.

The countryside is divvied up by roads, tracks, power lines, fences.  We are a fenced up nation.  But it’s said that fences make us good neighbors, and we have to hope so—they cut a lively rug, dancing across a pasture.

From its raised vantage point, the train window offers an agricultural panorama to astound the eye. Solitary farmhouses sit surrounded by great tracts of land. Crops march in parallel, stately silos anchor the terrain, dust billows behind a single moving vehicle in the entire landscape—this must be nearer what the world looked like before the coming of cars. Depending on the season, the vista is bright green or gold, and later brown.

The trains continue steadily through the night when all that may be seen is the down-spreading gleam of grain silo yard lights.  A train attendant warned the track would be rough, rough, rough, going through Nebraska in the dark—painful when I wanted to see Nebraska, not just feel it.

A few of these pictures raise important questions.  One is how will the clear-cut forest rejuvenate, and where did the wildlife go?  Another concerns the vast quantity of trailers everywhere, from wild burned-out landscapes to suburban backyards. At first I assumed many were for vacationing, but the sheer number, located in more impoverished areas and absent on the roads, suggest that this is what low-income housing has become.

Looking at my photos afterwards there's amusement in more absurd questions.  Can cattle be used to find water? Isn’t it a bad move to wreck the car in the liquor store parking lot? Are highway departments repurposing alien spaceships for storing salt and gravel? Who knew there are rainbows in the desert?

Any photograph is just a record of a moment, but even so at least one picture in these pages is of a larger something that already no longer exists. I liked to watch for Ratkid’s house on a train I take often, until one day it was gone. Torn down. Vanished. This shocked me so deeply I could not put my finger back on the shutter button for some time. Nothing has taken its place, and I’ve photographed that nothing too. I was seeing the passage of time in the life of a house—and perhaps this house, unknown to me, was first abandoned.

There is much abandonment along the tracks.  For one, abandoned semi-trailers sit everywhere, their better half having driven off. They hunker forlornly, empty sarcophagi in a lonely graveyard. And the cars, the cars, the old cars, a few even stationed face-forward in the fields close to the tracks, clearly to delight passengers. Does the farmer know how much we enjoy his daisy-shrouded cars?  (Another of the pictures I didn’t get in time).

There are not enough people along the tracks for me, so I have to be satisfied with photographing only traces of us.  I saw the same signs of our activities appearing all over the country: bee hives, hay bales, hunting blinds, party decorations, flag flying, chicken keeping, porch sitting. Hiding our old cars at the back of the property. Using old tires to hold down the roof.  Letting the barn fall down.

For some reason this moves me, that in so many places of wildly different climate and topography across an immense continent, people are doing these same things. We are all doing this life together.

I’m saddened by the people in tents along the tracks.  But heartened by the Community Fridge I saw along a walkway.

And always, I watch for people waving to the train. Goodbye, they’re saying, we see you, you see us.  Maybe someday we can join you. For a moment in this place where a train passes only once a day, we meet.

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Suzanne McIntire