Some time ago I began photographing the American vernacular landscapes I find so worth celebrating. I had bought a new camera and drove around photographing in unfamiliar places.

I loved stopping to capture curious roadside scenes, 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 taking pictures through train windows. I did it for the first time on the Number 7 train in Queens, New York.

I liked the challenge of photography at high speed—solving how to take pictures from a moving vehicle with the window frame as constraint. I had to decide how I felt about reflections on the glass, and come to accept dirty windows (no conductor ever objected to my cleaning them myself). Raindrops will spot and blur the glass too. In much of the country there’s considerable vegetation along the track, and the still camera has no persistence of vision, although the occasional motion blur is a nice dividend. Only the window, the proscenium, separates me from the unspooling landscape.

Interior window glass reflections aren’t always a hindrance to this picture-taking: in just one window we can see what is to the right, and also the mirror image of the left, and even of other riders inside the train. What is port superimposes on starboard, and without turning our heads we absorb the panorama, not as well as the engineer at his throttle but more than our 120º vision field allows.

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 child standing 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 higher 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 younger, 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 Christmas trees glimmered in almost every house we passed. There would be no tree in our hotel room, but I’d feasted on hundreds from the train.

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 intended to see: the backyards, machine shops, derelict signs, hanging laundry, abandoned gas stations.  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.

Highways were built to bypass this unselfconscious America, the slow-to-change country that the train still sees. It’s the railroad, not the highway, that travels through the old part of town, often through places that most of us can’t access, cutting through the industrial, commercial and residential backyards of today. Photographing this man-made landscape is like watching the most wonderful road movie streaming past and grabbing out the stills I like the most.  The camera stops the speeding train at my pleasure, and later in the photographs I can linger over each scene.

Thankfully, the iconic American scenery is still with us—corn reaching to the eaves, marshlands, silhouetted palm trees, stark deserts, vibrant cities, automobile graveyards.  There are enticing country roads, cutting away from the tracks and becoming the road not taken for those wistful passengers among us. And there is also the new social 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, all giving human character to the land; it seems 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, sometimes 12 feet above the rails, the train window offers a timeless agricultural spectacle 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 prospect—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 warehouse or 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.

Some pictures raise important questions.  How will the clear-cut forest rejuvenate?  Can the salt ponds be returned to marsh? And about the vast quantity of trailers everywhere, from wild burned-out tracts to suburban backyards—the sheer number suggest this is what low-income housing has become.

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, had already been 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 lonely byways. And the cars, the cars, the old cars, a few even stationed face-forward in fields close to the tracks, clearly to delight passengers. Does the farmer know how much we enjoyed his daisy-shrouded cars?  (Another of the pictures I didn’t get in time).

There are many buildings with windows along the railway, of course. I have felt disappointment in my countrymen that they no longer look out the window, to be captured by yours truly, framed in their homes and workplaces the way Walker Evans and Robert Frank photographed people in the years before air conditioning. And with the advent of screens, they’re indoors on even the best of days, discovering a larger world than what can be seen of their street. Sadly, they’re not even leaning out the windows of cars.

As 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 passenger train passes only once or twice a day, we meet.

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Suzanne McIntire