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—working out 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 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 painfully so many I didn’t get in time. I can rarely decide which side of the train I should be looking out—the mountains of shipping pallets often seem larger 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.

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, salt ponds, 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 will 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.

The iconic American landscape is still there—corn standing tall, marshlands, silhouetted palm trees, stark deserts, grazing sheep, country roads, automobile graveyards.

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

There are not enough people along the tracks for me—I have to be satisfied with 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, 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. I’m 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.