It’s an exaggeration, but I stood by the door of a regional Trenitalia train for minutes upon endless minutes just outside of Venezia Mestre Station.  More than anxious to disembark, I hovered at the stairwell alongside a collection of Italians who were shifting their weight from foot to foot in comparable anticipation. We rolled our eyes at each other and muttered frustration through facemasks. Gazing with futility through the oblong door window, we could see the fringes of the station—but we had come to an inexplicably premature halt. 

I glanced down at my watch to mark the time. It was 16:23—already six minutes past the departure of my connecting speed train back to Rome. As I glanced upwards at nothing at all, I heard two of the Italian women start chatting in frustration.  One of them mentioned that her train was to have departed at 17 minutes past the hour.

“Roma?” I asked, suddenly quite keen to be a part of the consideration.

“Sì,” she answered.

“That’s my train too.” I sighed.

“And allora, what do we do now?”

I held up my smartphone and gave her my planned course of action: 

“You go and buy a Trenitalia ticket for 92 euros in order to get to Rome tonight.”

Our train, really a mechanical interpretation of a caterpillar, was already running 31 minutes late. Worse, the train scheduled to depart earlier had been cancelled without explanation—not that it would have mattered much. The point was that this series of events had foiled my usually conservative travel method: provide enough slop time, and usually you wind up getting to where you need to go. But today didn’t look like it was going to be one of those days. 

As I looked again at my fellow agitated travelers, I imagined that most of us had planned the same way. Sensitized and savvy to the fickle nature of the train timetables—but all the same we had ultimately having come up short. The result was that all of us had missed our connecting trains. Or we were about to. 

I hadn’t yet bought my replacement ticket on Trenitalia, the primary train operator in Italy. This was mainly because I wanted to be absolutely sure that I’d missed my connection on Italo. Italo is the competitor company that often has better rates.  The fact that we had been so close to making our Italo connection, and now we were missing their last train of the day, did not have me feeling jazzed. 

I held my phone in one hand with the Trenitalia app open, ready to make my new purchase. With my left arm looped through my luggage and fingers grasping the train handrail, I used my right fingers to toggle through different apps and webpages.  I kept refreshing to see if my Italo connection had indeed departed Venezia. The website would only keep telling me that it was “on time”. 

Amongst the polite Northerns of Italy, one of the women just kept softly exclaiming, “Caspita!” kind of like how we’d say “Jeez!”.  An older woman with hair dyed black and wielding a red and white polka dotted suitcase suddenly plopped her luggage abreast with mine. “My train is supposed to leave at 27 minutes past the hour—so at least I have a chance.”  I wasn’t going to fight with her. I yielded my place in another fit of I’m dying just a tiny bit inside resignation.

Thug. The train lurched to life and suddenly we were sliding into binario 3. We were arriving. I already knew that my connection was over on track 6, and reflexively I craned my neck to look through the adjacent oblong window. I looked in vain for signs of a bright red and aerodynamic train—but it was impossible to see around a fellow blocky (and likely late) regional train.

“Can you see it?” my prospective fellow traveler to Rome asked me.

I just looked at her and shook my head. It was impossible to know.  But our train was finally coming to a gradual stop and we all straightened up ourselves with luggage at the ready. The woman with the polka dotted carry-on crossed herself.

Then it happened. Much like the bang of a starting gun, we heard the hiss of compressed air being released. The doors heaved open, and we were left to our individual devices.  I slide my phone into my purse, understanding that at this moment in my life I had no better mission than getting to track 6. I didn’t even want to know what time it was—I just needed to confirm that I’d be paying another hundred euro to get home. 

We sprang from the train, the bottleneck of delayed travelers who were desperate to at least be free from our temporary captivity. We thrummed down the steps to the main connection hall before hanging a sharp left and increasing speed towards the stairs leading up to track 6. If a pack of wild dogs traveled with carry-on suitcases, then this is the grace with which they’d be moving. We clumsily lumbered up the stairs again and towards daylight. More than full-grown adults with no business moving their bodies in such a laborious way. We couldn’t even tell yet what we’d see until we’d reached the top. I kept my head down concentrated on not planting my face into the concrete steps. My breath was labored as I arrived at the top step.

I set my suitcase down and looked to my left. Hardly believing my eyes, there before us stood a cherry-colored train with the door still opened. The woman next to me hesitated for a split-second longer than I did, and in that second I chose to jostle past her and propel myself into the entryway. I wanted to get aboard before the doors closed. 

Once inside, I looked ahead and saw the words Italo frosted onto the door. This was indeed my train. Trying to catch my breath through my facemask, the woman I’d just lumbered over boarded the train behind me. She too was breathing heavily. I felt like a first-class jerk for overtaking her in a very “Every man for himself!” kind of way. I apologized for my behavior before finding my seat. She shook her head and gave me a look as if to see she completely understood this mess– at least insofar as she understood that this was all only chaos that could be marginally managed. I turned to find my car, and found to my continued fortune that I was only steps away from where I was supposed to be.

As I moved into my assigned car, all of the passengers sat quietly, waiting for this marvel of Italian innovation to resume its fast-gliding journey. I chucked my purse down next to my chair, pulled out my book, and then placed my suitcase into the overhead space. Then I collapsed into my seat, still amazed that I was on the train. It took a good many minutes before my facemask stopped inflating and I ceased to resemble a human with the respiratory system of an amphibian.

The Italo train closed its doors about 60 seconds after I made it aboard. Looking at my watch, I noted that it had departed twelve minutes later than it should have from Venezia Mestre. I have no idea why it stuck around at the station. Maybe it was waiting for us, and maybe it was there for some other reason. Who cares. The autumn sun set quickly as we made our way southwest and I settled into reading my book recounting the adventures of people trying to manipulate the time-space continuum. At some point I remembered to open my phone and return to the Trenitalia app. I deleted the replacement ticket that had been pre-staged in the checkout section in the event that I’d missed this train. Not today, I thought to myself before closing my eyes—but we’ll see what tomorrow brings.