A Late Train

On the morning of the Opening Ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Paris, I woke up to sunshine glittering off the metal framed windows of Bordeaux. There was ample time to pack my bag and have a sit-down breakfast with two cups of coffee. Afterwards, my husband and I would leisurely make our way to the train station where we would catch a bullet train into Paris. About an hour and a half journey, from station to station. There would be time for a walk in the capital city and a late lunch before the pre-game festivities even began.

But when we got the station, the terminal screens all read, “DELAYED.”

A French woman in a uniform, translated to the growing crowd of tourists, “It’s France, the trains are late every day.”

So maybe there wouldn’t be time for a walk, but we’d make our lunch reservations, no problem. It’s moments like this, while traveling, that I think about how Americans really take for granted that things will be on time. We also take for granted that activities will take the precise amount of time they are scheduled for. Our time is our currency, and we guard it like an American Bulldog will her home. There was no point in me being that kind of American. Johnathon and I weren’t going to be upset about this because we were in France on vacation going to the Opening Ceremony. And from the looks of the terminal, it was affecting everyone.

When the delay of the trains had eclipsed the time that we were supposed to be arriving in Paris the root cause had been flashing headlines at the bottom of every TV screen for over an hour.

The news looped, “Acts of sabotage on all major SNCF railways.”

The station had become so swollen with late people, we were touching shoulder to back to foot to luggage. Everybody was stuck in place waiting for a resolution. By the time the announcement came that every high-speed train in France was out of service for the day most bus lines had also been canceled. I gave up on the idea of attending the opening ceremony.

Johnathon and I had been checking the notices on the American Embassy website and trying to purchase flights out of the country for the better part of an hour. No one said it, but every face watched the crowd for an answer. “Were acts of sabotage the same thing as a terrorist attack?”

Many of the children around us looked to the parents, “Should I be afraid?”

By midmorning, everyone had stopped saying, “pardon,” when they bumped into one another. We’d all been jostled into more people than we could count. There was simply nowhere for anyone to go.

A loud, male voice shouted over the heads filling the terminal.

“Start a queue here, for vouchers and instructions. One person per family, please.”

Each family representative joined a line of people waiting to be assigned a hotel room or a new boarding pass. I stood and queued, Johnathon left to connect to the internet to purchase tickets and get our luggage out of the way. A sharp parting of the crowd to my right snapped me to attention. My eyes had grown heavy as the minutes had morphed into an hour of wait time. It’d be my turn to get out of someone’s way any moment, I needed to pay attention.

A no-nonsense woman wearing a SNCF uniform and thick, black ringlets stopped right next to me.

“You need to go to Platform Three.”

It’d been over an hour since the last time I had heard English words. Actually comprehending what she’d said startled me.

“You’re going to Paris, ya?”

I swung around at the waist, unable to move my arms or spin in place. I looked everywhere but at her. And she didn’t stop looking right at me.

“Me and everyone else in this building!”

“I don’t care what you do, I’m going on my cigarette break.”

She cut right back through the crowd without another word. People moved out of her way to let her pass, and then right back into place behind her. The crowd looked like it had swallowed her up whole. Nothing at all made sense about this. I hadn’t spoken to anyone, other than Johnathon, in hours. There was no way she could have known that I was in need of help. At least not more than any other delayed and canceled traveler in Bordeaux.

My watch told me it was about seven hours of standing, queueing, and wondering what was happening. At that point, I didn’t care what was going to happen, all I knew was that I didn’t want to be in that customer service office anymore. I struggled my way to a side door, bursting into the outside air.

On the patio, hundreds of family members loitered about with their possessions waiting for any word of instruction. My eyes found my husband stuffed against a brick wall of a coffee shop, guarding our bags. His face looked just as desperate as I felt. I moved to him with the same jerky, unsteady walk of someone who is trying to break free of the final waves at the beach. My legs were so tired, and I was so disoriented by being able to move my body freely about.

“A lady came up to me and said we need to go to Platform Three. I know nothing else.”

“We have to get out of here. Let’s go.”

The further we got away from the main terminal; our pace quickened like we were running from a nightmare. No one had told us to hurry, but we’d started dashing down the line of stopped trains. There were no passengers, just a handful of uniformed ticket collectors smoking and scrolling on their phones. A metal placard with a painted three jutted out from an iron pole.

At the gate, two men grabbed our suitcases without asking a single question. Our virtual tickets had expired and deleted off our phones hours so we had nothing to show. Still they didn’t even ask us where we were going as they waved us to the upper deck of the train car. Johnathon and I sunk into an empty booth as we felt the train roll ahead on the train tracks, and then stop.

Murmurings in French lilted out of the nearest seats. Mothers soothing children. Husbands patting the hands and knees of wives. Everyone looked absolutely exhausted and resigned. We did not utter a word. We had none.

French announcements were made on the intercom, and I tried to pick out any recognizable words. We waited for English translations like they had offered in the terminal, but they never came. Our train did not move for forty-five minutes. The internet was disconnected on our phones because we were in the underground transit area. There was no way for us to even figure out which direction the engine was moving in. I closed my eyes and waited some more. If there was a terrorist attack in Bordeaux, it’d most likely be upstairs in the crowded terminal. Every person I had spent the day standing shoulder to shoulder with was still up there. I could still be standing up there if it weren’t for these random sequences of events.

I started praying with a desperation I’d never experienced in my life.

“No more bombs.”

A family in the seats across the aisle from us caught on to the fact that we were not understanding the announcements. They took pity on us; the mother leaned over to tell us there was water provided in the next car over, “for free.”

Breakfast was the last time either of us had anything to drink, eat, or use the restroom. I’d forgotten that stuff mattered. The fog in my brain confirmed just how dehydrated we probably were. And so was everyone else. Johnathon thanked the woman, squeezed my hand, and got up to retrieve water bottles for us. Out the window, I saw fields of blooming sunflowers in every direction. Just like the sunflower fields back in Iowa where families would be visiting soon to take back to school pictures and gather sweet corn for dinner. The family across the aisle was probably on their last vacation of the summer, too. My heart ached for the taint this fearful experience would be on their memories together.

I heard laughing and a strong, familiar voice in the next car. I craned my neck to discover my husband was speaking to the train conductor. They looked happy. A measure of that fear left my body when I saw Johnathon smiling as he returned to our seats.

“He asked me if I’m from Denver, Colorado,” Johnathon pulled at the hem of the Colorado Avalanche shirt he was wearing.

“It’s crazy, but he loves Patrick Roy,” he chuckled. “He also made it very clear he is from Montreal which means he is French, but not this kind of French. And he also told me he would get us to where we need to go, safely.”

An exhale, “The train is moving towards Paris.”

Map of SNCF high-speed lines borrowed from BBC News, 2024

Later after many conversations with our fellow Avalanche fan, we would learn that the cables of the SNCF high-speed train lines had been dismantled and set on fire. Four of these coordinated attacks had taken place throughout the night before the Opening Ceremony. There had been a few other foiled attacks discovered in the morning by line security. Around the same time as we were headed to the train station in Bordeaux.

Platform three was where one of two passenger trains departed for Paris that day on a separate set of historic tracks not typically used for passenger transport anymore. The journey of three hundred sixty-five miles took many hours of stop and go travel as we were following a pilot train that had no one in it. The pilot train and its conductor went before us to test the tracks. After clearing safe passage through a stretch of lines, the conductor would radio back to the passenger trains giving them the all-clear to move forward.

The morning of July twenty-sixth, I walked into that terminal as the American who expected things to operate on time. For the environment around me to coordinate with my schedule and my plans. Our leisurely one-and-a-half-hour journey morphed into twelve hours of agonizing uncertainty. Arriving at six seventeen pm in Paris, I stepped into the receiving terminal a woman deeply grateful for running late. It’s hard to explain, but I possessed an immense thankfulness for having the luxury of time to get it right. All the people on the trains and in the terminals were safe. The Opening Ceremony was executed without any further acts of sabotage or terrorism. Johnathon and I stood in the pouring rain, with men and women from all over the world, just in time to watch the Olympic flame lift our spirits.

Opening Ceremony Watch Party, somewhere in Paris, July 26, 2024