My first movie for 2026 was Train Dreams, a beautiful but tragic story of a man who found happiness, then saw it ripped away from him, and then was forced to grapple for meaning like Job. After dealing with an allergic reaction to something that induced lots of eyeball leaking, I declared on facebook: this is the best movie I will see all year! Then I sought out the story it was based on, and …uh.

Just..uh.

I’m sorry, but what the hell? Train Dreams as a written story is quite different from Train Dreams the movie, and while I do not wish to go on comparing the two stories, it is difficult considering I watched them in the same evening and my brain insists on making Venn diagrams. Doing my best to treat Train Dreams as a novella in its own right, though, it is an odd story — a look at the Old West within the Pacific Northwest, a realization that the Past can continue within the Present (or the Future) for far longer than many might suspect. The Future comes slowly to rural places, especially to those occupied by men like Grainer who still live deeply in the past. One cannot fault Grainer: he was a logger with a wife and a small child, and he worked for them during the logging season and pined for them when he was away, taking solace in the fact that he was providing for them. But then something happened and there was no longer a them to provide for, and he was forced to persist — to work, to wonder. And strange things happened to him. There is a scene where he thinks his daughter is a wolf with a broken leg. I do not know that I would have finished it without having watched the movie in the same evening, to be honest. Well, here’s the trailer for Train Dreams. You may anticipate my comments on it in a month’s time.

Some Quotations because it did have its merits

Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent.
“That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”
“All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him.
“My dog shot me in self-defense.”

“His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”

Grainier asked him, “Do you really know how that motor works inside of there?”
“I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!”
Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.

In a civilized place, the widows don’t have much to say about who they marry. There’s too many running around without husbands. But here on the frontier, we’re at a premium. We can take who we want, though it’s not such a bargain. The trouble is you men are all worn down pretty early in life. Are you going to marry again?”

“If you’re prowling for a husband,” he said, “I can’t think of a bigger mistake to make than to get around me.”
“I’m in agreement with you,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly happy or sad to agree. “I wanted to see if your own impression of you matched up with mine is all, Robert.”
“Well, then.”
“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”