We left Seoul on the KTX, the fast train to Busan. It is so smooth and quiet that it begins to move with no sensation of moving. It glides through Seoul past a forest of grey high-rise apartments before entering a tunnel. After several minutes of darkness suddenly the world opens again: we are out of the tunnel and out of the city, the buildings replaced by farms and hills.
We travel through farmland patterned ingeniously on flat fields or jig-sawed into the small valleys between steep slopes. The farmland is all efficiently managed. Neatly rectangular plots are bordered by ridges, some of which are long, straight irrigation ditches. Access roads are raised above field level. The larger, flatter areas are divided into these smaller plots. Every corner and odd space is bordered, cultivated.
No space is dominated by huge, unbroken fields as one would find in America. In places long, plastic covered green houses stand in close rows.
None of the farm buildings appear to be as neat or as well tended as the fields. It is hard to distinguish farm houses from other buildings, although the usual kind of farm debris lies in the yards – old cars, old tractors, various beat-up tag-along machines, barrels, buckets, piles of discarded and rusting metal things, variously dull colored plastics (sometimes folded and stacked, sometimes heaped), junk, always junk. Occasionally board and sheet metal fences define areas filled with refuse, perhaps to be recycled. Occasionally, too, narrow smoke from a trash barrel fire creeps slowly across one of these little valleys like a low-hung cloud.
If one is thinking of values here, if the landscape were speaking, clearly the farmland itself, the cultivated soil, takes priority over human inhabitants.
No livestock visible anywhere. In western New York, cows at least are out in the stock yards in all but the coldest weather. Here, no trace.
The landscape in mid-February is dun-colored, desolate looking, except for hillsides, which are covered with dull, dark-green evergreen trees. We pass through higher mountains white with snow, but mostly the snow is confined to irrigation ditches and the north side of buildings and ridges. We have not seen the sun all day.
We pass silently through cities – Osong, Daejeon, Dondaugu, Ulsan – before we reach Busan. The cities are grey, concrete, industrial. They remind me of Russia. No one is out in the farm land, but the cities are busy with construction – high-rise buildings, roads, bridges.
Perhaps it is not an accurate conclusion, but in the cold and desolate light of winter one must conclude that it is a hard life for farmers, as it has always been. One imagines the pre-war look of poverty – poor people in poor housing, poor neighborhoods.
In Central Gimchen, just below Daejeon , buried among new concealing structures I note occasional, compelling, lovely, heartbreaking pagoda type roofs. To the western visitor, this may be a glimpse of traditional Korea. In Russia, 19th Century wooden houses and mud alleys lie just behind the soviet era buildings that line the main roads. Perhaps that has happened here, too, to make progress visible.
Then Busan. The train pulls in and stops so smoothly the man snoozing in the seat ahead of us does not wake. Even when the train has emptied and we shoulder our bags down the aisle, he slumbers on.
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