I grew up—more or less—in a small town called Smithsburg, Maryland. It’s the place my father ended up when his military career was over, and the place I ended up enlisting from, if only to escape it. None of that matters exactly, except to give you a place to press your thumb down on the map and say, Here. Begin here.

In the summers, we’d pack into the family minivan and drive four hours and forty-three minutes—more or less—southwest to another pinprick on that same map. That’s where my grandmother and her dog Tippy lived, just outside of Mossy, West Virginia—down in a shadowed crease of a holler along Paint Creek.

I hated that drive. Endless miles of indifferent Interstate unspooling beyond my backseat window. To stay sane, I invented a game: how many times could I play the same CD—start to finish, no skipping—between our front door and hers? My go-to was Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd. I liked it for reasons I could not quite enumerate as a child. The game became a kind of mile-marker ritual, like running laps on a track: one lap down, four to go. Two down, three to go. I could usually make it through five full plays, the 23-minute title track climbing to its final swell just as we crunched onto the gravel of her driveway.

And pulling into her driveway meant certain things: swimming in the Paint Creek, ghost stories under the pine canopy with my cousins, and, sometimes, waking to the sight of a black bear on the front porch while my grandmother, in her nightgown and fearless, chased it off with a broom.

I regret that I don’t have any photos of those summers.

I tell you that to tell you this.

Cait—ever the planner—booked a father-and-son weekend aboard the Potomac Eagle in Romney, West Virginia. Felix is obsessed with trains, and luckily, we live in a part of the country where the old railroads offer ample opportunity to explore the land and its stories. So, on Memorial Day weekend, we drove three hours and fifteen minutes southwest of Baltimore to ride the rails through the hills and hollers that follow the Potomac River. More on this in a moment.

The journey to Romney—much like those long-ago drives to Mossy—began with a slog down the Interstate: from Baltimore to Cumberland on I-70, then west along I-68, until the road finally loosened its straight-ahead grip and gave way to the bends and folds of the mountains. Even now, I hate thinking of driving in terms of time. It felt like the right moment to return to Atom Heart Mother—to measure the miles between there and here in repetition of sound.

Years later, another gravel driveway. Another summer weekend. Another long drive into the hills. This time, it was my son in the backseat, and the destination was Romney, West Virginia—where the rails of the Potomac Eagle would carry us through a new stretch of memory and mountain.

The train departed Romney and wound its way south through Johnson, Pancake, and Sector. We had seats in the dining car—thank you, Cait—where Lauren and Kim’Bree served us lemonade that never seemed to run out, salad, warm cornbread, chicken alfredo, and a slab of chocolate each.

After lunch, we made our way to the observation car and leaned out the open windows, our faces in the wind, the cool breath of the mountains rushing up to meet us. The track curved and narrowed into a place called The Trough—a deep, wooded gorge where the South Branch of the Potomac runs slow and quiet between two ridgelines. It’s home to over 150 bald eagles, and we saw seven of them that day. I regret to say that I was not fast enough with my trusty Ricoh to nab any photos of them.

By late afternoon, the train pulled back into Romney and we climbed off with full bellies and windblown hair, sun-stung and quiet in that good way.

We stayed overnight in Springfield. The cabin was only a few miles away, tucked in close to the river and surrounded by trees. No cell reception. No sounds but the ones we brought with us, and the steady hush of water moving downriver. Felix, in the way maybe only a four-year-old can, spent the better part of an hour throwing rocks and sticks into the Potomac.

The tap water had the same mineral scent I remembered from my grandmother’s house, as if filtered through the limestone heart of the mountains themselves. We ate leftover alfredo at the little red-checkered table while music played from a portable speaker, while Felix narrated a National Geographic book about volcanoes to me.

Later, I showed Felix how to build a fire—how to find the right sticks, how to lay them, how to coax it to life. We made s’mores. He ate seven—one for each bald eagle we saw. When the flames had died down, we stood on the porch in the dark and looked up into a deep, starry sky.

We left the cabin the next morning with the windows down and the sun just starting to warm the hills. From Springfield, we followed a series of state routes, winding our way through the highs and lows of the Appalachians, easing eastward toward Baltimore.

West Virginia, as ever, wears its history in plain sight. So many classic cars sat rusting in front yards. Each time we passed one, Felix would shout, “Cool car! Stop and shoot it.” And I did.

Eventually, the curves gave way to the wide lanes of I-81 North, where the road straightened and the speed picked up. From the back seat, Felix sighed. “Too fast,” he said. “Too boring.” And I agreed.

I turned the volume up just a little. The familiar swell of Atom Heart Mother filled the car again, as it had so many years ago. Five plays from Mossy. Maybe just two from Romney. Not just a measure of distance, but a way to feel time—looping, echoing, returning.