A life’s journey
As a contributing correspondent and part-time anchor on the PBS “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Elizabeth Farnsworth covered some of the most politically explosive stories of our time, including the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the rise of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti and the AIDS epidemic.
Farnsworth also produced a number of award-winning documentaries, including a full-length feature on Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán as he attempts to bring Pinochet to justice for human rights violations. The film, “The Judge and the General” (2008), was also a catalyst for Farnsworth to begin excavating her past, a process she artfully captures in her new memoir, “A Train Through Time: A Life, Real and Imagined.”
The book opens in a dark editing room at Skywalker Ranch with Farnsworth and her colleagues scrambling to finish the Guzmán documentary in time for the San Francisco International Film Festival. In an exhausted daze, she watches a sequence in which the judge first finds human remains, the chilling evidence of human slaughter 30 years earlier.
As the editor plays the exhumation scene over and over, Farnsworth flees the room, seeking the reassuring presence of Tik-tok, Dorothy’s mechanical friend from Walter Murch’s 1985 film “Return to Oz,” whose likeness is on display in Skywalker’s atrium.
“Stepping over a protective barrier and brushing plants aside, I kneeled in front of of Tik-tok and hugged him. Then time did something I can’t explain. I felt a jolt, like electricity, and saw myself as the girl who had loved Oz books half a century before. That girl asked, ‘What sent you on a path through death and destruction?’ ”
Having set the memoir in motion, Farnsworth sets out to answer her own question, fitting her memories together “like bones from an exhumation,” searching for the threads between her current life as a journalist and her younger self. Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Elizabeth lived in Kansas, lost her bearings and was forced to go out into the world in search of answers.
The journey begins with an epic train ride in 1955, during which Farnsworth and her father travel from their home in Topeka to Santa Barbara. As father and daughter ride west across the prairies, 9year-old Elizabeth searches the faces of all the women she sees, both on and off the train. Soon we come to understand that Elizabeth’s mother has recently died and that, thanks to her father’s well-meaning but misguided wish to protect her, her mother’s death came as both a mystery and a shock to the young Elizabeth.
The rest of the book toggles back and forth between scenes from the train ride — a new friend, a mysterious white horse — and scenes from Farnsworth’s life as a journalist reporting from various hot spots around the globe. Always there is death, and mystery: the “disappeared” in Chile; the death of a beloved handler in Iraq; the story of Thanh Pham, who lost his mother and grandmother as a child when his village in Vietnam was bombed by American soldiers and who is the subject of Farnsworth’s documentary “Thanh’s War.”
The two story lines intersect emotionally when the train is stopped by an avalanche and, as everyone around her panics, Elizabeth feels only relief. “Everyone around me was as confused and upset as I’d been for months. I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore that everything was alright.” This moment functions as a kind of emotional blueprint for her later willingness to put herself in danger, to report from the “edge of loss.”
While “A Train Through Time” is a moving and vivid account into what drove this accomplished journalist into the darkest corners of humanity, this is not a “tellall.” We learn little about Farnsworth’s adult life away from journalism, and some of her scenes, such as her interview with Henry Kissinger in 2001 about the U.S. support of Pinochet, would have benefited from more detail.
At 150 pages, the book itself is slight in length and, at times, feels sketched in rather than fully realized. But like all good memoirs, “A Train Through Time” offers the reader an opportunity to “ride along” with an intelligent and reflective narrator as she inventories her life and offers us an insider’s view of some of the most morally challenging moments in our country’s history.