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January/February 2004 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: The singing forest In-depth: Boreal birds The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

The slow train to China — and to Poland, Korea, Barbados, Greece, Peru and the Azores — slides with a screech from a fluorescent terminus, northbound on a weekday noon.

With me in the long, steel car are about 70 other passengers, most of them immigrants like me, strangers to each other and to this country, each of us making up less than a millionth of the great lakeside city beneath which we ride.

The car is rather crowded, yet nearly all of us today are riding alone. We are solitary travellers on a two-dollar, round-the-world ticket, our skins and stories far more colourful than the tired, tiled stations through which we pass.

I look at the faces around me, and I wonder — who has just landed the job of her dreams, and who has been let go? Who is newest to this cold, flat city, farthest from his home, farthest from her children, closest to a dream? Who is speeding toward a secret love affair, and who is running away?

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