When Frank Barry's memory started to slip, his daughter Rebecca made an unusual choice: instead of focusing on what her father was losing to Alzheimer's, she sat down with him to finish the book he'd started before his diagnosis. The result, Chasing Steam in Mexico, is both a family project and a genuine travel time capsule.
The story behind it is remarkable. In the late 1950s, Barry was a conscientious objector to the Korean War, posted to Tlaxcala with the American Friends Service Committee to build roads and drill wells. A train obsessive since boyhood, he spent his free days hitchhiking between Mexican railroad lines, camping out overnight and riding steam locomotives by day with his camera. He photographed the engines, the dark plumes of smoke, the remote landscapes and the crews who let a young American ride along in the cab. Some of the shots required real nerve: hiking into canyons, balancing on passenger car roofs, even riding the cowcatcher of a wood-burning engine.
After his wife died, Barry was still living alone — still driving, to his daughter's alarm, especially once a friend reported seeing a man who looked like him hitchhiking near the mall. So they worked together several times a week: reading the manuscript aloud at his desk, wood stove going, Mexican folk music on repeat, choosing which photographs belonged where. The change was striking. Research on Alzheimer's suggests creative work can ease anxiety and lift mood, self-esteem and focus, and Rebecca saw it play out. Her father would arrive cranky and scattered — broken chainsaw, scrambled computer files, missing glasses — then, after a few hours with the book, cheer up and recall details like a Yucatán dinner party in 1965 so hot the unlit candles melted.
The project changed her too. Editing the book felt like stepping into a time capsule: no news, no screens, just two people and a shared task. She heard stories she'd never known and saw pictures she'd never found, and came to understand her father as the young man he was before she existed. When he was later hospitalised with sepsis and his decline accelerated, the book gave the family something bigger to hold onto than the bad news.
Her advice to anyone with an ageing relative is simple: start a project together, and it doesn't have to be a book. Old letters, a photo album, family recipes, records, anything that puts you on the same side of the table. Not because time is short, but because making something together shifts attention to what you still have. For travel lovers, though, there's an extra reason: Frank Barry's photographs accidentally documented a vanished era of Mexican steam railroading, and finishing the book let him revisit those places one more time. As he puts it, he forgets a lot now, but reading his own chapters — like the day he stood sideways on a cliff ledge in Oaxaca for hours waiting for one train — takes him back to wonderful places.
