Day 1
Flew down to Chicago from Billy Bishop. The airport was full of people who were a lot better at traveling than I am. They were gliding around with sleek, towable carry-ons that clip neatly together. They were on the phone, managing the details of their carefully-organized lives. I fumbled along with a shoulder bag and backpack. Went through security, got a coffee, slopped it on my pants. Awkward, because it left me with only one pair that's suitable for occasions when you need to look like you haven't wet yourself.
Got to Chicago and slogged to the station. Chicago's Union Station's a grand building, built in the same era and the same spirit as Toronto's, but it has a gloomy, neglected feeling, in keeping with the general status of rail travel in the United States.
On the train, I have a 'roomette', which is a slightly ratty private closet with two seats that face each other. At night, the seats fold flat, and you get a bedroll to put on top of that. There's also an upper berth that folds down, for people who were misled into thinking that having two people in one of these compartments would be a reasonable thing to do. There are scratchy blue curtains and old windows that make any picture taken through them look like a Polaroid from the 1970s.
The roomettes are big with the over-70 crowd. Other passengers are sightseers, people too obese to fly, families on vacation, and dawdling business travelers. Families, and couples who have any sense, have taken the larger bedrooms. Kids rush back and forth with harried fathers. The retirees nearest me compare oxygen concentrators. One of them is bragging about his new nebulizer.
As the train leaves, there's a long series of announcements. Everyone on the staff seems to have the right to deliver a speech. It's very democratic. Some, like the dining car steward, have developed wacky characters, and seem to be working on trains in a misguided attempt to get discovered and given a game show. The steward will turn out to look like Bella Lugosi, talk like Snagglepuss, and have an air of incredible sadness and weariness. He works his way through the train taking reservations for dinner and exchanges wacky banter with everyone. It seems exhausting.
Employees use the announcements to unburden themselves of whatever annoys them about passengers. There's more than one lecture on courtesy. The woman who runs the cafe car, especially, is on a crusade against loud music, loud conversation, and the drinking of 'personal alcohol'. Later, there's a reminder about swearing. "This is a G-rated show," with "zero tolerance for that kind of language". I have a copy of Tropic of Cancer with me; I stash it away so it doesn't get confiscated.
In rural Illinois, American flags flap over every farm and every sewage treatment plant. Roofing company trucks have patriotic murals showing, for example, eagles standing around in front of waving flags. The first stop, I think, is Mendota: "Mendota! Here it is, your Mendota, Illinois! Come on down." Mendota has a water tower, a factory that makes culverts and pipes, and a long stretch where offerings of scrap metal have been left out beside the tracks.
The conductor reckons that Princeton, Illinois is "the perfect little midwestern town." It's perfect in the sense of being a perfect specimen -- like someone can be a perfect bastard. We pass an abandoned factory with a stoved-in roof, and piles of debris that were probably once buildings but that you'd need to send to the lab to be sure -- skeletons of old timbers, faced with sheets of iron that are rusting into dust.
At this stage, someone in the nebulizer and oxygen concentrator crew is raking up a lot of phlegm. Via's sleeper compartments were like very tiny hotel rooms. Amtrak starts to feel like a campout with a lot of elderly strangers with noisy health problems. Mostly, it's perfectly fine; but every now and then you do get the urge to kick out the window and run off to bathe in a cold mountain stream.
The surprising thing about small-town America is that there are no strips of Burger Kings and Wal-Marts. There are old businesses named after their long-dead founders: Gus's Taco House, Casey's Sandwich Shop. When was the last time a baby in America was named Gus or Casey? In Greater Galesburg, we pass a faded mural advertising Railway Days (third weekend in June). Galesburg, notes the conductor, is "a fine railway town".
At dinner, the people I eat with quickly write me off as mentally defective, and lean over to join the conversation at the next table. There, a Norwegian exchange student is talking about life in Oslo. They're very interested to hear how long days are there in summer, but disappointed to learn that they're also short in winter.
Day 2
When I wake up the next morning, we're running through flat, dusty fields. It turns out to be Colorado: The city of Windbreak, Colorado. Goat pens and buildings abandoned to the elements. Windbreak saps your faith in progress. In Manhattan or Bangkok, you can believe in a future high-tech utopia. If you came back to Windbreak in five hundred years, it would be exactly the same. It would be full of rust and old timbers. Goats, lineally descended from the present ones, would stare at you, chewing thoughtfully.
At 6AM, the dining car steward comes on the PA to opine that it's a swell time to get breakfast in the dining car. It's also possible to wait, but the steward counsels haste. We've gained a lot of altitude; I open a bottle of water, and there's a slight hiss.
A copy of the Pueblo Chieftain was stuffed under my door during the night. 4 pages of the 9-page front fold are the 'Faith and Religion' section. Two half-page blocks are ads for local churches. The 'Divine Science Center for Spirituality'. The 'Wild West Cowboy Church: A Total Family Western Experience'.
Buildings start looking more and more Spanish Colonial. At La Junta, a sunburned man in a suede jacket and a combed white moustache stands at the platform, squinting in the sun. He's seeing off a pair of women. This is squinting country, cowboy hat country, combed-white-moustache country. There are corrals and dried-up streambeds. We follow a road for miles; there's no one on it. Finally, a miniature bus that says 'Trinidad State Junior College" goes by, and a few minutes later, a pickup truck. There are black dots in the far distance that may or may not be cattle. The shell of a car in a field has been used for target practice. We pass the exposed stone foundations of farmhouses on sites which, a hundred years ago, someone mistook for a good spot for a ranch. An army 'maneuver site', with a Sherman tank on a concrete plinth. A road sign says Tinaja 1/2 Mile. No Services Available.
Lunch is with a heavy-set father and his husky son. The two of them were wearing the merchandise of three major league baseball teams. The father was bluff and loud. When I talked to him, I felt like a ghost trying to communicate with the living. One of the things I wanted to sort out at this meal was what the tipping situation was. The plan was to wait until some other people left and see what they did. No one got up. When I sat down, there was a table of red-faced middle-aged jokers lingering over coffee. When I left, they were still there, arguing about the ingredients in crayons and how they dug the Chunnel.
There's no rush over meals. The sleeper-train lifestyle is 2 hours a day eating and 22 hours a day lying perfectly still and snacking. The food's mostly burgers, sandwiches, grits, eggs, bacon, little tubs of Haagen-Dazs. Like a lot of other operations, Amtrak's responded to obesity and public health worries by adding a single 'healthy' option, which the waiters advise you frankly not to order, and leaving everything else pretty much as it was.
We crawl up a burned-out mountain pass, more or less following the Santa Fe Trail. A strange, hand-painted sign tells us we've just passed through the Raton Tunnel. Between the rock-cuts, there are sandstone rock formations with long slopes of dirt and scree and a dried-up scrub of bushes and stunted trees. We have a stop in Raton itself, a dry brown town overlooked by a desert hill where the letters 'R A T O N' have been erected, Hollywood-style. In the packed-gravel parking lot, a white metal box has been nailed to a tree. It says 'Free Raton Info'.
After Raton, a woman seizes the PA to belatedly tell us that Trinidad, which we passed two hours earlier, is the Sex Change Capital of the World. More abandoned dustbowl farmsteads with fallen-in roofs and slumping windmills. Oceans of yellow stubble and dust inexplicably divided up with barbed-wire fences as though there wasn't an infinite amount of it. The landscape's like an overexposed photo, yellow and sun-faded and washed-out. All it's missing is a horse skeleton or two.
In a town I never learn the name of, there are badly faded signs for mayoral elections. The town's a scrapheap of battered portable houses and gutted cars with no obvious use for a mayor. Closer to the Rockies, fields shade from brown to red to green, and we pass a streambed that actually has a trickle of water running through it. There are working farms, where brown cattle stand around looking bored.
In New Mexico, we move through fog and pass jagged red cliffs scattered with snow. The evening's uncomfortable meal is with a young Czech woman, a middle-aged man from Kansas, and a sixty-ish woman from New Mexico who eats with tremendous poise and tries to engage us all in polite conversation. At the next table, an unmistakably Canadian couple are sitting with a middle-aged New York stereotype -- a woman in a baseball cap who slouches over the table and tells endless stories in a heavy Brooklyn accent.
At night, we go through perfect darkness and long stretches of strange chemical smells.
Day 3
In the morning, dawn's breaking behind a low ridge. It's a strange, pink-orange candyfloss sunrise. The conductor makes an announcement. He sounds fairly sure that we're in California, but won't commit himself. For reasons he doesn't seem to be able to satisfactorily explain, we're now being pulled by a freight locomotive, and are falling behind schedule as a result. He sounds groggy, like a man who's been slipped a mickey and woken up to find his locomotive swapped with an inferior one.
An hour or two later, we get into the LA exurbs: Lots of asphalt and chain-link fences with loops of barbed wire on top. Bare desert hills with houses built all along the crests. A billboard for a lawyer who specializes in truck crashes ("Crashed a big rig? I'll fight for you.") The whole mess drenched in inappropriately cheerful orange sunshine. For a while, we follow the LA River, which is a trickle of effluent in the bottom of a broad concrete channel. A duck floats on it. The duck would like to swim, I think, but the LA River isn't deep enough. Its feet would scrape the bottom.
The train station in LA turns out to be a big, pleasant, Spanish colonial thing. As I'm walking through the tunnel from the tracks to the station, a homeless man about thirty feet away makes eye contact. He sticks out his fist straight out in front of him and starts walking towards me. He veers away, corrects course, and speeds up. I struggle to free a hand. Finally, he reaches me. I bump his fist, and he nods and moves on. Welcome to LA.
Flew down to Chicago from Billy Bishop. The airport was full of people who were a lot better at traveling than I am. They were gliding around with sleek, towable carry-ons that clip neatly together. They were on the phone, managing the details of their carefully-organized lives. I fumbled along with a shoulder bag and backpack. Went through security, got a coffee, slopped it on my pants. Awkward, because it left me with only one pair that's suitable for occasions when you need to look like you haven't wet yourself.
Got to Chicago and slogged to the station. Chicago's Union Station's a grand building, built in the same era and the same spirit as Toronto's, but it has a gloomy, neglected feeling, in keeping with the general status of rail travel in the United States.
On the train, I have a 'roomette', which is a slightly ratty private closet with two seats that face each other. At night, the seats fold flat, and you get a bedroll to put on top of that. There's also an upper berth that folds down, for people who were misled into thinking that having two people in one of these compartments would be a reasonable thing to do. There are scratchy blue curtains and old windows that make any picture taken through them look like a Polaroid from the 1970s.
The roomettes are big with the over-70 crowd. Other passengers are sightseers, people too obese to fly, families on vacation, and dawdling business travelers. Families, and couples who have any sense, have taken the larger bedrooms. Kids rush back and forth with harried fathers. The retirees nearest me compare oxygen concentrators. One of them is bragging about his new nebulizer.
As the train leaves, there's a long series of announcements. Everyone on the staff seems to have the right to deliver a speech. It's very democratic. Some, like the dining car steward, have developed wacky characters, and seem to be working on trains in a misguided attempt to get discovered and given a game show. The steward will turn out to look like Bella Lugosi, talk like Snagglepuss, and have an air of incredible sadness and weariness. He works his way through the train taking reservations for dinner and exchanges wacky banter with everyone. It seems exhausting.
Employees use the announcements to unburden themselves of whatever annoys them about passengers. There's more than one lecture on courtesy. The woman who runs the cafe car, especially, is on a crusade against loud music, loud conversation, and the drinking of 'personal alcohol'. Later, there's a reminder about swearing. "This is a G-rated show," with "zero tolerance for that kind of language". I have a copy of Tropic of Cancer with me; I stash it away so it doesn't get confiscated.
The conductor reckons that Princeton, Illinois is "the perfect little midwestern town." It's perfect in the sense of being a perfect specimen -- like someone can be a perfect bastard. We pass an abandoned factory with a stoved-in roof, and piles of debris that were probably once buildings but that you'd need to send to the lab to be sure -- skeletons of old timbers, faced with sheets of iron that are rusting into dust.
At this stage, someone in the nebulizer and oxygen concentrator crew is raking up a lot of phlegm. Via's sleeper compartments were like very tiny hotel rooms. Amtrak starts to feel like a campout with a lot of elderly strangers with noisy health problems. Mostly, it's perfectly fine; but every now and then you do get the urge to kick out the window and run off to bathe in a cold mountain stream.
At dinner, the people I eat with quickly write me off as mentally defective, and lean over to join the conversation at the next table. There, a Norwegian exchange student is talking about life in Oslo. They're very interested to hear how long days are there in summer, but disappointed to learn that they're also short in winter.
Day 2
When I wake up the next morning, we're running through flat, dusty fields. It turns out to be Colorado: The city of Windbreak, Colorado. Goat pens and buildings abandoned to the elements. Windbreak saps your faith in progress. In Manhattan or Bangkok, you can believe in a future high-tech utopia. If you came back to Windbreak in five hundred years, it would be exactly the same. It would be full of rust and old timbers. Goats, lineally descended from the present ones, would stare at you, chewing thoughtfully.
At 6AM, the dining car steward comes on the PA to opine that it's a swell time to get breakfast in the dining car. It's also possible to wait, but the steward counsels haste. We've gained a lot of altitude; I open a bottle of water, and there's a slight hiss.
A copy of the Pueblo Chieftain was stuffed under my door during the night. 4 pages of the 9-page front fold are the 'Faith and Religion' section. Two half-page blocks are ads for local churches. The 'Divine Science Center for Spirituality'. The 'Wild West Cowboy Church: A Total Family Western Experience'.
Lunch is with a heavy-set father and his husky son. The two of them were wearing the merchandise of three major league baseball teams. The father was bluff and loud. When I talked to him, I felt like a ghost trying to communicate with the living. One of the things I wanted to sort out at this meal was what the tipping situation was. The plan was to wait until some other people left and see what they did. No one got up. When I sat down, there was a table of red-faced middle-aged jokers lingering over coffee. When I left, they were still there, arguing about the ingredients in crayons and how they dug the Chunnel.
We crawl up a burned-out mountain pass, more or less following the Santa Fe Trail. A strange, hand-painted sign tells us we've just passed through the Raton Tunnel. Between the rock-cuts, there are sandstone rock formations with long slopes of dirt and scree and a dried-up scrub of bushes and stunted trees. We have a stop in Raton itself, a dry brown town overlooked by a desert hill where the letters 'R A T O N' have been erected, Hollywood-style. In the packed-gravel parking lot, a white metal box has been nailed to a tree. It says 'Free Raton Info'.
In a town I never learn the name of, there are badly faded signs for mayoral elections. The town's a scrapheap of battered portable houses and gutted cars with no obvious use for a mayor. Closer to the Rockies, fields shade from brown to red to green, and we pass a streambed that actually has a trickle of water running through it. There are working farms, where brown cattle stand around looking bored.
At night, we go through perfect darkness and long stretches of strange chemical smells.
Day 3
In the morning, dawn's breaking behind a low ridge. It's a strange, pink-orange candyfloss sunrise. The conductor makes an announcement. He sounds fairly sure that we're in California, but won't commit himself. For reasons he doesn't seem to be able to satisfactorily explain, we're now being pulled by a freight locomotive, and are falling behind schedule as a result. He sounds groggy, like a man who's been slipped a mickey and woken up to find his locomotive swapped with an inferior one.
The train station in LA turns out to be a big, pleasant, Spanish colonial thing. As I'm walking through the tunnel from the tracks to the station, a homeless man about thirty feet away makes eye contact. He sticks out his fist straight out in front of him and starts walking towards me. He veers away, corrects course, and speeds up. I struggle to free a hand. Finally, he reaches me. I bump his fist, and he nods and moves on. Welcome to LA.
