October 23, 2007 - Railway Adventures

This dispatch is a brief account of my four-day transcontinental train trip.

Rather than fly to the next stop on my life’s itinerary, I chose to go by Amtrak. I have no fear of flying – but I have no desire to pay money to spend a couple of hours at the airport being treated as a potential terrorist before boarding a flight (with a stopover at another airport with other passengers who, likewise, have no taste for being treated as potential terrorists), just to arrive at my destination in seven hours, exhausted.

I would have preferred either the “Peace Train” or “the Love Train,” but these do not yet exist in the United States; and so, I traveled through some of the Northern States on the Empire Builder. Since I passed through many of the Southern States by car last year, I liked the idea that this trip would further one of my idle, inconsequential, minor “goals” in life: to visit all 48 States in the continental US and the ten Provinces of Canada

There’s no patriotic sentiment in my wanting to see the USA (before it fades away). The older I get, the more I appreciate my own memories of “how it used to be” and my imagining of what it might once have been – before colonization; before the states united into what has become a machine of world domination; before the spread of mass industry and its polluting by-products – just land, much of it very beautiful, where people lived. Passing through sparsely populated stretches of countryside, it’s still possible to imagine what it might have been like – and also what it could be.

Traveling by train has always been a pleasurable experience for me, starting with the first long trip I took, as an eight year old, with my grandmother. We rode the New York Central from Schenectady to Buffalo, New York. Back then, as a young researcher, I still thought that the cow-catcher on the front of the train scooped up cows and put them gently on the side of the tracks. I was entranced by the sounds of place names … Canandaigua, Batavia, Lockport, Tonawanda, Geneseo...

Later, there were short trips to New York City on an excursion train with my mother and my aunt to see a movie and the Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall. Later still, there were trips with my children to visit distant family, or to attend funerals. The journeys were at least as interesting as the destinations, and so the sound of a train whistle has always inspired me to dream of travel to distant places. Today’s diesel locomotives have air horns that sound more like business than pleasure – but in the 1950s, trains still had steam whistles that produced a long, low, haunting sound. Even so, the calling is the same. I still occasionally hear foghorns from ships off the coast that have the same timbre as the old steam whistle, and they call up the same deep desire to travel, to be going somewhere I’ve never been before and to be meeting people I’ve never met before. Now I travel alone – but I’m never lonely. I always meet the most interesting people on the train.

While I was making plans for my trip, I checked the fall foliage map at weather.com. Traveling eastward, I could expect to see the fall colours at or near their peak as I passed through Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, DC – and they were! Having lived on the Pacific Northwest Coast for the past six years, I’ve missed the changing colours of autumn – though not the cold, white winter that inevitably follows. The train’s observation car was perfect for viewing the spectacular display of reds, oranges and yellows in the passing landscape.

The train pulled out of Seattle on October 18 at 4:45 p.m. in the midst of a wind storm that turned Puget Sound lovely and wild. We were delayed between Edmonds and Everett, Washington for nearly three hours because a couple of trees had fallen across the tracks. The trees had pulled down power lines, which meant that the electric company had to be called in to turn off the power before the train could dispatch one of its locomotives to clear the track. And so we sat on a silent, motionless train as the darkness grew outside. My seatmate and I took turns charging the batteries of our laptops from the single outlet in our car, working on our respective projects and exchanging stories of our travel experiences in muted tones.

Once we got rolling again I was ready to sleep. Seatmate took the seats; I took the floor. It wasn’t comfortable, but I was prepared to arrive at the end of the trip stuck in a fetal position rather than pay hundreds of dollars extra for a berth (even though the extras that come with it include meals in the dining car – and being served first, at that). After three nights seat-and-floor-sleeping, I figured the people who would be picking me up at the station might just have to roll me down to the beach and stick me in the sand to straighten me out. Just kidding – it never got that bad.

Trains probably carry just as many people as are crammed onto planes. The passengers come from different places and are on their way to various destinations for all sorts of reasons. Because the train brings travelers together in a limited-but-sufficient space for a limited-but-sufficient time, the more outgoing among us can freely take advantage of the opportunity to talk about aspects of our lives with complete strangers that we might hesitate to share with people we know. In the space of four days I met many people I would probably not have met under other circumstances – except, perhaps, for a natural disaster throwing us all together in some less hospitable environment.

We who are solo travelers open to fresh perspectives are, in my view, the luckiest people on the train. In the dining car, we are randomly assigned to fill the empty spaces at a table that typically includes a couple and one other single person, and so we get a kaleidoscopic array of dinner partners. (I was never seated with three other people traveling solo, although I can’t say it never happens; and only on two occasions did I have dinner with the same person.) Sharing a view of the passing countryside from the observation car, or standing on the platform during a stopover, or hanging out in the café car late at night, I found myself conversing with: an independent filmmaker; a woman running away from an abusive relationship; a rapper (with an entourage) on his way to a gig in Miami; people just out to enjoy a train ride through the glorious fall colours. I met people from places where I’ve lived and from places I hope to visit.

Along the way, from Washington through Montana, the landscape was coloured with yellow trees that looked like dead pines. One of a group of Future Farmers of America (wearing a jacket that identified him as an "advisor") said with an air of authority that they were a type of cedar that loses its needles in the fall. When questioned, he was at a loss to explain how a tree considered to be an evergreen would not share the fundamental characteristic of evergreen-ness. I snapped a couple of photos of these trees at West Glacier, Montana, and later compared them to online photos of trees affected by the western pine beetle. As I suspected, the trees were pine trees killed by the western pine beetle that is decimating forests from the Pacific Northwest to Montana and down to Northern Mexico. This was the first time I actually saw the damage they do – although I must say that they did add their own brilliant hues to the fall landscape.

We stopped briefly at Shelby, Montana around two in the afternoon, and shortly after that, at Havre, where I photographed an old steam locomotive and a bronze statue of Canadian and US law enforcement officers, all angular and serious, shaking hands in that stiff and formal way. The sculpture had a vaguely Stalinist-era look to it.

Seatmate left us at 11 p.m. at Minot (rhymes with “why not”), North Dakota, which he said can be a desolate place in the winter, when the icy winds sweep over the vast plain on which it is situated. We had already seen snow, so it wasn't difficult to imagine how harsh winter could be there. I was left with two seats to “stretch out” on, a fair degree of travel fatigue and a vague curiosity about why anyone would want to live in Minot, North Dakota. With my expectations of comfort increasingly diminished by the realities of coach-sleeping, still I slept like a baby.

On Saturday, October 20 we arrived in St. Paul-Minneapolis at 9:30 a.m., still two hours behind schedule. The weather was surprisingly mild – about 60 degrees. Someone across the aisle had his newspaper open to the weather page and was reading out the temperatures for cities we would be passing through … 69 degrees … 74 degrees … 80 degrees. My bones started rejoicing. We had a few minutes to step out onto the platform, and I was long overdue for a leg-stretch and some fresh air. Here’s where the trip began to get interesting. As the train was coming to a stop, I fell into a serendipitous conversation with an independent filmmaker, Valentine Eben, who is associated with Ambazonia (English-speaking Cameroon) Indymedia. He had just come from a screening of his documentary Standing with the Students, about resistance to police repression by students at the University of Buea. How interesting! Another passenger and I had been in conversation only minutes earlier about issues of social justice and about Indymedia. A chance meeting with a “fellow traveller” so early in this journey of discovery, this renegade research, seemed to be a good omen. I knew then that my journey would become more interesting from there on. [Additional information on the current state of affairs, with police brutality continuing against the students at the University of Buea, can be found at Ambazonia Indymedia].

The next part of the trip was spectacularly beautiful as we passed through picturesque little towns, resplendent in their fall colours. We traveled 140 miles along the Mississippi River from a point not very far from its headwaters. Around this time last year, I saw the Mississippi Delta “shining like a National Guitar” in Memphis. A couple of weeks later, I saw it again in hurricane-devastated New Orleans, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. At Red Wing, Minnesota, the riverboat, The American Queen, was docked. For me, that would have been a dream cruise – a hundred years ago!

At 6 p.m. on October 20, two days (and nights) out of Seattle, the train pulled into Chicago’s Union Station, still over an hour late. With a couple of hours to wait before boarding another train, too tired to venture into the overwhelming shopping area and not able to think of a single thing I needed to buy anyway, I enjoyed the stopover in the station’s food court with a self-described “preacher’s daughter” of mixed Cherokee and Irish ancestry. She was on her way from Northern California to her childhood home in West Virginia. Her father having died recently, she and her sisters would be getting together to reminisce and to do some of the things they did as children – like picking berries and making jam. The “down-home”simplicity of the woman’s experiences – and the jokes (like the one her father told, about a boy who saw the photos of men from the church who had been killed in various wars, and the golden plaque above them, inscribed, “Died in Service,” who then asked the pastor, “Did they die in this service?”) – were a pleasant counterpoint to the sterile busyness of the food court. At that point, I was so fatigued, all I wanted to hear was the whistle of the next train, the Capitol Limited pulling out of the station, bound for Washington, DC. We left on time at 7:05 p.m. I slept again.

On this train I was seated in a car with quite a few babies and young children who had a hard time settling down to sleep. Having a seat all to myself, I had no such problem. Throughout the night we traveled through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Saturday, October 21, I awoke to the early signs of fall colours as we passed through Cumberland, Maryland. The leaves of the deciduous trees had begun to change, but, overall, the vegetation was generally starting to look decidedly (and most agreeably) “Southern.” The train route skimmed the northernmost part of West Virginia between Martinsburg and Harper’s Ferry. Harper’s Ferry is situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers and has a population of around 300. For such a small place, it played an important role in US history. Having lived the first third of my life in the US (right through the 60s, which now look like the best years in US History – which is still not saying much for US History), I had heard of Harper’s Ferry as a child in school. It was the scene of a failed 1859 raid on a federal arsenal by John Brown and his men, who intended to secure arms for a slave uprising. In John Brown's Wikipedia entry, he is described as “the first white American abolitionist to advocate and practice insurrection as a means to abolish slavery.” Even though he was a controversial figure (being at odds with the pacifist abolitionists as well as pro-slavery Southerners), and even though his planned insurrection failed on the face of it, the raid at Harper’s Ferry played a large role in igniting the American Civil War, which eventually led to the abolition of slavery in the US. I still find that piece of history instructive when I consider the “strategies and tactics” aspect of creating social change.

We arrived in Washington, DC around 1:30 in the afternoon. Just before the train pulled into Washington’s Union Station, a man seated across the aisle from me received a cell phone call from someone (a neighbour, I presume) who told him that their block of houses in Malibu was being evacuated before an oncoming wildfire. He started making phone calls to other neighbours to find out what they knew. He got some calls, too. One, he said, was from Canadian producer director and actor, Norman Jewison, who asked if he knew the status of his (Jewison’s) house. Just before we left the train, the man got word that his own house was engulfed in flames. The neighbour was watching it on television. It was difficult not to sympathize with someone who was in the midst of getting a blow-by-blow description of the destruction of his luxury home – even though I’m certain he was well-insured. Having seen last year what FEMA did to the people of New Orleans, I was wondering what FEMA had in store for these wealthy disaster victims.

During the six-hour stopover, I stepped outside the station into summer-like weather and took a couple of pictures of the Capitol and Union Station. I was surprised and happy to hear scores of crows loudly discussing politics (or something) in the trees. It sounded like Congress in full session on a lovely Sunday afternoon. At 7:30 p.m., the Silver Meteor departed, Florida bound.

After three days and two nights on trains, I had no trouble sleeping that night, and at 7:43 a.m. on Monday, October 22, I awoke as the train was pulling into in Jesup, GA. The heavily overcast sky was promising the rain so badly needed in Georgia. The state is experiencing a severe drought. By 8:15, a little more than an hour from Jacksonville, FL, with the morning mist hovering above the ground in the open fields and long shreds of Spanish moss swinging gently from the trees in the swamp, it seemed that it really would rain.

Whereas pine trees are plentiful in Georgia, in Florida palms predominate. By the time we stopped in Jacksonville, it was raining hard, but it was gloriously Florida-hot. At 1 p.m. we were in Orlando – and it was hot, hot, hot. As we passed by miles and miles of swampy forest, it seemed odd to see the occasional fan palm growing amongst the swamp-loving vegetation. The closer I got to my destination, the more I began to think in terms of a hot shower and a real bed to sleep in.

With that “almost there” feeling, I hung out in the café car, enjoying a couple of glasses of white wine. Maybe it was three. In any case, suddenly the conductor announced that we were arriving at my destination. I shut down my laptop, gathered up my belongings and toddled off the train, too happy to have arrived, and too tipsy, to do any more “research.” Fortunately, a car was waiting to take me home, my checked suitcase had already been collected, and all that remained on this part of my trip was a dinner feast, a shower and a peaceful sleep. I would begin organizing the next phase of my journey once I fully recovered from this one.

I will be adding a photo page to Renegade Research at some point in the near future. If you would like to be notified when a new page is added to the site, please send me an email.

Correction: I received an email from a correspondent, who wrote: "Just one note: I think those golden trees you saw might have been larch or tamarack, deciduous conifers. I love them. They have short feathery little needles and pretty little cones. I remember flying down to Cape Breton one fall and seeing the yellow forests below....in shock, until my brother, the forester, filled me in. At least I hope they were tamarack and not pine beetle victims." I hope so, too..

feral@renegaderesearch.org