Musings of a Restless Mind

This last summer I wanted to go to Liberty-Con in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I haven’t flown in many years, and have heard lots of awful stories about modern air travel. Being retired means I was in no hurry, and both Sharon and I took long train trips when we were younger and really enjoyed them. So I bought myself a 30-day Amtrak rail pass for $500, packed a duffel bag, and I was off.

On an airplane, you’re stuck next to one person for the duration, and most people aren’t friendly enough to engage in conversation. They worry that they’ll be stuck next to a bore. So the airlines have done everything but put you into a plastic bubble. You can watch the movie from the back of the seat in front of you. You can stick earbuds in to listen to your cell phone, pretending not to hear anyone else even if they’re trying to talk to you.

Trains are different. It’s not so much trouble to get up, go to another seat or, on long trips, the dining or observation car, and, in general either be alone, or, more likely, find someone you have fun talking to. Years ago, on my first train trip from San Diego to Seattle, I noticed a beautiful young lady reading Stern Magazine, and asked her, “Sind sie echter Deutsch?” (Are you really German?). Unfortunately, I had learned German for reading and comprehension rather than conversation. Consequently although I understood everything she said, I was handicapped by formulating sentences in English in my head and trying to translate them into German rather than just talking in my more limited vocabulary. As anyone who’s learned a language that way can tell you, that doesn’t work well because your vocabulary in your native language is 10 times the size of your vocabulary in your second language. Eventually our conversation slipped back into English.

On my wife Sharon’s cross-country trip in the 80s, she had met a man who had been Robert Frost’s neighbor, a semi-retired scientist (his old company continued to pay him in full for two years as long as he didn’t go to work for one of their competitors), and a retired pro football player, taking his little girl to DC.

I was initially disappointed to find out that Amtrak now insists on assigning seats, but nobody really cared if you weren’t in your assigned seat unless it was getting close to your stop, and that was mostly so they could find you to tell you your stop was coming up in the middle of the night because they quit using the loudspeaker after 10pm.

The train from LA went straight to Chicago, taking 47 hours if you didn’t get off somewhere inbetween. My first surprise was that there were about 15-20 Amish on the train heading from LA to Chicago with me. Although they mostly spoke their own language to each other (a separately evolved amalgam of German and English), they spoke perfect English as well. I opened with, “You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?”

Turns out they had taken the train to go to a medical clinic in Tijuana, and were now on the trip back to upstate New York. My seat-mate was heading back to Dayton after visiting her mother in LA and spent much of her time answering her cell phone and telling whatever telemarketer was on the other end to stop calling her. I mostly watched the scenery as we went from Flagstaff into New Mexico. All the washes looked to my eye like they had recently flooded. They must have had a good rainy season this year, I thought but never bothered to check.

BTW, travel by train and see the worst parts of American cities. The countryside is fine, but no one wants to live near the train depot, and those parts of town are mostly junkyards and warehouses, so Albuquerque of fond memory didn’t impress me. What did fascinate me was a small “town” called Lamy (the conductor pronounced it lay-me). I put “town” in scare quotes because, although it had a fancy looking train station facade, there seemed to be no real town. Whatever houses were visible were at least 500 yards apart, although some folks did indeed disembark there. I asked about it and was told that it used to be the main stagecoach stop between Santa Fe and points east as if that explained it. For a writer, this town from another world fascinated me. I’m sure it will end up in a story some time. One thing that stuck with me about Lamy was the orphaned fences. Every so often you’d see a fence about 50-100 feet in length, just a straight line, no gates, no corners, just an abandoned fence that wasn’t keeping anything in or out. Frequently the underbrush had grown up high enough to almost swallow up the fence, but nobody had bothered to tear it down.

In the observation car I met Lizzy, Claudia, and her husband (whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten). Lizzy was a young woman on her way back to southern Colorado after setting up her new life in Prescott Valley Arizona where she had found work in a bakery. Turns out she is the youngest in her family with 8 (eight!) older brothers. Now she was finally old enough to set out on her own from rural southern Colorado. I told her something about the inspiration of my planned 12-story saga of a family over 40 years, where the parents come from the city, raise their family isolated in the countryside, and then the kids each go off to live in the city. I gave her my card and found out later when I got home that she’s an aspiring writer, and a really good one, it turns out. Over email I gave her a few tips that she appreciated, but mostly she’s doing well figuring it out on her own.

Claudia is a 3rd generation American-born Chinese who taught in Navajo schools for a while. Her husband is an archaeologist and they go back each year to his dig in Kazakstan. They originally thought it would be just a Mongol era burial ground, but it turns out to go all the way back to the stone age, hence all the return visits.

I also had a long conversation with a soybean broker during the stretch through Kansas and Nebraska. He told me that farming is so high tech now, that each farmer can tell him almost exactly how many bushels each part of their farm will yield.

I ran into Claudia and her husband again, and had dinner with them at Union Station in Chicago before we boarded trains going in separate directions, them on to New York, me down to Charlottesville VA and eventually Atlanta. (Why is the main train station in every city called Union Station? Is it some obscure clause in the union contract or something?) Chicago’s train station had kiosk restaurants featuring the cuisine of many points of interest along the rails. Knowing I wouldn’t be in New Orleans long on my trip back, I tried the gumbo and some other dish from the kiosk that Claudia and her husband assured me was authentic. I was also in time to see the endless stream of commuters come down the escalators and head from their downtown jobs to their nightly trains back home.

My train left about 5 or 6pm, and was due to arrive in Charlottesville about 3:30 the next afternoon. Now Charlottesville is the home to Jefferson’s Monticello, and I hoped to catch an uber and see it, but the train was late getting in, so Monticello was almost closed, and it had started to rain. So instead I went across the street to eat dinner in the Smyrna restaurant, featuring a fusion of Turkish and Greek food. Didn’t write down what I had, but it was good, and I enjoyed a glass of Massuco Nebbiolo D’Alba red wine with dinner. Don’t ask me what the name means, but it suited my taste buds.

The next morning I was in Atlanta and took a local bus to Marietta to see a former colleague and friend and her husband. That allowed me to get a much needed shower and have some wonderful conversations. BTW, I had figured I’d probably be doing a lot of bus travel, so before I left, I cashed a 20 dollar bill for 20 ones and bought a roll of quarters. Next morning I was back on the local bus to Atlanta where I took the metro train to the Greyhound station. They had 2 scheduled trips to Chattanooga, one departing at 0600, and the next at 10:45. Just before I got there, I got a text explaining that my bus’ departure would be delayed. Of course when I walked in about 10am, the folks who got there for the 6am departure were just boarding their bus. I suppose I could have tried switching, but it didn’t occur to me. Since my bus wouldn’t leave until 12:30 now (more like 1pm actually), I went up to the food counter where they had someone serving hot breakfasts. Except they were closing it down for hot meals, leaving only the vending machines. I noticed about 8 slices of bacon under the counter lights and asked if I could just buy the bacon since she was shutting down the counter. So I had bacon for lunch!

The young lady driving the Greyhound waited until we were all aboard and then launched into a drill instructor speech.

“I am the captain of this bus! You can talk on your cell phones but only using earbuds. If I hear a cellphone conversation, I will stop the bus and throw you off. If I can’t find who it was, I will throw everybody off the bus. They pay me to arrive. They don’t care if anybody’s on the bus. If anybody tries to smoke or vape, I will throw you off the bus!”

Appropriately chastened, we rode the two hours to Chattanooga in peace. Then I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and walked the 10 or 12 blocks to the downtown hotel. There I met lots of folks in person that I had only interacted with over the web. Also met new people and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Even managed to drink some free maple whiskey from the open bar at one of the suites. I had only had it once before, maybe 20 years ago, and it still tasted just as good as I remembered. It’s a Canadian thing.

On Monday, it was back to the bus depot and then to Atlanta where I picked up the train to DC, arriving sometime the next afternoon. There I took the metro one stop too far and had walk back about 6 blocks to get to my hotel when there was a stop just across the street from the hotel. I asked the woman at the front desk where there were good restaurants and got 4 recommendations, 3 of which I eventually took. The first was a Chinese restaurant, 3 doors down the block, so I took that one. It was only 5:30 and except for me, the place was empty even though it was a very fancy place, rivaling some of the fancy restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Presumably business must pick up later in the evening. In any case I thoroughly enjoyed my dinner, but ended up with way too much food. There was no microwave in my room, so I donated the leftovers to the woman who had recommended the place. She was surprised and grateful.