Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DESPITE all this—the cramped living quarters, the poky pace, and the bizarre companionship—the train
is still sort of wonderful. It's that view out the window of an ever-changing American landscape. You just
can't top it. You wake up in the morning when the sun hits your face, and after rubbing your eyes you look
up to find yourself in the middle of unspoiled Arizona cactus desert. The tracks have meandered far away
from the highway, and the land is devoid of any human presence. It feels like a theme park ride through an
exquisitely tended replica habitat.
To escape the tight confines of our roomette, we spend most of our waking hours in the observation car.
It's like a rolling greenhouse, with windows for walls and broad skylights for a ceiling. If there's one dis-
covery I've made on this trip, it's that there is nothing more meditative than a long, quiet journey on a ship
or a train. The shooshing bow waves and clacking tracks seem almost engineered to induce a fugue state in
our brains. The expansive view of the horizon seems to set our thoughts free to roam far and wide. Consider
that Walt Disney conjured Mickey Mouse to life while aboard a cross-country train between New York and
Los Angeles—and then ponder whether he'd have mustered the same intense concentration if he'd been
watching an in-flight movie on a 747.
The dusty western cities and towns roll by, one after another. San Bernardino, Barstow, Flagstaff, Gallup.
In Albuquerque, the train makes an hour-long service stop. We get off and take a stroll through the city's
thin air and thinner sunshine. It's Christmas Day now. The stores are closed and the streets are deserted.
A few old Native American women sit shivering behind folding card tables on the train platform, selling
handmade jewelry.
We rumble north through the dark of night, then cross the iced-over Mississippi the next sunny morning.
The towns run closer together now. We see backyards, loading docks, parking lots. We move into the culs-
de-sac of the Chicago suburbs and then into the grid of the city itself. There's a layover of a few hours here,
giving us just time enough to meet an old friend for dinner in the Loop. And then we're back at the station,
boarding a new train, gearing up for the very last leg of our journey.
As a thought experiment, I imagine what it might be like to catch a cab to O'Hare right now and board a
plane to D.C. Compared to the train, the flight would save us twelve hours of transit time. But how miser-
ably buzzy and enervating that flight would be. I can feel my lungs gasping at the dry, recycled air. My legs
cramping in my tiny seat. My mind recoiling at the abrupt transition between the two cities, at the ineleg-
ance of the conveyance, at the bloodless practicality of plane travel.
This is my final step back into my real life, and I find I'm clinging fiercely to the eccentricity of an
overnight train ride. I've grown addicted to the calming clackety-clack of the wheels. It's like a rolling de-
compression chamber. It's acting as a buffer—between the quirky, whirlwind travels I'm leaving behind
and the static, wearying responsibilities that lie ahead of me.
FIFTY years ago, an American tourist on vacation might well have taken a ship to get to Europe. Fifty
years before that, it was not unusual to ride in a stagecoach. For someone growing up in the first half of the
twentieth century—watching the automobile and the airplane evolve into everyday conveniences—it must
have seemed that humankind's advances in the field of transport were only just getting started.
But then, sometime around the mid-1960s, the progress stopped. Air travel had its golden age in that era,
and since then flying really hasn't improved. With notable exceptions like the now-defunct Concorde, the
jets never got much faster. Meanwhile, they did get a whole lot less comfortable, as airlines crammed in
more seats and cut out the amenities.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search