Train Brain

I would travel by train again.

During the day it's calm and nearly civilized (compared to air travel). You can sit and look out the window at the landscape and the towns, at the women holding their toddlers up to wave at the train, at the people at the crossings waiting patiently in their cars for you to go by.

You can daydream or you can read or you can nap. You can go to the dining car or the observation car and have a meal or a snack.

(And at night, there's the strange thrill of other, less familiar things.)

It was several hours after stepping off the train before The Brain stopped rocking back and forth. (The rocking is great when it comes to getting to sleep, terrible when it's happening while you're standing in the shower.)

We came and went via Amtrak's Southwest Chief, in a first class "roomette" so small it was like performance art: Two chairs set eighteen inches apart, two people facing each other for twenty-six hours. Outside: (day) New Mexico, Colorado (night), Kansas, (day) Missouri, Iowa, Illinois.  Periodic meals (included with our first class tickets), seated with strangers, some truly strange, some only mildly so.

And possibly one of the best moments I have ever experienced: Night and Kansas. Hurtling across the flat expanse that is Kansas, in the dark.  We passed through town after town, marking the crossings with lonesome, wailing whistles, one barely fading out before being overtaken by the next.  I am awakened by the train reaching its top speed and the accompanying shift from a familiar back-and-forth rocking to a near-peristaltic motion, unfamiliar even after twelve hours on the train. I smiled in the dark, lay back in bed, and thought about the part in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book By the Shores of Silver Lake when Laura and her cousin Lena race on horseback across the prairie.

     Far off she heard Lena yell, "Hang on, Laura!"
     Then everything smoothed into the smoothest rippling motion. This motion went through the pony and through Laura and kept them sailing over waves in rushing air...below her she saw the grasses flowing back. She saw the pony's black mane blowing, and her hands clenched tight in it. She and the pony were going too fast but they were going like music and nothing could happen to her until the music stopped.

We were moving like that, too. I thought of Laura and Lena and their ponies and of the two engineers running the two diesel locomotives at the front of our train, more than 8,000 horsepower, enough to run fast and far away across the flat expanse of Kansas.

(I found out later that we were an hour behind schedule as darkness fell and the engineers were trying to make up that time. They did it, too, by morning.)

There were six stops in Kansas, all in the night. I lay in bed and watched three of them before falling asleep again. The train slowed then pulled into moonlit stations where thirty or forty people stood silently, waiting. The stops are not announced at night, so nothing marked them but the slowing and stopping of the train, and loading and unloading done in near silence.

And then it was day again and time for another meal with strangers in the dining car, and another nine hours of Missouri and Iowa and Illinois.

And here is where it ended:

But wait, there's more.