(Amtrak: “Empire Builder”; “City of New Orleans”, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Chicago, Mississippi, Louisiana)
The “Empire Builder” train to Chicago - in coach: St Paul. 7.50am:
A demure lady of a certain age, hatted and scarfed:
“Are you in this seat?”
“Yes, M’aam: 51. My tickets’ right there”
“You got a seat ticket?” Increasing volume. “Why didn’t they give me one? DUMB COCKS!”
She wandered along to the next carriage, checking the window view from each vacant seat. As the view out the window (St Paul bus depot and rail freight yards) appeared unsatisfactory, she wandered into the next car...
I love a good profanity in the morning!
_________________________________________________________________________________
Our ebullient conductor (Christmassy red ear-flap cap with fetching antlers) spots a child on her first train ride. “How did I know? Well... after we leave Red Wing, the Mississippi will be on your side of the train and I want you to see how many big black birds with white heads are out fishing and let me know.” She continues along the train, scanning coach class tickets... There are a lot of university students on board, heading home for Christmas from “school”, often to towns now only served by Amtrak as the airline and bus companies cut back services. It’s a “full train”.
I’m dipping into my travel reading in no particular order:
Don Watson’s; “American Journeys” (now more than 10 years old but clearly foreseeing the themes leading up to the 2016 election);
Paul Theroux: “Deep South” and Charles Dickens’: “American Notes” (largely read in preparation for this trip)...
Maureen Dowd’s: “The Year of Living Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics”: (I haven’t quite brought myself to start on this. Talking about anything political these days can be “dangerous territory” according to my breakfast companions on the subsequent train to New Orleans - who now eschew any mainstream news, preferring to understand the world through “U Tube”. I dutifully apologised for Rupert Murdoch.)
And:
“The Collected Dorothy Parker”: why have I not read this before? Who knew that darkly hilarious book and theatre reviews from the 1930’s could regularly induce helpless laughter?
_________________________________________________________________________________
Behind me is an Amish family: women in black scarves/bonnets and long skirts; men and boys wearing identical gingery “bowl haircuts”, some stringy Abe Lincoln beards, and toothy grins, speaking in Dutch. Around us, most passengers have spent the night and are “lying” in those upright-trying-to-sleep-twisted-mouth-open-do-not-disturb-hoping-to-at-lest-fitfully-doze-without-drooling physical positions.
In the window seat next to me is a prone, soundly sleeping teenager (BIG poop-catcher pants, BIG jacket, BIG sports boots, BIG sideways cap, BIG dishevelement, BIG mobile clutched in his sleeping fist, BIG red plastic comb dig into his BIG Afro, BIG alarm ringing - which he was sleeping through, “bigly”....). Curtains are firmly closed: so it’s a walk along the train to find any phone-alarm free - scenery
In the lounge car, a couple of Veterans of Foreign Wars (in “Korea Defense Veteran” ball caps) on their way to a conference in New Orleans stop the conductor:
“Was that you we heard singing in the dining car?”
“Why yes it was!”
“Well darlin’, why don’t you just come up here and sing for us?”
The car attendant vacuums morosely around their feet.
_________________________________________________________________________________
To the left of the train, emerging from the scrubby plain is the Dakota Indian lands, hotel, casino and sports ground before more flat, scrubby landscape slides past the train.
Lunch: they made me sit with teachers (a retired adult literacy/skills teacher (their “last chance salvage year”) and his wife who was “let go” from a 30 year middle-school career following state funding cuts, now “substituting” and training new teachers. We had a lively time. From Wisconsin Dells (snow flurries and the “Dells Bells Wedding Chapel” across from the station as the Amish families left the train) all the way to Milwaukee (snow flurries, a multiplicity of concrete overpasses; industrial river fronts, ‘Doggie Daycare’, breweries- and “no-longer-a smoke-break-due-to-the-state-of-Wisconsin-decision”: desperate snorts from some fellow passengers), I had the best grounding in what Republicans are doing to public enterprises, told with that international dark irony of teachers everywhere. Betsy DeVos, anyone???? Very scary!!
My new teacher friends were also fans of the “Doctor Blake Mysteries” where they “love your cars”... They were looking forward to Christmas with their son “in DC” as he contemplated a promotion to The Pentagon or Germany. “We hope it’s Germany!”
At this point the head writer bundled us out of the dining car so he could clean up before arriving into Chicago.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Chicago: heavy snow falling, all day, so after a handful of picturesquely bleak photos, I was taking refuge with the warm light of the Impressionists in the Chicago Art Institute.
Seen on a tower block in the university district of South Chicago: a massive banner along the top of the building” “WE TRUST OBAMA”. Sadly it was too dark (at 1pm!) to get a photo from a moving train.
Trudging back to Union station on slippery grey-snow pavements trying to avoid a second tumble of the day: a thick Dutch accent - “Hey you, you with the kangaroo on your bag. Are you from Australia? Well then... that would explain why you’re walking on the WRONG SIDE of the sidewalk. Yessir!!”.
_________________________________________________________________________________
“City of New Orleans” from Chicago - Christmas Eve:
“Good night, America, how are ya?
Said, don't you know me? I'm your native son
I'm the train they call the City Of New Orleans
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done...”
- Steve Goodman
On this train (now a pale corporatised shadow of its once great days on the Illinois Central Railroad) we are greeted with a “fast meal” (salad and a glutinous dessert) and a friendly broadcast warning that the crew will tolerate “no cussin” on board. My dinner companion was a grandmother from Mississippi, travelling home to see her grandchildren for Christmas, fixed to her cell phone (eating with the spare hand) describing the extended train shunting, the backing up and painfully slow wander over elevated lines through South Chicago to connect with the correct train line to the south near “Home Sweet HOMEWOOD”. It took more than an hour to falter through the first 5 miles...
_________________________________________________________________________________
Woken in Memphis, Tennessee by excited, laughing families detraining at 6.30am. Lots of “Merry Christmas Baby” s and “I do believe” s... in syrupy Tennessee Williams tones. Outside, a milky dawn lights condos across from the station and a distant steel bridge and industries along the Mississippi River.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Greenwood, Mississippi:
Christmas Day - Consuming (as opposed to enjoying) a “breakfast bowl” of scrambled eggs, chopped potato and chopped turkey sausage. Across from me are two brothers who are taking their extended families from Iowa to New Orleans for a week’s holiday.
“Well we have a 10 year old who is back there unwrapping presents. The train crew (ours a young taciturn guy in Santa hat with the white pom-pom drooped down his nose) were great: every station stop they came by the cabin to say that Santa was delivering even more parcels to the train.”
“You went where yesterday? 93rd St South Chicago? Did you take the Metra Electric? Did you take your flack jacket?”
“Did you know that farm milk prices are all determined by how far the dairy is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin? Yessir, the further away you are, the more your milk is worth: explains why there are now so many dairies in California and the south.”
“Oh LOOK: some deer! But no humans about yet...”
One brother was a railroad train dispatcher who loathed the appearance of a passenger train needing to be on schedule (...”because box cars can’t cuss”... “because boxes don’t biiiitch”....)
_________________________________________________________________________________
“I knew freight companies gave their trains precedence over Amtrak’s trains - the market has judged that corn and pineapples weigh less heavier than citizens - but I did not know until she told me that when freight drivers have an Amtrak train behind them, it is not uncommon for them to reduce their speed to 35 miles per hour”
· Don Watson: “American Journeys”
_________________________________________________________________________________
We are now zipping through fallow brown fields, gaunt black trees rising from freezing swamps and poor southern towns. There are no cute two-storeyed clapboard northern houses here: mostly utilitarian long-boxy single-floor places at ground level in various states of repair with a front porch tacked on (mimicking the trailer park housing allotments also in every town) among a (very) few brick veneer cottages. On the edges of town, before the Walmarts and the Hampton Inns, are trashed/abandoned industrial concerns and poor fibro or wooden properties among vacant lots with their mounds of demolition waste. The small out-of-town cemeteries are small and well-manicured. Main streets are boarded-up versions of what once was.
Yazoo, Mississippi - The hootin’ and hollerin’ of the train’s horn as we roll into this more prosperous looking town with its neat white churches and new-looking townhouses (until we get to the more decrepit railroad end of town) suggests that the arrival of the daily train is still an “event” here. About 30 people get off to Christmas hugs and into pickups parked on the dusty platform.
_________________________________
________________________________________________
In the Lounge car a lovely elderly couple from Nashville give me a list of great places to visit in New Orleans and Atlanta:
“... and if fast food is your only Christmas option in New Orleans tonight, then go to Popeyes. It may be fried, but it’s real Southern, with bite.”
(“Don’t send him thar,” says the stoic husband). They talk about how the west coast states and northeast really aren’t feeling like part of mainstream America at the moment.
“You know California has its own foreign policy now. They might try to leave the USA. We tried that a century and a half ago…and it did not work out so well…”
_________________________________________________________________________________
“... logic seldom overcomes the feelings of profound loss, or sentiment, or wounded pride. Much of the South still hurts because a great part of the South is still poor; and the air of defeat I sensed keenly at gun shows was like a reminder of the Civil War - the losses, the deaths, the gratuitous burnings, the surrender. The sense, too, or the delusion that a golden age had ended with the war - of ease, of mansions, of slavery-when what had happened was that the vigorous of the South had been exhausted in its failed bid to be separate, turning it upside down and impoverishing it, making it a bitter place of tombstones and memorials and ruins.”
- Paul Theroux: “The South”
Comments