The Amtrak blues

The terrazzo tile floor and vaulted reclaimed former tobacco warehouse ceiling and dim ambient light give the Durham Amtrak station a sort of artificial twilight feel, a cathedral’s stillness. You hear everything. The faithful wait on wood benches, checking the time on their cell phones. A man combs his hair slowly, the dark windows—black obsidian mirrors. The ticket agent behind the counter twirls his pen back and forth. What else would you do? He is either pointing the way to the water fountains, in which case people hardly stop to say thank you, or he’s announcing that the 7:48 p.m. train won’t arrive until 8:30 p.m., in which case people are just tired, sad or angry. Often a mix of the three.

Call it the Amtrak Blues.

I took the train home this Thanksgiving for a number of reasons. By the time I got around to making travel plans, flights were above $300 roundtrip; the Amtrak fare to South Florida and back was just over $200. Budget air travel is usually more competitive, but involves more inconvenience. For one thing, trains often run through the center of town instead of to a suburban airfield, making them easier to get to. You can haul two 50-lb carry-on bags full of nearly anything, plus briefcases, purses or backpacks. And there are no annoying security lines, 3-1-1 rules, millimeter-wave scanners or overaggressive TSA friskers.

There’s also a romantic side to train travel, born of so many films and novels—why else would Hogwarts students bother with their Express but for the sheer grandeur of the experience? Hitchcock’s North by Northwest makes the 20^th Century Limited, a train that used to run from New York to Chicago with the finest possible accommodations, seem like the classiest form of transportation ever (Indeed, that train introduced “red carpet treatment” to the world, one of its lasting legacies).     A bygone era of lavish stations, Pullman porters, dining cars and fresh cocktails around every corner. Before that, great iron rails stretching towards the infinite horizon of the American West, finally uniting the coasts with a golden spike. That’s the still-lingering romance of the rails.

Although modern Amtrak service is hardly equal to the luxury of the 20^th Century Limited, there are distinct advantages to train travel, certain on board conveniences that make coach class on a train more like business class on an airplane. The seats are far larger on Amtrak than in coach on any airline; they recline more, have a pop-out leg rest and foot rest, and you even get a pillow at night.

You have no seatbelt and are free to wander around—it’s a necessity, in fact, given the length of an overnight trip. Kids can roam the aisles and find playmates, adults can stroll up to the lounge car and railroad fanatics (always a few of them about, following along with their own pocket timetable and watch, bushy eyebrows under souvenir hats from model railroad conventions) can chat with the crew. It’s all very relaxed and sociable, a refreshing change from the elevator silence of aircraft.

I left Durham Tuesday evening on the 76 Piedmont, headed for Cary where I’d catch the 91 Silver Star, one of Amtrak’s main East Coast trains. New York to Miami. On the Piedmont, I met a woman named Kay, headed for Winter Haven, Florida on the same train. I helped with her bags when we got to Cary, but left the station for dinner at a restaurant I thought was Italian but had recently become Chinese. I was the only customer, one veggies-and-fried-rice-to-go-please bit of life in the otherwise ghostly quiet room. When I returned to the station, the only free seat was—surprise—on a wood bench next to Kay.

She was probably somewhere in her fifties, but it was hard to say exactly where. A wrinkled, wild-eyed face with dry, wiry hair. Picture that sort of frazzled, methed-out look. Weathered. Clutching the strange array of bags I had helped her with earlier—a reusable supermarket bag stuffed full of what looked like infant onesies, a battered blue Samsonite rolling carry-on (when I helped her, the presence of wheels was a major revelation; she had just been dragging it along) and a cavernous canvas purse—Kay waved me over to her bench, where I sat and listened to the strange circumstances of her life. The cousin she had been renting a house from, only to be kicked out. The daughter who ran away. The father of her children, who was not her husband, who was also not the man who raised her kids. It was hard to follow, but clearly Kay had lived a tough and complicated life.

With a general groan of disappointment, all but one family sat down.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “Right this way, please.”

He called for groups of coach passengers who wanted to sit together, families of four, trios—oh excuse me, you’re a family of five. This way, we don’t want to punish you; your kids do enough of that already.

Jokes a game show host would crack, followed by cued audience laughter. When he called for couples, Kay turned to me.

“Let’s do it,” she said in a conspirator’s whisper. “Let’s get in line now. Get good seats. Come on!”

And so Kay and I boarded as a couple, boarded toward the front of the line, and I ended up sitting next to her on the Silver Star, listening to stories from her life. How Walt Disney stopped for coffee in some diner in central Florida when she was six, drew Snow White on a napkin for her, signed his name, and took off. She thinks her sister has the napkin still, filed away somewhere.

“I bet it’s worth millions,” she said. “I should sell it sometime.”

In the café/lounge car, Kay sat and chatted with other passengers while she drank a Bud Light. They liked her spirited personality. Cheered for comments like this, directed at the Amtrak bartender:

“I wanted to rent this beer, not drink it," she insisted. "$5.50, my God!”

You don’t have to buy their alcohol, though. You can bring your own, which some consider a definite advantage of train travel. I saw hip flasks, glass pint bottles and what looked like a fifth of Smirnoff nestled in a handbag. Ice and plastic cups are free. Fruit juice is reasonably priced. At one point, a 22-year-old man named Brandon Ross, who I overheard bragging about downing three FourLokos before boarding, was pouring shots from a handle of Skol Citrus vodka. He tried to goad other passengers into drinking.

“Come on, old man,” he shouted at a man drinking Budweiser at one of the tables. The bartender looked on, peering over his eyeglasses at the noise. “Drink something a little stronger than that cheap beer!”

The man, who wasn’t that old, turned to Ross.

“Didn’t you hear the lady?” he asked, sounding mildly amused. “This is a $5.50 beer! Ain’t cheap, son.”

And so Kay and I met Steve Distler, age sixty, a self-described “crusty old Jarhead” who served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1971.

“I saw it all, man,” he said. “I was right in the middle of it.” He looks out the window and sighed. “The guys coming back from the Middle East today, they’re a lot more damaged than they would have been after Vietnam. They do the extended tours, years and years. We did our twelve months, we put our names on a list and we were out.”

He clarified his service record, saying that he took an extended tour because he was offered a month of vacation in the middle with free airfare to wherever he wanted. Distler moved on to a second Bud and started talking economics and politics with other passengers—the decline of the American empire.

“We used to have industry,” he said. “Now everything’s automated or overseas. Damn robots and Chinese. Where are the humans? What are kids supposed to do when they grow up? Where are the jobs?”

Back at our seats, without prompting, Kay turned and showed me her bullet scars—“This one from being in the wrong place in the wrong time,” she said, bony finger pointing at a shiny gray spot on her cheek, “and this one from shooting myself by accident, which was just wrong.”

She’s been kicked off trains twice before for smoking, and was once dumped on the side of the road in Nevada by a Greyhound driver for lighting up in the bus bathroom.

“That was a fun trip,” she said. “My husband left me in California while we were on vacation, so I was on my way back by bus. When they threw me off, I had to call him to come get me because I was broke. We were kind of on-and-off.”

Amtrak hasn’t allowed smoking on trains for years. If you smoke onboard, you will be caught and thrown off the train at the next stop. This was a common lament in the lounge car, where passengers spent their time talking about cigarettes, looking at cigarettes, trading cigarettes and counting the minutes to the next time they’d be allowed off the train to smoke. Gentlemen argued in thick drawl over the best flavor of Skoal, settling on Green Apple. A woman tried to convince her boyfriend to quit smoking, and you got the feeling it was an exchange rehearsed daily, the outcome never changing.

Outside of the lounge car’s dive bar moments, it’s quieter than you’d think on board. The train horn that blares in the middle of the night and carries for miles into your open bedroom window—where it reverberates around in low and mid-frequency ripples and amplifies and amplifies and eventually sneaks its way into your eardrum and whoooooo-whooooooos you right up out of dreamland—that horn is surprisingly absent on the train itself. Especially in coach, way in the back, so far in the back that the train has to take on sleeper passengers up front and then close the doors and scoot forward a few cars just to let the coach passengers board at smaller stations.

Back in coach, you don’t hear the horn. What you do hear—the constant day-and-night noise of the trip—is the hissing of the air conditioning, the squeal of steel wheels complaining as they grind around curves of steel track and the rattling of some loose piece of metal or plastic overhead. There’s a muted rumble the whole time, which kind of goes along with the usual shimmying and bumping and otherwise inconstant movement of the car. It’s not what you’d call herky-jerky, but the seatbelt sign would definitely be on if you were flying.

At night, you don’t see much through the windows. Every now and then you blow through some small town, catch a glimpse of the wreaths and garland hung over a classic little Main Street for Christmas, a halcyon Disneyesque vision, four-globe park lights and a blur of grass and flowers in a brick-paved square, sidewalk cafés with polished metal tables stacked together and shining in moonlight for a split second, and then it’s gone. An office building under construction flashes by, rigid spiderweb of metal studs gleaming in the sodium orange of a streetlight. You see a restored theatre circa 1898 in Southern Pines, North Carolina, bright sign touting a free movie to an empty midnight street: “The Last Waltz”, this week only, the blinking marquee still a purple fuzz in the rear of your eyes as once again the train is back in absolute darkness, rumbling on into the night, a solitary silver star shooting ever onward.

Curled under a ratty Aztec blanket which smelled of smoke and appeared to be made as much of cloth as of the several kinds of animal hair clinging to its surface—she smilingly offered to share this if I felt cold during the night—Kay propped her feet up the seat-back tray and went to sleep. As the train swayed back and forth, my seatmate and her feet did their best to affirm inertial physics, sliding in the opposite direction of the car’s rumbling, somehow edging closer to me every time. There are no serene Sleeping Beauties on Amtrak—people snore, make vague animal noises as they move about in half-awareness. When else do so many people sleep in the same sociable, jostling, ground-level place? You feel a distant, primal connection to smoky caves, mammoth flesh roasting slowly over a low fire, fur-clad humans in small sleeping huddles. History calls out to you from the murky past, a shadow jumping wildly on the cave wall in dying firelight, whispers gently, jokingly, “You haven’t changed as much as you think you have…”

I have a vivid childhood memory of riding Amtrak to New York City with my family. Stopped in the train yard at Union Station in Washington, D.C., we had breakfast in the dining car. I had the best plate of French toast I can ever remember eating, one of the defining breakfast memories of my childhood. When I woke up Wednesday morning next to a quietly snoring Kay, I decided to eat breakfast in the dining car and relive that moment. The French toast, served with coffee and orange juice and a single bright red sliced strawberry, was very good. Not quite as good as my memory, but then again that’s an idealized golden moment in my mind. Likely, I had just been very hungry all those years ago in D.C., and I would have been happy to idolize anything on the menu.

People read a lot on the train. Stieg Larsson books, graphic novels, magazines, day-old newspapers. I high-fived a kid who was reading a Calvin & Hobbes anthology. Good taste, man. Good taste. A few people were working on papers for business or school, but most with laptops were watching movies. Easy A. V for Vendetta. Star Wars prequels. Tyler Perry films. Anything to pass the time, because on the train there’s always more time to pass. You can disappear into a movie or two, chew through a whole novel, and still be in the same state, just trundling along.

People also spend a lot of time looking out the windows, watching the country slip past at ground level. Daylight makes this easier, of course. Lots of trees, cultivated fields, the occasional river. In more developed areas, stacks of jersey barriers, bricks, rebar; rusting bulldozers, rusting water heaters, random pieces of equipment so rusted that their original form is unknowable; new and neatly fenced-off warehouses casting long shadows on crumbling and abandoned warehouses; used tires, wood pallets, junk cars, huge multicolor mountains of empty 55 gallon chemical drums, all awaiting recycling or decomposition.

Concrete blocks and concrete rubble—everything begins and ends in the industrial yards beside the tracks, interfacing with the circulatory system of the nation, the great network of freight trains. You’re just a civilian interloper, a weird human observer in this world of machines. Maybe Distler is right. Maybe progress has gone so far beyond the human level that we can’t relate, can’t keep up, can’t stop it. We can only ride along, peering out the windows, marveling, fearing.

Kay got off the train in Winter Haven as promised. I helped her with her bags one last time, thanked her for her stories and went back to my seat. I was assigned a new seatmate immediately—the train was completely booked for most of the journey. Justin, a twenty-two year-old chef-in-training, sat down and shared his recipe for barbeque turkey. A natural conversation topic, perhaps, given the season.

“My girlfriend was skeptical the first time I made it,” he said. “You just cut it up, salt it a bit, grill it on low heat for hours and slowly baste on the sauce. You have the make the sauce yourself, of course; otherwise it’s no good. That’s the thing most people skip.”

The impressive thing about Justin was his photographic memory and insanely fast-moving mind. In the middle of a conversation about his dog, he’d suddenly blurt out something about jellyfish, then for my benefit explain how he got there.

“I have a very low tolerance for stupid people because of how fast my mind moves,” he said. “I’m always thinking ten steps ahead of what I’m saying. My girlfriend knows to just put up her hand and say, ‘Explain’ whenever I jump too fast. But it has its advantages.”

I asked him what he meant by that, and he laid out a scenario. Picture a girl at a bar, he said, talking to a guy. She writes her number on a napkin, or maybe types it right into his phone.

“I remember the number, what she was wearing, what they were talking about,” he said. “Every detail. I call her up the next afternoon, feed it all back to her, ask her out that night. She doesn’t remember the guy, and I sound legit. I hate all that stupid bar conversation anyway.”

He told stories like that for the next hour—the Readers Digest version of his life—of the adventures of his super-fast mind. Crazy schemes, feats of mental trickery. Lots of bets won to the disbelief of others. It was quite entertaining, and thankfully he didn’t have any bullet scars to show off. When he got off in West Palm Beach, waving his wide-brim hat in the air to attract the attention of his girlfriend, who waiting farther down the platform ran in sandals to greet him, I finally had an open seat next to me. My own stop was just twenty minutes down the line, so it wasn’t a major luxury, but the silence and space was still refreshing.

And finally, almost 22 hours since leaving Durham, the Silver Star slowed to a stop in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Palm trees and greenery. Parrots chirping somewhere. The tropical air heavy with humidity, the ocean not too far away. Solid ground feels strange—you get “train legs” like you would on a constantly pitching boat, and the sudden stability underfoot is weird for a few seconds. But then it’s family and friends, relaxation and your own room at home. You wonder why who didn’t just fly: you could have had another day or two of this. But it’s the stories, the people you meet, the view of the country as it really is—that’s the real value of taking the train these days. And boy, did I have some travel stories to tell at the Thanksgiving dinner table.