TRAVEL BY AIR is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June then, after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago. My daughter had a roomette, my wife and I a bedroom: the couch, facing the front of the train, becomes a bed; above it is a bunk, locked into the wall, lowered at night; a narrow shoe locker has hangers for shirts; there is a bathroom with a lavatory latched into the wall above the toilet; you lower it to wash and when you lift it into the wall again, it drains; the room has a wide window and is air-conditioned, and a small fan over the door stirs the air above the couch, the bunks.
We go to the club car as the train gets underway, and are sitting with our first drinks when the porter who showed us aboard comes in and sits at the table across the aisle. He looks at me and says: “You’re in the wrong car.”
“This one?”
“No. The bedroom. Room A is right, but it’s Room A in the next car.”
I follow him out and we move the luggage and I go back to my drink and watch the backward rush of late spring green, while a boy with a transistor radio plays rock music so loudly that no table or booth is free of it, and I wonder if we need an amendment to the First Amendment, or thousands of violated Americans willing to break the portable radios of those people whose sonic selfishness disturbs the sound of breakers and breeze at beaches, the quiet of parks, and even the sounds of baseball and fans and vendors at Fenway Park where I’ve often heard the play-by-play from nearby fans with strange needs, and once heard a basketball game from the row behind me.
My wife asks him to turn it lower and he does, and we pass trees interrupted by parking lots and factories and stores and houses of small towns, and I remember the cities our trains have crept through since morning, where the tall bleak monuments stood, walls of indefinable color, not brown or grey or black: the color of hopes slowly constricted through the years, and I look out at lovely farms and grazing dairy cattle in green pastures in maligned New Jersey. In a light rain we cross the Delaware into Trenton; on the river a man stands in an outboard, under a sheltering bridge. West of Trenton are suburbs, with softball diamonds and supermarkets and pastel houses, small and built close to each other, those little homes where people paid for a piece of the country, and to judge them from the distance of a train, with an eye for size and space, to judge them from anywhere, is foolish; for finally you know that, as with the train compartment, one could disappear nightly and happily into those houses. But somehow they seem sad, perhaps because I believe that anyone who wants to own one of them would also want to own a bigger one with more lawn and trees, so the house becomes another burial place of surrendered hope. Maybe it means that, along the tracks, America is sad.
Philadelphia is the saddest, so far, of all: looking as though it has been defeated after a long siege, ending in house-to-house combat, and then abandoned, leaving the brick factories and mills with their broken windows, and the dwellings built together without yards or even a glimpse of light between them, all these buildings looking vacated months ago by the wounded and dead. But leaving Philadelphia we go through Bryn Mawr where, for a short distance, there is not only light between homes but wide lawns with trees, dark green in the grey light of the wet sky. The hope for a piece of the country is realized here: a piece of it far enough away from neighbors so you cannot smell, hear, or even see them; and again the train’s sleeping compartment comes to mind, its sealed-in privacy paid for more dearly than the coach seats, where you smell and hear and see everyone; so that the train becomes a mobile microcosm of the land.
It is cocktail hour in the club car, and the citizenry are reading bad books. I am sipping a vodka and tonic when, not three feet from my window, which is wider than the table where we sit, an eastbound train rushes past, adding to the stimulation of liquor: I feel I can reach out and touch speeding steel. At six o’clock the sun breaks through, trees and meadows are lighter green and, far from the tracks, white houses are nestled at the edge of forested hills. Then we are in farm country: long wide fields east of Lancaster, some separated by trees growing in line; large houses and barns, and the sky here is touched by trees and silos. Now the outskirts of cities are as something seen long ago, memory of them muted by this landscape, and I know I have not lost touch with the land but, reared in towns and suburbs, was already removed from it at birth. People’s love of the country is simple and profound: out here one lives on real earth, not a measured and manicured replica of it, or in an apartment whose seclusion consists of steel and concrete rising above the streets, and high up there, one can have colored walls and the smells of toiletry and cooking. We pass trees so dense that we cannot see between them, our vision narrowed to our window and the green trees in the late sunlight, and the sky patched with blue. Then we leave the trees and, in the open, the sky is slashed by tall grey turrets and we pass Three Mile Island. Then we go along the tree-grown banks of the Susquehanna, into Harrisburg. By dinner the sun is out, the sky blue, and as we are seated we cross the Susquehanna, broad, with tiny grassy islands.
The steward comes for our drink orders: a vodka and tonic, and a half bottle of burgundy with two glasses. He assumes the two glasses are for my wife and daughter, and says: “I’ll bring it and you pour it. I know they’re not twenty-one, and I won’t touch it.”
I tell him one glass is for me, the other for my young wife. When he brings the wine, he pours it and says: “Pennsylvania, Iowa, Texas, Arkansas are the bad states. We know them. They come aboard and arrest the bartender. In Oklahoma you can only sell beer with an Oklahoma stamp on it.”
Still we are following the Susquehanna, trees along the banks, the earth rising in ridges to the horizon. I go to the club car so I can smoke with my drink, and sit with a black man with white hair and moustache. He is from New Jersey, and he and his wife are going to St. Louis to visit a niece.
“I was supposed to be born in New Orleans,” he says. “But my daddy got on a moving van and didn’t have the sense to get off. He just couldn’t stay settled. Started in Georgia, got to Louisiana, ended in Trenton.”
“Are you still working?”
“I own a garage, knock out a few dents. Something to do while I’m retired. But it’s hard to keep help.”
“They don’t show?”
“They don’t show, or when they do, they want all the money.”
He tells me to watch for the horseshoe turn later that night.
“You see a train moving and you think it’s another train, then you realize it’s the same one you’re riding.”
“Maybe I’ll see you here for that, after dinner.”
“Maybe. My wife’s up in the car. I came back to smoke. She worries about our stuff, wants to watch it all the time. I try not to worry. This year I’ll be seventy-two. How much can I take with me?”
“Six feet of the country.”
“They probably won’t give me all of that.”
I go back to the dining car; the sun is setting behind trees, peering through as though perched on the fork of bough and trunk; then it is on the crest of a blue ridge, beyond the river and trees.
After dinner I drink a beer in the club car and talk with Doris, a black woman tending bar. She asks where I am going, then says: “You’ll love the Zephyr: two decks, and the scenery from Denver on west is beautiful. My husband is a retired veteran, and he flew a lot in the service, but hadn’t hardly been on trains. So we were going to L.A. and I said Let’s go by train. He fell in love with it. He loved it so much that he took the train back from L.A. I’m telling you, honey, he left before me, and I flew back.”
“You married an older man too. You don’t look over twenty-five.”
“I’m past twenty-five, but my husband’s forty-five.”
“My wife’s twenty-three.”
“There you go. Nothing wrong with that. I’d never marry a young man again: too many hassles. You got to get somebody settled. This man that works for Amtrak asked me about a friend of his that was forty-seven and wanted to marry a girl that was twenty. But I knew he was talking about himself. I told him: Listen: don’t worry about age. It don’t mean nothing. You need a woman that understands your work and loves you. Some can and some can’t and don’t matter how old they are. He said he wanted some children. I said Go ahead and have children. Then he said he was worried because she was going to go to college. I said She’s not worried about you not having an education, so don’t worry about her having one.”
We sleep in Pennsylvania with the shade up so we can watch the darkness and street lights and silhouettes of trees. I wake at five-thirty in sunlight and the flat green country east of Fort Wayne: farms, the neighborhoods of white houses looking less desperate, more sturdy that those east of us, crouching at the sides of cities, like sleeping rabbits in the shadow of the hawk. I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air. From the tracks, Fort Wayne is attractive. Under a light blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds, the city’s few tall buildings are pale beige. The streets are wide and quiet, probably looking wide because they are quiet. The houses near the tracks are old; many of them are two-storied, and in their lawns are old trees. Leaving these, as I order poached eggs on corned beef hash, we move through wooded country, then farms again and country neighborhoods, the houses spaced among low hills and clustered trees.
At Chicago the train passes homes where blacks live: at first they are decently spaced, single-story, with yards and trees, much like the white suburbs outside other cities, but juxtaposed with vacant weed-grown lots and junkyards; farther on, the houses become four- or five-storied tenements with less and less space between them until, in the final area before the train yard, there is none. It is strange to come into a city after the expanse of country, and I feel I am looking at pictures of my country’s history: a city built because of a lake, and on the city’s outskirts the blacks, descended from slaves, cheap labor pushed northward, holding their piece of the land — the few rooms, the screened windows — under the concrete-pierced sky.
We are in Chicago at nine-thirty and spend the day in the city with a friend, showers and a change of clothes, margaritas and Mexican food at la Margarita; we walk to book-stores on Michigan Avenue and buy Simenon, Zola, James Webb, and Sara Vogan. We leave at six-fifty that evening on the San Francisco Zephyr, with a family room for the three of us: the couch becomes a double bed and there is a fold-down bunk above it and another at its foot; a few paces away, down the hall, are six good bathrooms. We are on the first floor. Before dinner we go to the second floor club car, with wide windows and overhead windows, swivel chairs and couches, and we go through green farm country under the enormous circus tent of the midwestern sky, the sun descending, an orange ball over trees and rooftops, a long grey-blue cirrus cloud at the horizon, almost the color of a distant ship; then, the sun gone, a strip of gold cloud and trees silhouetted against the rose and golden sky, their crowns burnished, and we go with that sunset for miles, then into the night.
On Friday we wake in Nebraska, and I think about the blacks: the porters and stewards, bartenders and waiters, each of them with a certain duende, so that, like the porter leaving New York (“You’re in the wrong room”), they are friendly in a way that lets you know they are not paid attendants, servile to the whim of anyone owning a ticket, but your proud and sometimes avuncular hosts. Perhaps this comes from knowing the train so well, from the camaraderie of work, from the skillful legs and hands that don’t stumble or spill, from feeling finally that it’s their train; and it occurs to me that this is good work for the dispossessed of the land: seeing the country’s landscapes from a clean mobile home and place of work, a place they know and command, as if The Man Without a Country had been given command of a ship to cruise America’s coasts and rivers.
At breakfast we enter Colorado, the country mostly flat and grassy, with scattered trees and low green scrub brush. The sky is cloudless, an expanse of unbroken blue from horizon to horizon. Cows watch us, and a jackrabbit bolts. After breakfast, the club car is filled, so we go down to our room, which occupies the width of the car, with wide windows on both sides. To the north there are ridges as we move toward Denver. West of Fort Morgan we are in rolling terrain, some large farms, penned cattle, then grass and white and yellow flowers growing wild. By eleven o’clock we can see the Rockies. Leaving Denver, we skip lunch, sit in the club car, and look out at the snow-capped mountain range to the west, as the train goes north to Cheyenne, where we turn west toward Laramie and see antelopes standing in the open. Because they are so close to the train, they seem tame; but then I realize that there are no people out there, and the train is going through their country, whose flat scrub-grown surface is split by long draws, and rises steeply into buttes and, in the distance, mesas. We stop at Rawlins and I go downstairs, to the bar, to buy cigarettes. A black woman named Sharon Avington is tending bar, selling snacks, and working a microwave oven. She doesn’t have Marlboros.
“I’ve got exotic brands: Merit, Kent III, Salem Lights — but you see those machines in the station?” She points through the open door at a window in the small station. “You go in there. But don’t dawdle.”
I go, stopping long enough to read the sign on the station door:
Rule of the day: DON’T get off the train if you
can’t hurry back.
Missed this month — 3
Near misses — 0
In the club car we watch grazing antelope, russet buttes, and the citizenry. While driving the highways and walking the streets and roads of America, I blame the garbage I see on an abstraction: they dropped their emptied cigarette packs and cans and bottles and wrappers and boxes. Here on the train we watch them do it. There are no waiters in the club car, but there is a large garbage can; the arms of the chairs and the tables have ashtrays. By mid-afternoon smokers and drinkers have come and gone, leaving behind their coat-of-arms: ashes and cans and plastic glasses. I watch one couple, a man with greying short hair and his wife; their dress and faces appear conservative, and I imagine their kitchen at home: clean, orderly, the emptied can or bottle immediately removed from the table and dropped in the garbage hidden behind a cupboard door. Yet on the table they share between their seats at the window, and in the shallow trough for drinks beneath the window, cans and glasses accumulate, ashes and matchsticks scatter. Then they leave.
First call for dinner is supposed to be at five, but today it is late, and the citizenry are lining up in the club car aisles, muttering behind our chairs as we watch the country. Downstairs Sharon is chilling the champagne we brought. A large woman keeps saying she will write to Amtrak. Others call for the steward. A wiry greying man in his fifties goes into the dining room and comes back with word: We were late getting to Rawlins and they had to turn off the power when we stopped there and the chefs did not want to start cooking before that, and then lose power.
“But he’s only a Negro,” the wiry man says.
My wife goes downstairs to the bar, comes back with the champagne, and I hold plastic glasses over her lap while she works on the cork. It pops loudly and the large woman softly screams.
“I thought it was a gun,” she says.
People laugh nervously, and for a while their anger dissipates. We drink the bottle of champagne while behind us in the aisle the voices rise again, and people sway against the backs of our seats. Outside the land stretches wide and treeless, broken by the steep sides and flat tops of buttes. Then we see a prairie dog village. At some of the holes, prairie dogs stand erectly and watch the passing train.
On Saturday, the last day of the journey, I wake in Carlin, Nevada. We are going through foothills then Battle Mountain, a town of trailers, with a sign at the highway: The Barite Capitol of the World. I go upstairs, through sleeping cars and the dining car, the smells of bacon and pancakes coming from the kitchen below, a few people eating early breakfast, through the club car, clean now and empty, and down to the bar. Sharon is working, and while I drink coffee a woman and her daughter, about eight, come in. The girl is barefooted and Sharon tells the woman not to let the child walk barefooted on the train. She says to the girl: “When you grow up and get married your husband will want to kiss your toes, and you want to have all five of them.”
Near the tracks, a coyote trots west. My wife comes in for coffee, and Sharon sits with us in a booth; in the booth across the aisle are a couple and their seven-year-old daughter and a boy who belongs to no one in the car, and who wears a T-shirt with, printed across the chest: Caution: Here Comes Trouble. Sharon talks to him. He is five, and his name is Casey. He is sitting beside the girl and, now and then, he peers at her and smiles. He and his mother and two-year-old sister are going to Martinez, he says. He keeps striking his left palm with his right fist. After a while, a conductor comes to the foot of the stairs.
“Did you know you’ve been lost?” he says. “Come on, son.” He looks at the girl, and says: “I don’t blame him for following that pretty girl around.”
Casey leaves with him, and the girl says: “I wish that boy took an airplane.”
“They lose them all the time,” Sharon says. “Soon as they come aboard, they expect the conductors to look after the kids. We had one drunk woman who got off in Omaha and forgot her little boy. A conductor found him curled up asleep in a men’s room. So they wrapped him in blankets and left him at the station in Sparks.”
“How far is that from Omaha?”
“Five hundred and twenty-two miles. But there wasn’t anyplace to leave him in between.”
I tell her about the angry people waiting for dinner last night.
“They’re just bored,” she says. “If they had some distraction, they’d be all right. And they’re the same ones that’ve been nickel-diming me all afternoon for snacks.”
We talk about Amtrak people losing jobs because of Reagan’s budget; and propositions thirteen in California and two and a half in Massachusetts taking away more jobs, and public services as well, and she says: “Those people in power: they make a decision on paper, in their offices. But where’s the heart? The heart, that is this country.”
After breakfast we move southwest along the Truckee River, through the mountains. A huge bird flies over the valley between the tracks and the mountains: dark grey, wide wings, moving up toward the high brown slopes spotted green with scattered brush. Two palominos are drinking in the river; they stand among rocks, the water beneath their knees, and the high country is closing in on the tracks, cutting off and diminishing the blue sky with small puffs of solitary white clouds, and we go to the club car to watch the Sierra Nevadas.
Reno’s so close to hell you can see Sparks, a trainman said. In Reno we pass tawdry casinos and hotels, and look away, at the mountains beyond them. Quickly we are past Reno’s outskirts, going between hills and past grazing sheep, to California: to Truckee in the Sierra Nevadas which rise now on both sides with slender evergreens growing up their slopes and with green shrubs on the lower hills and grass farther up. A young man and a boy are wading in the smooth-flowing river, fishing for trout. To the north, across the river, high on a bank, is Highway 80, and beyond it the mountains rise steeply, slopes of rock and brush and evergreens. We cross the river, it is south of us now, and I turn my seat around to watch it and the peaks we are leaving. We stop at Truckee, where the buildings are old, made of bricks, brown ones and red ones and one of yellow stone. They are lined facing the tracks on Donner Pass Road: Capitol Saloon and Dance Hall, shops, and on the hills above the road, old wooden houses among the evergreens.
The train climbs and the sun comes into my lap through the overhead window; behind us there is snow on the peaks. We reach Donner Lake, large and surrounded by trees, deep blue in the sunlight and dry air. We are in Donner Pass where they froze and starved, then through a long tunnel, someone’s lighter flares in the dark, and we come out in pines where houses are, trees growing thickly between them, the houses of redwood with aluminum roofs shining silver in the sun. We are going gradually down, the highway beneath us now, and beyond it is a narrow valley of trees, then the upward slope of a mountain, with evergreens covering most of it except for a wall of rock and patches of bare earth. The pines are tall and straight and slender, some almost cylindrical until the final tapering at their tops, others the shape of cones. A lone red peak, ridge-shaped, appears behind the peaks to the north of us, across the highway, which is far below now as we pass large rocks, deep gorges and, always, the evergreens. On a red rock near the tracks someone has written in white stones: HELLO.
We go through a short tunnel, come out with cabins below us, aluminum-roofed, a winding dirt road going down the mountain. Slowly we descend, pass south of and above a lake, ringed by brown hills and pines; the power lines in the distance are going downhill like silver ribbons through the trees. Then, between the slope we ride on and the mountain to the north, there is a long green valley stretching west, so that power lines and rails and train and the earth itself, the mountains and valley, are moving toward the sea.
My daughter tells me to look at the organized trees behind me: to the south the pines grow from a draw up the mountain so uniformly that a man from Ireland asks if they were planted, then says: “If you built a house in there, you’d have a bear at your door.” I go down to the bar for a beer and when I come up again I look down a ravine and across a deep wooded draw at mountains; the tracks curve and descend through trees and rocks and red earth, and the Irishman says: “I’ve seen trees in my time, but never like this: as far as the eye can see, and then some.”
We leave the mountains and move into rolling country that feels hot through the windows; a cactus grows in a box in a backyard, there are palm trees and apple orchards, and a pasture where cows graze and, among them, a white goat stands motionless on a lone rock. Groups of trailers are parked against palm trunks, under the wide leaves. The country changes to gently rolling land, and between lumber yards and houses, horses graze; we cross a river where a man fishes from a small island, and a man and his black dog ride in an outboard.
Between Roseville and Sacramento the land flattens and is crowded and we have reached, or returned to, cluttered America living close enough to each other to hear and recite the neighbors’ quarrels and exclamations of joy and grief, the only spaces those cleared of trees and reserved for sport: softball diamonds and golf courses. I am saddened by what we make: the buildings where they might as well hang a sign: THIS UGLY PLACE IS WHERE YOU WORK, the playing fields and parks, and the house to contain you. While somehow there is a trick at work and you have been removed not only from the land itself, but from its spirit; or, as Sharon says, the heart. After the open country and mountains, the earth looks punished, and it is hard to believe that its people have not been punished as well, for nothing more than the desire to love and to prove oneself worthy of that by going to work.
West of Davis there are irrigated farms and fields of yellow-brown hay with a wide black strip where they have burned it. To the south the sky is broad, nearly midwestern, but it seems lower; to the north it is hazy and broken by a mountain range. Corn is growing. Near us the low hills are grown with hay, and the trees on them are darker green against their sand dune color. Turning southwest we go through a stretch of marsh, white herons rising from it; then rows of grey ships are sitting on green and yellow grass, and we see the wide Sacramento and cross it and from the bridge we see the ships mothballed at Vallejo. We stop at Martinez and watch Casey outside with his mother and two-year-old sister, their hair moving in the breeze, Casey punching his palm with his fist.
Then we go downriver. On the opposite bank are blond hills; then men are fishing from a wharf, there is a marina with sailboats and fishing boats, and we are going south along the Bay. It is wide, muddy near the shore, then green, and across it there are blue ridges against the pale sky. Then we see the Oakland Bridge and, far off, the Golden Gate Bridge, and trees shaped by the wind leaning forever to the east, and a teenage black boy, lean and muscular in his shorts, jogging north along the tracks, his hands high, at his shoulders, punching: hooking and jabbing the sunlit air.
1981