Into Sunlit Captivities
An Essay on America, and Trains
“When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.”
— John Steinbeck, ‘Travels with Charley in Search of America’ (1960)
“In keeping constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, we prevent ourselves from fully living. Ponder this… ‘The fool, with all his other faults, has this also: he is always getting ready to live.’”
— Seneca, ‘On Groundless Fears’ (63–65 CE)
“The train arrived at Ayudhya. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway station. After all, if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim, weary vastness of London.”
— Somerset Maugham, ‘The Gentleman in the Parlour’ (1930)
“Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.”
— Paul Theroux, ‘The Old Patagonian Express’ (1979)
There is a woman working at the coffeeshop across from Amtrak’s station in San Luis Obispo, California who writes novels. On that warm January afternoon when I came across her, she was wearing two pencils in a loose bun of hair and a tee shirt that read “too many books, too little time.” And I know about her literary enthusiasms only because she told me — with an hour to kill before jumping on the Coast Starlight, a train that departs from Los Angeles and ends up in Seattle, stopping in SLO along the way, I sat down at a corner table in her cafe and pulled out my laptop. She noticed, refilled her mug, and came over to chat.
“How are you starting this piece of yours?” she eventually asked, after a bit of smaller talk that revealed what I was up to, which was something like the scribbling of travel notes that might at some point turn into a few coherent paragraphs of writing.
All the same, I told her that I wasn’t sure yet.
“Well hun, you’d be wise to start with something sad. If you start with something sad, everyone’s sympathies will be on your side right away, and after that, the rest is a breeze. It’s really what all the best novelists do.”
The advice was so perfectly delivered that I had no choice but to honor it, so instead of conjuring up some hopefully elegant sentences about my glittering California surroundings, I sat in the sunny corner of that coffeeshop — with its stellar light and delicious aromas and not really a modicum of anything that might make someone unhappy — and tried to think of the saddest thing I could.
All I came up with was Sense and Sensibility. I didn’t personally have any doleful attachments to the Jane Austen novel — but the man in Marfa did.
Marfa is a small, tidy town in West Texas vaguely known for its prominence as a filming location for Hollywood westerns set in centuries past. A train that I was on had stopped there a week earlier to deal with a quick mechanical fix, and with 30 minutes to kill I wandered across the train platform, into one of the only businesses with an open door on a Monday afternoon, which was a tumbledown little operation named “We Sell Your Used Furniture.” Tucked in the bottom corner of the front window was a piece of paper, torn from a spiral-bound notebook and handwritten in pencil, that said: “& books!”
The aforementioned man in Marfa is the owner of this shop, and his note on the glass was a far-too-modest estimation of his library inside. The place, which did I guess have a few nightstands and battered old vanities with stickers on them, sure, was really most notable for its back-left corner, which was a collection of books that would certainly rival most.
He had old boxed sets of literary masterpieces from around the world; and piles of reprinted letters penned by explorers and writers and scientists, which had never been circulated widely to the public but now you could nearly hear them, if you turned your ear and listened closely to that little corner of Marfa, sharing notes about their travels and discoveries; and boxes of dusty maps, some as mundane as a new municipal zoning regulation from the 1910’s and some as marvelous as a vintage relief of East Africa, replete with colonial names that are now long out of use; and a set of Churchill’s World War II memoirs that looked as if they were just as well-traveled as the itinerant statesman himself; and stunning, leather-bound tomes that were pressed very long ago and should not have looked as good as they did; and copies of the Bible and the Qu’ran and the Torah and a Bhagavad Gita; and a shelf full of Americans writing about America, plus one full of Britons writing about everywhere besides Great Britain; and an entire wall guarded by a sign that said “$1,” which was huge but couldn’t muffle an almost audible whisper from beyond the edge of the shelf that said “come on in and have a look.”
Myself and another passenger on site couldn’t believe the literary bounty before our eyes, and probably both had a flicker of doubt on whether to walk back across the street in 21 minutes to catch our train or just hang out in the furniture store for another day and get the next one.
We all chatted — the traingoers and the furniture hawker — and sooner or later we got around to asking the central question of how he had come across this collection, and with a notable pause and a clear rush of emotion he told us: it was his mother’s. She had been wealthy once, daughter to an early princeling of the Texas oil scene (there were more untold stories hiding under that point, no doubt) who on one winter day in the late 1920’s decided to leave home and embark on a life of travel. She was an avid reader, and these were her things.
At that moment, the man’s emotion swelled enough to produce a tear in one eye as he quietly described to us that he was in the process of selling his mother’s treasures. Incredible as those shelves were, a fact which he certainly appreciated, they made him sad to be surrounded by. And if he could share a few with travelers through Marfa, off on their own adventures and picking up their own curios along the way, then “it would be a good and happy thing,” in his words. He described himself as a man with simple wants, and one of those wants was to now, after many years, move on.
He held up a finger, then reached down under the counter and pulled out a small brown book with a tiny gold script centered across its front cover.
“Sense and Sensibility,” he said. “By Austen. This was her favorite…I do think I’ll keep this one.”
With that he waved us both off kindly and asked us to be well, just as the train spit out a loud whistle and puffed a billow of hot air across the street.
Ten seconds before meeting the girl with pencils in her hair in the California coffeeshop, I wouldn’t have expected to begin any written recollection of such a well-remembered journey with such a melancholy tale. But such is the experience of taking long trains across the wild face of America — one is likely to come in contact with a great number of characters. Some are strange and some are neighborly, some are rambunctious and some are pensive, many are forgettable and a few are definitely not. (Here is an early point of difference between the long-distance train, car, or plane trip: only the former can put you in real contact with a country’s residents. Cars are the most isolating of travel methods, and any stranger you might come across in an airport is usually upset, stressed, or in a state of complete detachment from the world beyond themselves). Often times we shy away from trips far from home for the very reason of knowing that each person met will be a new one, but if presented with the opportunity to hop on the rails in America, even for a relatively short amount of time, I would earnestly recommend that you go for it. With any luck, the novelist was right — now that sympathies are properly situated, I might halfway convince someone to do such a thing.
Over the past few months, I found myself with a bit of extra time and a desire to try and see America from a perspective other than those experienced most often these days: the beautiful but detached views from a plane window, the dun-colored confinements of an interstate highway system, or the pixel bath of an Instagram scroll — things which are all convenient yet uncoupled from reality in some way or another. The technology of it all has made the distant place more knowable to everyone, yet less necessary to visit personally. I was hoping to look and listen and move, and to talk to people, sure, but also to just make camp in a corner (as in the case of the coffeeshop) and observe a country covertly.
With these goals loosely established, I chose to take the train.
Long distance train journeys are often a purely emotional undertaking — evoking senses of classical adventure and not at all practical as a modern means of transportation — but not always. Normally ridiculous itineraries become completely reasonable once inside the confines of a train. I was — as an overland traveler sometimes must — romanticizing the escapade, but I also met people with far more grounded outlooks. They were on their way to Tucson from Maine, or coming out of Portland and heading towards Jacksonville. There is, on the rails, an innate sense of respect for the far-flung. On a boarding platform in America’s southeast, one solo traveler was met with quiet nods of approval after remarking that his destination was Flagstaff, but another was showered with “well dones” and “right ons” when she one-upped him with Vancouver. Any landing place more than 1,000 miles away is likely to receive some genuine admiration from fellow locomotive folk. I met retirees taking the slow route to their summer vacation, a few people who simply weren’t into flying, and a proud and peripatetic prostitute in Texas who happily explained her massive knowledge of the Amtrak system to a curious group of listeners. Once aboard, it’s really not all that difficult to separate the travelers from the passengers — one group hauls around paperbacks and spends plenty of time staring out the window, whereas the other carries on with work or tucks into a movie, head down, chugging along through the transportation method that they’ve chosen to get from A to B.
Filled with starry-eyed ideas of adventures to be had on the way to the west, I took first the Empire Builder from Pittsburgh to Seattle (a city which, while standing on a train platform in Pennsylvania, seemed impossibly distant), pushing through the fire-like hues of a midwest autumn before inching north to Glacier National Park and finally the wet, dense forests of the Cascade range. I took the Capitol Limited through forgotten stretches of Southern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Northern Maryland, places where the land can be bursting with color in springtime but completely starved of it in winter, and where crumbling huddles of trailers and old houses are pinned between the train tracks and the river for much of the ride, showing only the faintest signs of inhabitance. I took a slow-moving and jam-packed iteration of the Crescent from Washington, D.C. all the way south to New Orleans, a train that spent a very rainy day crawling along the edges of Appalachia, with little sunlight or highlight besides when the skies cleared just in time for our entrance into the southern marshlands, inside of which the sinking sun gave the thick soaked foliage an appearance of actual gold. I took the Sunset Limited from the bayou across the belt of the country to Los Angeles, a route where the train rolls along in lonesome defiance of humanity through the epic stretches of America’s southwest, and where the snacks at trackside shops changed from crawfish étouffée to beef brisket to carnitas burritos over the course of a single trip. I took the Pacific Surfliner along the beaches of San Diego, L.A., and Santa Barbara, the rails pressed narrowly between the ocean and the highway, the train trading positional advantages with swells on one side and trucks strapped with surfboards on the other. I took the Coast Starlight from central California’s gentle green hills all the way up through the agriculturally rich Salinas Valley and sequestered landscapes that Oregon puts on display before an arrival in Portland. I took the Cascades through Seattle and onward to the northwest corner of the nation, Bellingham, in clear sight of British Columbia. I took the Alaska Railroad’s Aurora Winter from Anchorage to Fairbanks, circling Denali and punching through the sentry-like mountains that guard the 49th state’s interior, as the train glass frosted opaque in a heroic effort to shield passengers from the ungodly February temperatures outside. I took just about every single one of the northeast trains, slithering as they do along the hot, dusty corridors of our Atlantic cities before they sink into a crowded urban basement to unload. Sooner or later it would be time to take the matriarch of all the American train journeys, The California Zephyr, which slips its way through the Rockies, momentarily disrupting the quietly resplendent peaks and pristine alpine streams with a loud symphony of steel and steam. Finally, I’d planned to traverse America’s northern neighbor in a single, two-train swing — Canada’s epic routes of The Canadian and The Ocean — first from Vancouver to Montreal, then on to Halifax and St. John’s, on the very eastern edge of the continent.
It was about 16,000 miles in total, two thirds of which was tackled on a single trip in a North American winter, but by the early summer I found myself with a battered set of bags piled on the country’s sidewalks again, trundling around the States on giant metal monsters through cities big and small, piecing together maps and research and trips taken by travelers in different decades, going to sleep in one place and waking up 500 miles away.
To go about these travels in modern America and not be completely struck by the country’s unmistakeable diversity would only be possible in a state of habitual ignorance.
It is a diversity in physical geography, a field in which the U.S. is better-endowed than arguably any other on Earth. The contiguous United States are situated happily within the northern temperate zone — allowing for a rich crop in many places — with complete access to two major world oceans. The separation (or, rather, isolation) of those States from others allowed a government to more deeply prioritize local affairs than global ones in the early pages of its history, a position that would have vast implications for its role in the international community. And besides the one that it brought upon itself, large-scale wars have barely left any scars at all on the domestic lands of America.
The U.S. is also lucky to have a low-lying, navigable, and perfectly-oriented river system that, in early days, served to both unite the country and allow it to expand. Eastern urban areas were able to trade with each other, and the veins could eventually be explored west. Compare this to Russia, in which the rivers mostly run vertically, acting as natural borders between different ethnic groups and do much to fracture the country’s cohesion, or to Africa, where commerce can’t flow as easily given the unrelenting presence of inaccessible terrain and inland waterfalls. Like Western Europe, America’s regions — different as they were — found oneness in the binding power of common waters. And eventually, trains and highways — those man-made commercial cousins to the natural river — could be cast over the land in further efforts to connect a continent.
The eastern residents of those early United States moved westward into lands of unbelievable abundance, pushing past frontiers that are easy to take for granted today. The conquest of the western prairies, deserts, mountains, coastlines, and the indigenous peoples who called these places home serve as some of the earliest examples of American imperial agency. Today, the steel-gray gunships of the Pacific Fleet, sitting in San Diego and looking west across the water towards Asia, are a reminder of this — only once one frontier has been conquered can sights be firmly set elsewhere. The weapons on those shipdecks aim directly at a statement made by an early Secretary of State, in which he hoped that the new country would “go not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
Modern America is largely free from sovereign antagonization on the home front, an enviable situation not shared by many nations trying to work towards their own developments. The U.S. has a completely friendly relationship with her neighbor in the north and an amicable — if not easy — one with her neighbors in the south. Immigration disputes are quite a bit different than blatant war. The biggest problem that America has in her own hemisphere is deciding on what terms she would like to approach the dynamic of overcrowding and unrest in Central and South America, which every year brings a great deal of people to huddle at her doorstep.
America is also a kaleidoscope of human geography. It is, at once, very rich and very poor. It becomes hard not to notice, throughout a journey that took me to many of the country’s most significant places by way of some of its most forgotten ones, the changing nature of the so called “middle class.” This is much written about but recognizable from the ground — it is a group that, on aggregate, is either dissolving into difficult and unsettled times or solidifying into a more comfortable echelon of wealth, which will be unachievable for many. I write these current sentences from a small community in central Colorado, where the streets are worn out and home to many drifters, but the faces of the lovely green mountains above are freckled with glass mansions in every direction. Some peaks look down their noses at the valley below.
When transposing these complex changes into the generalizing terms of geography, it becomes clear that the biggest cities are far more connected with other such places around the world than they are with those in the hinterlands of their own country. The ilk of New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami are much more London, Dubai, and Paris than they are Chattanooga, Omaha, or Fresno. The most cosmopolitan of these places embrace the huge, unquantifiable forces that push our world forward — technology, globalization, finance, communication, and the like — the same forces that loom behind the sudden appearance of a new second home or trendy coffeeshop in Colorado, pressing down and threatening a heritage, a place, a people, a way of doing things.
For anyone living in or making a visit to America, glimpses into the realities of all of these things — beautiful and melancholy alike — are accessible by picking up a cheap ticket on a train.
Sometimes — more often than not, on the big cross-country routes — you wake up to direct beauty, barreling through some remote landscape to a bucolic dawn outside of the window. You get up, step into the observation car, and as a cresting sun meets the glass and spills rainbows across your view of the fast-moving world, you wonder why you haven’t done this before. But sometimes you wake up to immediate melancholy, crawling through a drab fringe of a city underneath the piercingly metallic twang of an announcement through bad speakers, while trying to shake off a stiffening sleep, two hours behind schedule. And here are the truly confrontational realities of train travel: one version is easy to romanticize, and one is easy to hate. But it seems to me to be a rare thing these days to have an experience like some that are possible on a good train trip; the suffering that is normally associated with a long stint on public transportation can be completely effaced by a magical moment or two that is had along the way, and also by the wonderful reality of covering so much ground — on the actual ground.
Travel has become much more of a teleportation than a transition of late. On one end of this spectrum is the insipid prospect of the standard domestic business trip, which usually doesn’t offer much variety at all, for as unique as American cities can be, we get on airplanes and stop by coffeeshops and visit office parks and go to gyms that mostly look exactly as they do in the place we just came from. On the other end of the spectrum is the long-distance international adventure, tantalizing but completely devoid of any link between the here and the there, where one can be wrapping up a slide deck in Midtown Manhattan in the late afternoon on a Wednesday and chasing elephants around the Serengeti before brunch on Thursday. That perennial train passenger Paul Theroux offers some commentary, during an overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town, by saying: “A person who has not crossed an African border on foot or by train has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality.”
I’ve pieced together my own slipshod theory that on a three hour train ride, you can’t wait to get off, but after a thirty hour train ride, you’d rather stay on. In the U.S., this view gains credibility as you move west. West is the way that Americans have always been romantic about going, and the child-like excitement of seeing something new and getting there the long way — even if propelled by leisure rather than necessity — can definitely still be found on train platforms in the east before the start of a big journey in the other direction. Show me the rider that goes completely numb during their umpteenth trip between New York and Philly on the lamentable Northeast Regional, and I’ll refresh their locomotive enthusiasms over a chilled evening beer in the observation car of a train floating alone through a pastoral scene in America’s midwest, while the sun sets in rich colors down below the prairie on its way to the other side of the world, us both armed with the knowledge that our ride is going to follow as far as it can — tomorrow it will maneuver the Rockies, and the day after that, reach the coast.
Sometimes it’s clear that a neighbor is in a painful situation — again, almost always on the East Coast — they’re spending a long few hours on a boring train. On plenty more than one occasion, I’ve overheard someone in this position call their ride, who is waiting for them at the next station, and mention how they can’t wait to get off and end the dreadful outing for good.
And to be sure, the realities of taking long-distance trains are not always as prim and likeable as the vintage Amtrak posters displayed in their stations would have you believe. On these pieces of colorful propaganda, classically-named trains — their titles printed in charming fonts and splashed across a backdrop that nods toward some halcyon setting in American history — drift though scenes of starry purple nights, mountain peaks, blood orange sunsets, prairies, deep green forests, and wide coastlines. In real life, you might get stuck in a seat next to a loud neighbor, or have to escape to a different car for a break from some outburst of first-world insanity, or wait for an hour while a freight train full of corn syrup and coal hijacks the tracks, or have a night of terrible sleep, or a shit meal — and the journey doesn’t feel so wonderfully anachronistic. (‘I read a dumb essay written by that naive clown and was expecting sunsets and adventure! Now there’s a stinking, unidentified liquid slopped next to me on the floor and I’ve had the same sandwich for three dinners in a row!’) Sometimes a trip that is hopefully reflective is interrupted by annoyance, and sometimes a trip expecting excitement is dulled into despair.
But as Davos once said, a single moldy speck on an onion doesn’t ruin the whole thing; and as Cheryl Strayed once said, there’s a sunrise and sunset everyday, if only we cared enough to put ourselves in front of them. A train quarantine is far more enjoyable than most other types of quarantine that most of us have battled through in recent years, and it’s a good exercise to occasionally spend a lot of time — if we can spare it — on a single thing. Take ninety minutes to watch the sun go down. Listen to three albums without skipping any songs. Put down the phone and read something for awhile. To steal a catchphrase that is printed on the inner-door of most Amtrak toilets: “Keep It Clean, and Enjoy The Journey!”
So grab a book, and hop on a train. It’s all just as well to read a gut-punch of a sentence in your kitchen, but if you instead get the pleasure of doing so in front of a mountain or a good sunset while charging down the rails towards somewhere far away from home, it might just change the direction of your life. I think it may have changed mine.
/S
Colorado, June 2022
