Adventures of a Sun Seeker: Amtrak

"Hot hot HOT coffee!" trilled the conductor's voice over the loudspeaker, which is what finally woke me this morning. I had woken up with at least two locations in my body having turned into end-of-the-line tracks, left hand and right foot in a buzz from lack of blood. The man sitting next to me pulled what looked like half a grapefruit skin from a plastic bag and ate two bites of a stinky mustardy sandwich before replacing it. Or maybe the stinky mustard was my feet. I stretched like a kitten in a small basket and out from my kinked body rolled a burp so loud the man jumped.

There is little glamour in riding coach overnight.

I am on Amtrak, going to St Louis MO to visit a grad school friend, and then heading to Kansas for a conference for Cornell. I have never ridden more than a commuter train in my own country before, and traveling a distance by train was on my bucket list.

I boarded in Rochester last night at 11:40pm, glazed and tired and a little surreal, climbing steps into the silver coach. I walked the dark hallway and found a seat next to someone non-threatening who wasn't snoring. I'd bought a blanket-by-the-pound blanket, cheap, from the new goodwill surplus store, planning to leave it after the night, and snuggled in knowing it would be the only night we'd have together.

It feels a bit like camping, perhaps, in the acceptance-of-grime way, but with a scenic movement view and many more people. My sandals went stick stack stuck as I approached the tiny toilet in the bathroom. My yoga muscles asserted themselves and I stayed balanced as the bathroom swayed around me. I imagined some man before me in this tiny space, weaving and large, who probably had no yoga muscles, judging by the state of the toilet seat.

But upon returning to my seat I learned we were in Indiana and I looked out the window and noticed the roadside weeds were different. The delight of travel!

This train is a mega-diverse landscape, as it were. All colors and levels of income and ages. Walking the aisle at midnight to my seat, all the sleeping people in various degrees of nesting with blankets or with stoicism uncovered. The sweet scenes of people revealing their affections in sleep, children wrapped around each other, two women with their cornrow hair mingling together, a small girl tight between them.

To pass the hours I could read, I could write, I could listen to music. But for some time i was just looking out the window, realizing that a train passes through the inglorious back rooms and junk drawers and forgotten closets of these Midwest towns, the garbage centers and storage facilities and lines of abandoned porta potties backed up against the track. And also grain elevators, trampolines and squat aboveground pools in backyards.

And endless corn. So much corn. Irrigated corn. This I find incredibly depressing, that so much of our land area is going to feed cattle or to be made into ethanol.

The travel eagerness and curiosity is setting in. What's it like to live in South Bend Indiana? What makes this place different from another? Who rides Amtrak versus flying or greyhound? What are those orange clumpy-headed weed flowers along the track?

I changed trains in Chicago, stuffing my luggage into an expensive locker, and climbing from the underground platform into the bright looming city. I walked for hours, staring at buildings, moving to counteract the sitting. I padded around Millennium Park, found a shirt with Jesus Lizards on it in my favorite clothing chain (in hip cities and nowhere in the fingerlakes), and ate the best baba ganoush of my life (for $4). [yes Chef Kevin that is a challenge] To pad around, exploring, feeling porous and delighted by the simple fact of being somewhere new, my traveler surges alive again.

This way of travel also seems more believable, that I am actually truly moving the distance between the east coast and the Midwest. In a plane it is too quick, too high, too removed. The clanking chimes of the crossing guards blocking the road, for once not holding me up as a car but making so I could be one of those to blast through. In this way I am finding train travel to have a magical aspect to it, exciting and lulling and expansive and detailed, all in one.