Amtraking across America

By Abigail Chatfield
Photo Illustration by Jennifer Hayes

It seemed my friends' rotting porch, equipped with a tattered couch, rested in the center of Kalamazoo's ghetto. For someone on the way to a middle-class town in northern California from a northern Michigan village, the term "ghetto" might seem a bit inflated. This fanciful wordplay, and a dragging feeling about spending three days in near-constant transit, were swept away, however, when the Amtrak train arrived. I felt downright exhilarated as it swept past the dozens of people waiting on the Amtrak platform.

It was as if I'd forgotten the cross-country Greyhound trip three friends and I braved only a year before. As if riding a bus 2,500 miles, carrying $2 and engulfed by the smell of an overused outhouse somebody graciously attempted to dilute with cheap room spray wasn't enough to knock some common sense into me.

How could anyone forget the contagious phenomenon we coined "Bus Brain Blues"? Or that invisible film of mysterious origin that coats a body after sitting in a carpeted seat for so long?

On a map, the distance between California and Michigan appears to be only a few inches. In reality, these map measurements equal three to four days of continuous rides on trains and buses. Yet, if ready to embrace the unexpected, one can see many good reasons to skip the air travel and go for the long haul.

If $59 buddy passes on Greyhound aren't enough, try to envision the same country, once viewed from an airplane's clouded porthole, now so detailed and up close that it appears to be a completely foreign land. It was through this closer look at a portion of the United States that I got a real look at both sides of the tracks.

Rolling away from Kalamazoo, I saw neighborhoods more run down than my friends' "ghetto" home. Shingle-sided houses with Harlem-style steps surrounded by pavement gradually crumbled into dirt roads. These roads led into trailer towns surrounded by soy fields.

By Illinois, the conductor had finished collecting all the tickets. Momentum picked up, moving us through golden wheat fields conveniently measured into square-mile plots defined only by clusters of trees framing lone farm houses. A forest of corn stood tall for miles, concealing any borderlines between Illinois and Iowa. The only line visible was the sunlit horizon, flaming red like a barn on fire.

Night wrapped around the train like a time capsule, and fellow passengers became the only visible landscapes. Everyone's attention seemed to be riveted by the immediacy of the surroundings. And this sparked spontaneous conversations. So it wasn't surprising when a 20-something guy sporting a shaved head and driftwood earrings approached me. "Josh-o" was an artist of natural mediums, a San Francisco native, on his way home from an apprenticeship with a sculptor in a North Carolina commune.

"Let's go find the party," he suggested.

Agreed.

After searching the lounge and munchie cars, we moved down below to the smoking car. This car was out of the way of the others and not a favorite among most passengers. For the convenience of both Amtrak staff and the night owls, the smoking room was ignored. Cardboard boxes with tinfoil lining spilled over with cigarette butts and crumpled packages. A swirling smoke cloud forewarned anyone who dared enter of the intensity of the company inside.

Doors slid open to a heated debate. A tall, young brunette offered her opinion freely in a loud, shrilly voice. Others seemed to join in at once, eager to share their sides of whatever issue was at hand. A teenage boy ignoring the drama sat cross-legged, quietly strumming a mandolin. Josh-o and I sat, content just to watch and listen.

"I don't care who he is! How does he really expect us to treat him when he huffs around the train like that?" the brunette argued.

"I think he's a pompous jerk!" shouted a mullet-haired man in overalls. He took a drag off his GPC, exhaling smoke in raspy laughs. A worn-looking woman with chipped blue nail polish and a jean jacket joined him in his rasps. "Yah! Yah! Jerk!"

"How could anyone forget the contagious phenomenon we coined "Bus Brain Blues"? Or that invisible film of mysterious origin that coats a body after sitting in a carpeted seat for so long?"

"You tell him, Cory," said the man.

"George, it's not even worth it," said the brunette. "He thinks he's a god just because he's a famous actor."

A hunched Indian man leaned forward on his cane. All attention focused on this subtle movement from his corner seat. Right away the power of this man's presence appeared obvious. Everyone in the room stopped their arguing to listen to his carefully chosen words. "Jen, my dear. He is not God. He may think he is God, but he is not God. "

Silence.

The man kept speaking. He seemed to like the attention the group paid to his words of wisdom. "He is an asshole because he is not happy. Money does not make anyone happy. Let me show you this."

George busted in again. "Muhammad, man. He don't know happiness because he don't know any way of life but his own. He don't know what it's like to really work."

"Do you know of Rockefeller?" Muhammad asked. "He gave much money to this country, but when he died, no one visited his grave. Birds shit on his grave."

"What are you getting at here, man?"

Muhammad sighed. "There is one Indian mystic buried over 4,000 years ago. Today, a million flowers cover his grave. Why?"

No answer. Muhammad started again, but a man in a U.S.S. Ranger hat keyed in. "It seems to me that he's in the same boat we are. He's just used to being treated a certain way. We're all different from each other too."

"Ah, yes," said Muhammad. "But we are sitting here talking to each other."

"Yeah," said Jen. "He just sits and glares at us for trying to talk to him! Like it's a chore or something!"

"Maybe, for fun, we just see what happens if we treat him like anyone else next time he comes down here," said Muhammad.

The conversation dwindled as everyone fell into his or her own thought. The boy with the mandolin kept playing.

"You're not so bad," said Ranger. "What kind of music is that anyways?"

"Colorado bluegrass," said the boy. "I grew up in the mountains out there."

"Play us a song then!" shouted George. The boy picked a rhythm on his strings. Soon some of us were singing along, making up stories to fit the melody. Party favors were passed around the room. Everyone forgot about arguing for the next hour. It reminded me of the guys my friends and I had met at the beginning of our bus trip, Ernesto and Smooth.

Ernesto and Smooth shared MD 20/20s with us in the central park in Cheyenne, Wyoming. They roamed the streets of Omaha with us, scheming up plans to collaborate on some lyrics for Smooth's future free-styling career. No one knew which day it was, how long we'd been riding, or when it would end. The only way to survive it was to live it moment to moment together. The minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, meals turned into signifiers of time's passage, time turned into eggs and green beans.

Picky eaters need not apply. After a breakfast of runny eggs and green beans in the dining car, it's easier to enjoy the hotdogs and salad from the munchie car. The munchie car is also the only place on the train with friendly personnel. To ask any Amtrak staff for help is like throwing extra burdens on mules. It took half the train ride to find an employee willing to answer a question about some tangledconnections. Even then, the chief of customer services watched me wait 45 minutes for her to finish a cup of coffee before she would respond to my question. At the Denver stop, the janitor hurled a bag of trash through a crowd of people stretching on the boardwalk.

The train followed the Colorado River out of the city limits and into a winding mountain stretch. The viewing car appeared to be the choice place to relax throughout the second half of the trip. Passengers could sit back in the swivel chairs and chat or admire an expansive view of granite cliffs looming beyond the floor-length windows.

We had a new crew of friends now, and they claimed a corner of the viewing lounge where we stayed until the night sky fell heavy over the Utah salt flats. It was somewhere around this same area the Greyhound we rode last year had stopped to pick up a woman the whole bus came to know as "Crazy Irene."

I pondered this for a while as I rode the Amtrak train, and I thought about how people advised me to stay away from strange people on my journeys. I concluded that I did the right thing by not heeding their advice. I may not have ever met all the off-center people I met -- including "Crazy Irene."

Amtrak soon reached Sacramento, the transfer point for those of us headed to the northwest. Connections were still messy, and it was the last chance for us to straighten them out. To get to Arcata from here, Amtrak had us zigzagging north to Redding, and then turning right around on a five-hour trip south to Martinez, where I could catch an Amtrak shuttle to Arcata.

I elected to spend the night in the Sacramento train station and try to figure out a better plan. But Amtrak told me I couldn't do that. They also told me there was no better way to get to Arcata using the circuitous Amtrak routing system.

I decided to take a long walk.

After checking our luggage into an Amtrak holding office, Jen and George and I strolled through Old Town. We sat and had a conversation in a Chinese courtyard. George passed around a flask of warm peppermint drink, and we set to fixing my problem. Jen and George offered to miss their own connections to reassure my own safety. Instead, we settled on them helping me find a cheap motel.

At the Vagabond Inn, not even a mile from the station, a woman offered me the "distressed person's discount." To me that meant this wasn't an uncommon complication at Amtrak.

Jen and George stuck around until my accommodations were secured. They still had time to catch their connections to their own destinations. So with an hour to kill, we shared poetry on Vagabond's patio.

We would all be back into the middle of our own lives by the next day. I arrived surprisingly motivated, refreshed, and with all luggage intact. That's more than most airlines can promise.

Airplanes might get you there more quickly, but our train travels had been a journey -- a REAL journey -- which lent a sense of purpose to that time in between here and there.