After leaving the station at Memphis, Manny Rivers LaCross sat idly before his computer in his cramped compartment aboard the City of New Orleans, adjusting to the unpredictable sway of the car. He felt the awkward movements of the car as it was jostled two and fro by the time-worn Illinois Central track bed below. That is not to say that he did not enjoy the unpredictably repetitious rhythmic patter of the train, which he thought was caused by the uneven sections of the aging steel rails. He sipped iced Scotch slowly. He leaned back against the headboard with its sanitized institutional paper towel draped over its cushion.
“Who wants lice,” he thought the Amtrak customer might think.
He looked out the window into the black night. He saw himself reflected in the widow from which, beyond, the dark mysterious night passed. The train’s eye view of the mid-southern countryside reveals the place as naked, stripped of its purposeful and conventional appearances, Rather than entering a community head on and dressed up, from a train window, a town looks like an half-dressed actor in her dressing room. He looked out again. His reflection showed his fiftyish paunch, which oddly seemed to reassure him. “I’m no Cary Grant,” he laughed.
He sipped his drink again. The night was tepid, humid and close. A mist hung on the kudzu from the warm day turned cool with evening. The train heaved and clanked passed crossroads where bleary-eyed pickup trucks’ headlights pierced the rising fog. These were the honky tonking latenighters who had had a last game of pool and a few long necks at that neon-lit tavern back aways, perhaps.
“I might as well write,” he said to himself, “I’ll never get to sleep with all this bouncing around.”
He had had a nice dinner with friends at the Friday’s in downtown Memphis.
“You know the Radisson is a Minneapolis chain,” he had offered lamely. “I knew the guys who started Friday’s,” someone said. He was sure it was a Minnesota chain, but his penchant for self doubt gave in: “They must have sold it to the Radisson company; I saw the owners at the Friday’s in St. Louis Park and they were there to demonstrate their solidarity with the corporation,” he remembered. He almost enjoyed it when he might be incorrect. That’s when the truth is nascent.
He recalled being there at Fridays in St. Louis Park one crowded Sunday morning. He thought the Carlsons, who owned the chain, were very rigid and unhappy. It was one of those bleak grey March days when the only glimmer of feeling came at the end of a straw that protruded from a spicy bloody Mary. The patriarch, Curt Carlson, who had made his fortune on Gold Bond stamps, was quite indifferent to his starchy and wooden daughter. She was, according to the Tribune, the CEO of the upscale hotel chain, and their familial relations bore the earmarks of the sort of business that the father was accustomed to – that is to say, unfriendly.
Saint Louis Park, Minnesota…his grandparents had moved there in the forties and he had spent much of his boyhood there; their house was up the hill from Cedar Lake. From the top of their hill, you could see the Minneapolis skyline off in the distance to the northeast; then the Foshay Tower was prominent. His grandfather was in the dairy products business, and he had moved the family from Northeast Minneapolis after World War Two when his business had prospered. The grandson had visited there in the summers of his youth; bright days filled with an earthy fresh aroma that arose from the dewy humus of the clean northern black earth. This had been Indian country, home to Sioux and Chippewa before the infernal white settlers took it for farms and lumber. It was heartbreaking to imagine the Indians losing their hunting grounds at Lake Minnetonka, where today, the well-to-do sanctimoniously bask during the short summers on the decks of audacious boats too large for the lake.
A hundred years ago Saint Louis Park had grown up around its rail connection to Saint Louis, a relationship now forgotten. There isn’t even an interstate highway from Minneapolis to St. Louis; ok, sure, there’s the Avenue of the Saints, a loose system of state and federal roads, but there’s no north-south cultural affinity between those two cities like there is between Memphis and Chicago, no diaspora. On the upper Mississippi human movement was westward. Sure the boat traffic moved up and down the waterway bringing in coal and taking out lumber and grain, but the trains went toward the setting sun and over the Rockies, taking with them homesteaders and bringing back beef.
He sipped his Scotch again. He thought about how much he liked the idea of drinking a bloody Mary on Sunday mornings even though it would interfere with the rest of the day. The train was really swaying now. “It must be going pretty fast,” he thought. He could hear the whistle.
The air in the car smelled like the scent that follows a dentist drilling a molar, acrid and pungent; but almost immediately the scent disappeared. “Strange,” he thought – the train drilling through the still night air; the north like a gaping mouth with its decaying cities like Chicago or Detroit.
He leaned back and looked out the window. The car continued to shake and vibrate. “The condition of railroad tracks in America must be quite bad,” he surmised. He was in the top compartment: “Perhaps that’s why it shakes a lot,” he considered. “The center of gravity is high here,” he deduced.
Suddenly, the train stopped smoothly. The lack of motion struck him as unfamiliar and it was unsettling. He had become acclimated to the perpetual motion. He could see no lights out the window that might indicate a station. In the distance he perceived a faint whistle: perhaps we’re on a siding and waiting for a southbound train to pass. Then, they were at a crossing; he could see cars impatiently waiting for the roadway to clear but the train just stopped In the middle of the road. He could see the car’s exhaust vapor billowing from the their tailpipes. “It must be cold up here,” he assumed. The train crawled away from the intersection and the stopped cars crept across the tracks where the train had just been. The whistle was louder now. “That’s our signal,” he thought.
He needed to relieve himself. He got up briskly, indifferent that he was dressed in nothing but green undershorts and walked determinedly up the narrow corridor to the head. He observed that all of the other passengers had turned in. On his return to his cabin he reflected that this portable pension was by its nature a tolerant place; we travelers were all in this monstrous lurching steel tube rocketing ever northward towards the windy city by the lake, pressed together by mutual interest.
He slept lightly if at all, nestled in that compartment with his iBook between his legs. At six the next morning, he got up and went back up the cramped corridor. Returning from the water closet he elected to have breakfast. He found his way to the dining car and was seated at a booth with rather talkative Chicago-bound man and a couple from central Minnesota; the men were talking about their Vietnam service as he joined them. The men were both hunters and they talked about their miserable experiences.
The man from Chicago had sat in a tree for two days in a cold November rain to bag a deer. Unsuccessful, he had packed up and on his way out of the forest he hit a deer with his car. The damage to his car was over $500 but he said he had managed to save most of the carcass. The Chicago man teased the Minnesota couple because of their clipped Scandinavian accents. They were returning from New Orleans and were quite taken by alligators in a swamp there.
Our traveler was interested in their story but the Chicago man kept interrupting. The subject shifted to hurricanes and the talkative Chicago man regaled his audience with first hand experiences in Florida. He described the damage he had witnessed recently; he was an insurance adjuster, so it turned out. He described third-floor apartments on the Florida coast filled to the ceiling with sand. Our narrator looked out the dining car window at the flat, bleak Illinois landscape. The dawn was a steel grey, the same color as his companions’ tired eyes.
The trees were shorter here, our passenger realized. The fall had stripped most of their leaves and the colors were bleak. And the land was flat and unwelcoming. The furrowed fields were wind beaten and brown, their summer fertility now in rapid decline. Each little town was centered around a grain silo and a farm coop. Farmers were getting coffee at chain convenience stores and the routine seemed depressing. They stood stiff but limp, others talking passively from the windows of their pickups, coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He could almost see their weather beaten faces where lines had formed as the skin tightened from years of sun, wind, and tobacco smoke.
He lurched back across clacking car platforms as they pitched and yawed with the undulating motion of the train’s reaction to unevenness of the rails. He carefully gauged his steps attempting to move from step to step across the coupling without encountering a wild movement, which might throw him off balance. His car was the at the back of the train. He poured steaming black coffee into a paper cup from an institutional steel dispenser located at the head of the stairs in the sleeping car. He looked down the corridor; nobody was yet astir except an elderly German woman. He knew this from her accent. She was on her way to Chicago to visit relatives.
He went back to the cubicle that was his sanctuary and read Moby Dick, occasional noting the transition outside from countryside to suburb. Chicago was approaching. He looked at the buildings. It was curious that the train’s-eye-view always had such an intimate vantage point for seeing the private spaces of apartments; intimate spaces unfurled as the train sped passed balconies and courtyards where residents would, in summer months, long for privacy and solitude. He thought about the way train travel encourages, because of where the tracks take one, a kind of elective voyeurism.
When the train found its way into the bowels of Chicago’s Union Station, he disembarked clumsily squeezing through the narrow corridor with his three shoulder bags. He found Amtrak’s VIP lounge and took a seat at a table. He sipped coffee and read a sheaf of student papers. He had assigned his students to compare and contrast the candidates’ positions as they presented them at the last debate. He was disappointed that to a one, they simply parroted what the candidates said without analysis or interpretation; well, except the football player who, in character, felt obliged to mock the assignment by arguing the most baseless points. Our reader scribbled comments that would likely be skimmed or not read, but engaged these shallow thinker’s minds the way they should be engaged when they mature. “I doubt they’ll appreciate it,” he thought. Still, he felt he should offer constructive comments if he was going to grade them critically. He was sick of giving away grades.
His connection time approached and he ran up to the mezzanine for a sandwich. He rushed back down the escalator expecting to here the announcement for his train. It came. The train, it seemed, was going to be four hours late. “Shit,” he said to himself. He called home and gave the message that he’d be in at 3 am. Then he went back to reading poor composition assignments.
He had stashed his bags with an attendant in the frequent travelers’ lounge. He had to beg the somewhat imperious woman to get them back so he could get at his papers and computer. Granted, she had the task of maintaining some sense of security, but the train was four hours late, after all. Earlier she had been pleasant but now the train was late and passengers were getting angry, so she had to put up a front. There’s nothing like a badge and the Patriot Act to keep the throng at bay.
At 6:30 P.M. the loudspeaker announced the train. He grabbed his bags and went out with bustling crowd to the platform. There was really no reason to hurry, but everyone had become so impatient that they jostled in and around slower people as they headed bewildered towards the monstrously steaming train. The explanation for the delay was that the dining car had malfunctioned. Those that had compartments were offered a free dinner. He found his way to the club car.
This was the Empire Builder, the Great Northern of tycoon James J. Hill, whose St. Paul mansion is haunted by the memories of the broken backs of wage laborers who opened the west for Teddy Roosevelt. From Chicago, through St. Paul, through Great Plains of North Dakota and over the Rockies in Montana, the storied train blasts over the Continental Divide and through the tall pines of the Pacific Northwest. Our traveler had spent eleven hours once sitting on that train on a siding in Havre, Montana while train engineers solved a similar problem. The glory of that once luxury liner has been leveled by Amtrak’s monopoly. It’s the only game in town and you better get used to waiting while they take their sweet time.
Still, it’s a unique way to travel: Americans seem to have rail travel ingrained in them; the mystique is so much part of the American experience that once aboard people seem to adjust immediately to the circumstances.
Once, Manny had taken the Empire Builder to Seattle. It was the 1970s and he met a porter, a charming and talkative black man from Chicago, who was on his first run westward. The fellow had just gotten home from Vietnam and was eager in his new role of employment. The porter and Manny ducked in between cars and smoked a joint together and stood looking out at the lushly scenic Kootenay Valley near Spokane. Twenty years later Manny was on the same train and met the same porter who was on his last run west before retirement. It was a strange coincidence. The porter still had that ebulliently cheerful demeanor, but he look tired. At five AM that morning the Porter had slept in so Manny helped the waiting passengers off the train at Cut Bank.
Our traveler took a seat in the club car. It was of a two story design where below there was snack bar and above, a lounge with floor to ceiling windows. He sat reading student essays on the second floor waiting for the train to depart. He was startled by a conductor who ushered him impatiently to a seat in the adjoining coach: “You’ve got to have a seat…where’s your ticket,” he demanded. The conductor seated him momentarily between a somewhat incensed couple. He gave the conductor his ticket, and rose and walked back to the club car. “What a silly exercise,” he said to himself.
He was hungry. He went below to the snack bar and waited for a few minutes for the concession to open. The waiter was a trim man of 40 and of mixed ethnicity. He had the well-groomed manners of a professional waiter and the sense of humor that accompanies countless hours of adapting to hungry and impatient people. “Have a seat, I’ll be open in a minute,” he said as he hurriedly put things in their proper places. “I’ve been sitting all day,” replied our traveler.
“You’ll be sitting some more I expect,” the waiter retorted, “why don’t you sit down, you’re making me nervous.”
“Ok…sorry, we wouldn’t want to get things off to a bad start.” Our traveler sat down at a booth behind a gaggle of drunk and noisy young women who were all but oblivious to their surroundings. He watched them and listened. One attractive blond with a few tattoos on her back – he saw it before she sat down – was from Alabama, he had overheard. Another, a brunette was smoking, and she hacked and shouted into a cell phone. It seemed that they had a portable party of some sort going.
The train was moving now. “I’m open for business,” said the waiter behind the snack counter. The young women didn’t get up, but a few others had assembled and a line formed. The waiter cracked open a few bottles of beer for a couple guys at the head of the line; a woman purchased a bottle of wine in a small screw-top decanter.
Our traveler bought a beer and a sandwich and went back up to his seat in the lounge. He looked out in the dark at the suburban neighborhoods on the fringes of Chicago. There were luxury apartments, contemporary office buildings, chain restaurants, a predictable slice of current American upscale culture. The train picked up speed and he went back to grading papers.
Soon the train slowed again. “This must be Milwaukee,” he thought. Sure enough, on the horizon, he saw atop a huge aging warehouse, a Miller Beer sign. “There’s proof.” The train slowed to a stop at the station. It was an interesting mid-sized city. He had never been in Milwaukee, just passed through it on the train some years ago. Eastern Wisconsin has much more affinity to Chicago than does the western part of the state. Chicago holds sway as far as the Dells, that faux resort on the Wisconsin River 100 mile to the west. Of course Madison, the Capital, is a liberal college town, ideologically separate from most of the state, which is working class. Wisconsin is the cheese-head state, a reference to the Green Bay Packers fans, who wear hats in the shape of blocks of cheese to frigid outdoor football games, and usually are drunk enough to drop their shorts and moon the rest of the Bratwurst eating tailgaters.
It’s all in fun. Wisconsin has a lot of that going for it. Compared to Minnesota it’s more relaxed, more free-spirited; more ‘southern’ – “like southern Canada,” he laughed to himself. He counted the number of beer taverns from the club car window. “There’s more money up here,” he noticed. Even the taverns were better kept and had more attractive signage. Besides its dairy industry and acres of corn – once a Polish friend had pointed to a cornfield near Madison and exclaimed: “Doritos!” – Wisconsin is known for beer. There’s no better state for beer. There’s Alder Brau, Berghoff, Capital, Point, Fox River, Great Dane, Cross Plains, Lakefront, Viking, Northwoods, Harbor City, Leinenkugel, Pabst, Miller, Heilemanns, Red-White-and-Blue, and who knows how many others.
Wisconsin invented the microbrewery before the idea existed. Our traveler, who is a movie buff, remembered that neon Lienenkugel sign in the movie Great Outdoors with John Candy and Dan Ackroyd; those guys had grown up in the ‘second city’ and had an eye for the great white north.
Wisconsin is also, curiously, the home of the Naturist Society. Lee Baxendall – he’ll never run for president, I’d venture – formed this group of progressive and liberal pagans - nudists in Oshkosh, by gosh! – Naturists, they call themselves – social activists who have traded marches on Washington for the strands of muskeg up at the Mazo River; folks in tie-dye who connect mental health to social nudity. Most are fiftyish graying men with fur-covered beer guts and a library full of philosophy books. These guys are obsessed that Socrates is mortal and thus are they as well: Carpe diem!
And who can blame them…with all those rivers and lakes up there to skinny dip in. And the water’s clean, too. You can go nude tubing on the Apple River towing a cooler of Lienies and a lunch pail of cheese curds and bratwurst. But the thought of all these nude polar bears ice fishing in February, like a sketch in Grumpy Old Men, made our traveler a bit incredulous. In the great white north, this nude recreation idea is far-fetched wishful thinking for at least nine months out of the year, and the rest of the time the world up there in the land of lakes is full of mosquitoes and biting horse flies.
But anthropologically Baxendall has a point. Now in the south, a naturist would probably be someone who believes in evolution rather than creationism: Mother ‘nature’ versus father ‘Idea.’ To some fundamentalists nature is sin, and these are the same folks who want to drill for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Baxendall would say that clothes are the original sin, or at least indicate a destabilizing social mechanism. (Although social difference is probably unavoidable in most circumstances, so we’re back to ideals.) But, after all, Adam and Eve were naked; clothes had to be created to address human shame. Why, you ask? Well, southern culture, as we know, can be conservative, but heck, God didn’t create anyone with clothes on that I’ve ever seen. I guess clothes must have evolved. Did shame? (Our traveler has hit upon a Nietzschian notion derived from the Genealogy of Morals.) And the south is a lot warmer than Wisconsin, so you’d think that…(don’t show Bush in the buff, please; Dubya better’n keep ‘em ol’ pants on). One might wager that the Judeo-Christian mind-body split invokes an inverse ratio between equatorial repression and arctic license. Strangely, the south is more frigid. Call it what you will: Freudian irony or Columbus’s revenge. The closer to the equator the more conservative and repressive the dominant class has to be to distinguish itself in terms of civilized and native codes. In the north, unless you’re Socrates, you’d better cover up unless you want to freeze or get bitten up. Well, just a thought.
With all his philosophizing, our intrepid traveler wasn’t getting as much grading done, now. The beer and fatigue were wearing on him. He put his papers away for the day. He entered a pleasant conversation with a single mother accompanying her son to Idaho. They had been on the train from Memphis the previous day. She talked about her interest in the election and he was pleased that she was a liberal. “That’s good to know…liberals from Louisiana, there’s hope,” he thought. Her son was a squirming six year old, and they moved on to the dining car for their free diner.
Our traveler was still hungry and went back down to the snack bar for another beer and a hot dog. When he got back up to the lounge the noisy young women had taken the adjacent seats. The woman was still on the cell phone making a repetitious insistent noise about some unintelligible matter of no interest to him. There was a video playing at the end of the car and the piped-in sound track helped mask the women’s inane conversations. He felt a generationally distant sense of melancholy. Education’s a strange thing. He was grading papers of people their age and felt the same kind of criticism for their conversations: Poor logic, bald assertions, lacks unity and coherence, no topic sentences, undeveloped thesis statement, grammatical problems. It occurred to him that these were typical thinkers of their generation. It was a disturbing thought. In a few years, like Amtrak, they’ll be the only game in town.
He dismissed the idea as maudlin. Now they had descended to get more to drink. They returned momentarily after the waiter had cut them off. They staggered off somewhere to sleep it off.
He was tired now, too. He wrote for a while. The train stopped in the Dells, then Tomah, then Winona. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. At Red Wing, MN he recognized the buildings. It was 2 A.M. He watched as the outskirts of the Twin Cities began to approach. No one was out. It looked cold outside. When it is cold there the blare of fluorescent lights disperses through the mist in an icy ring. He could see that effect, and it was familiar and foreboding. The train was alongside the Mississippi in downtown St. Paul now. The river was narrow compared to Memphis. He wondered if anyone would be at the station. He doubted it. He looked at his watch. 3 A.M. No one will be there. The train pulled into the station. The station lobby was packed with travelers waiting for the Empire Builder. They seemed very tired. No one was smiling.
He hailed a cab. The driver was Liberian. They talked about the thriving Liberian community in Brooklyn Park, and the problems of finding work for immigrants in the Twin Cities. He had been there for 11 years, and was listening to white Christian gospel. “Do you ever play Liberian music while you’re driving,” the traveler asked. “Not very often because passengers don’t recognize it. But I like Christian songs for the message.” The music seemed bland and agreeably generic – such are the ironies of acculturation. The driver liked to work at night because of the lack of traffic. Minneapolis has terrible congestion. The system of roads has not kept up with the surging population, now three million. Our traveler stepped from the cab and wished the dear driver a safe night.
Michel Aco
