Falling out of orbit in the Friendship 7 space capsule: as a girl I wanted to do it! Maybe that’s when I became eager to spend company with large chunks of fast moving metal. Hence, I can sometimes be found on the platform of the train station when Amtrak arrives in the evening. This Sunday I counted 11 people getting on and 23 getting off. The two engines of the train straddled Beaver Street for under 10 minutes and after that blast of horn recognizable as Amtrak standing in the station, the train pulled away and turned into two bright eyeballs of end lights becoming smaller on a curve below Mars Hill.
It’s not a bad timepiece, the daily pauses of the passenger train through Flagstaff: a cry of horn from the westbound just before 10 p.m. announces my bedtime and a hoot at 6:06 a.m. when the eastbound pulls in wakes me up. The sound also nudges me into fond memories. I’ve stepped aboard the eastbound in time to have my breakfast in the dining car as the train meets Winslow, and then had lunch in Albuquerque before getting off at the next station, Lamy, where the cottonwoods shading the tracks look like some film director’s version of a western whistlestop. With a quick shuttle to Santa Fe, I’m on the square in time for afternoon tea at the La Fonda.
Unlike flying, which makes me feel like a wrinkled envelope with a first-class stamp on it being run through assorted machines, train travel refreshes me. I am free to move about the cabin. Unfrisked, unafraid of catastrophe, with legroom to stretch out and doze, and a picnic basket at hand, I feel able to be me. I even sketch when I’m on Amtrak. On a train, daydreaming to the whoosh of the hydraulic doors between cars, or eavesdropping, or relearning the art of conversation with strangers, I relish travel again.
Once, en route to Chicago, I listened to a young man reading a Poe story aloud to his mother in a steady, clear voice that traveled across the aisle. One by one we passengers all leaned closer as the words of “The Gold Bug” snared our interest.
“What’s a scarab?” someone whispered.
“A kind of beetle,” a stranger answered.
Before drifting off to sleep, I heard a 24-year-old accountant nearby try to explain his work to six teenage Mennonite fellows.
“It’s numbers. I work with numbers.” Six blank looks. “I count things. I keep books.” The eldest boy offered a quiet “oh yes” and then he made some calculations of his own. He figured they have 70 cousins among the six of them. Two of them have twin fathers. Each of them have at least six brothers and sisters. For fun they like to ice skate and sing, but without musical instruments. They talked about cows and chickens, too, and then returned to numbers, perhaps out of politeness to the accountant. “My father counted the mileposts and timed the train and worked out it was going 95 mph!” said one.
On a recent snowy day I walked, bundled up to my gills, unable to tell sidewalk from street but by Route 66 the train tracks gleamed, brushed clean by a freight train. I looked at that shiny steel and felt connected to Chicago, which is less than 40 hours away aboard the Southwest Chief. Standing on the brick platform of the train station here, I pictured the train station there: how commuters come rushing through at the end of the day, putting down money, grabbing set-up drinks from one end of the bar, gulping them down as they hurry to make connections and leaving the empty glasses at the other end of the bar.
Rah, rah! Rah, rah! To me the trains sound like they are cheering as they pass through our town. On these cold nights tucked into warm rooms, I listen for the low rumbling ocean sound of the wheels on the tracks. To those notes blasted, to that rush of large metal, I knit my imaginings of Amtrak humans murmuring to each other, as they fearlessly rocket across the country, at home on steel.
