She Walks Among Us

The Wages Of Fear

A while back, the National Association of Railroad Passengers featured interesting little interviews with train riders, samplings taken onboard various routes around the country. People give all sorts of reasons for going by train--it's relaxing, it's cheap (not in the sleepers it's not), ticketing is flexible, you see the country, you meet so many nice folks--but the one that pops up over and over, the great common denominator, is--guess what? Fear of flying. According to NARP, there are 31 million of us fainthearted earthbound types in the U.S.A. That's nearly 10% of the population. Late at night in the bar car, among ourselves, we let our hair down and compare our favorite plane crashes. I'll let you in on a secret, in case they ever try to slowly choke the life out of Amtrak again, if you promise not to tell the enemy: We'd take any train they gave us. We love the train, and not just because it stays on the ground. That's important, but it's not the whole story. Cars and buses mostly stay on the ground, too, but they're not the train, not the train at all. Even if they did get rid of the sleeper and the dining car, so that we'd have to ride in the seats for hundreds and hundreds of miles and bring our own food or get off and eat out of vending machines, if they eventually gave us nothing but wooden benches and made us ride with goats and chickens, we'd do it.

The reason for this has to do with the same reasons why there are a couple of thousand songs about trains. And the landscape those songs traverse is as vast and varied as the American continent--everything from hard times, regret, yearning and lost chances to transcendence, hope and redemption. Cars and buses certainly turn up in songs, but they don't have anywhere near the enduring, versatile, dreamy, compelling power of the train song. Lonesome Car, Lonesome Bus? Strangers on a Bus? I don't think so. Mystery Car? Ghost Bus? This Car is Bound for Glory? Midnight Bus to Georgia? Desperadoes Waitin' for a Bus?  Nope.

The train lives up to its intensely poetic reputation. It doesn't let you down. Things--very, very good and very, very bad--happen on trains, and because of trains, that couldn't quite happen anywhere else or on any other mode of transportation (see THE MAN IN THE BROOKS BROTHERS SHIRT by Mary McCarthy). Those things then go into a certain very interesting part of the brain where dreams and fiction and odd metaphorical connections form, all beyond your conscious participation. The train doesn't just take you from Chicago to Denver or from L.A. to Seattle or from New York to New Orleans. You need a different kind of map for the other places it takes you...

The top bunk of the economy roomette has a definite coffin-like quality to it. It's narrow, and if you try to sit up all the way you'll knock your head on the ceiling. The lower bunk is wider, and you have the window. The curtains do a good job of blocking the light. The roomette has a heavy sliding glass door with another curtain held in place with snaps. You lock the door with a mechanical latch absolutely impossible to open from the outside. If you died or got incapacitated in there, they'd have to actually remove the door, or break it, to get at you.

So the sense of snug privacy even while people talk, laugh and clump past only inches away in the narrow corridor is extreme and delicious. When the train makes a half-hour maintenance stop in Salt Lake City at 3 AM on a frozen winter night, the cessation of motion and the stillness as they shut down all the systems makes you rise up out of your dreams and drowse just below the surface. There are people on the platform, passengers and personnel, in the bitter arctic pre-dawn. Without opening your eyes or rousing yourself, you know by the subdued way they're talking how stunningly cold it is out there. You are warm and infinitely cozy and comfortable. Nothing is required of you. You are in here, and they are out there. You can picture the icicles on the undercarriage of the train, the great clouds of steam. There are clunks and bumps as water tanks are filled and supplies are loaded. After a while you lean up on an elbow, reach out and move the curtain aside a little. You see the passengers, bundled up in big down parkas and wool hats and scarves, waiting to be let on: Families with kids and babies, cowboys, sturdy octogenarian widows. They have backpacks and little rolling suitcases. Some of them are carrying pillows and blankets, and all of them are gazing anticipatorily upward at the train windows.