Notes from the Empire Builder IV

[See also: Notes from the Empire Builder I, II, and III.]

Taking Amtrak is like a bad relationship. Imagine loving someone who ignores you, and yet you love them deeply. The sound of their voice or the way they laugh make you forget the time of day. You cannot stop thinking about them, doing things for them, going to their house if they need anything, cleaning up after them. You're whipped.

Each time you return, it's the same: they treat you like shit. Your lover barely acknowledges you, never shows up when they say they will, rarely fulfills a promise, keeps you waiting for hours without explanation, offers only rudimentary efforts to apologize or win back your good graces. Your lover mails it in, barely a kind word, no reciprocation.

"I was busy," they say, hardly making eye contact.

"I got stuck. I was held up."

They give you the look that says, "I'm having a bad day," only it's like this every day: the flat voice, hanging head. They know they'll do it again tomorrow, they'll commit the same slights, fail you again.

So it goes on for a long time. After each fresh disappointment, you vow never again to repeat the mistakes of the past.

"I'm over this," you say. "I am moving on, for my own good. I respect myself too much to put up with this shit any more."

You vow to yourself, "never again."

Your friends and your family support you. They've seen you two together, the look in your eyes after a long weekend. They've been astonished by the stories. No person in their right mind should suffer constant neglect and abandonment. And you listen to them, leave your love behind. It was a stage in your life, you say, not to regret, but to learn from. Surely, you're a better person now.

But you can't quit. Months pass, maybe years, but once in a while, and more so all the time, your thoughts return to your love. You overhear a conversation, someone mentions their name, and it shoots you into a week of fantasy and remembering. What are they doing now? Where are they? What do they look like? Do they still sound the same, move with the same distinct rhythm? Is the feeling of being together still there?

You search your mind for images, retelling stories from years ago. That one time when a song broke out, when you got drunk, or where you noticed something surprising. You find yourself mentioning your lover in random conversations, bicycling places where you met, telling stories about those days to friends. There's no stopping it. You draw closer, and soon you'll find yourself trying again, despite it all.

Everyone else knows it, too. Your friends see as clearly as a sunset the way your eyes change when you talk about them, the way you cannot help but repeat yourself, bringing up their name.

You book another ticket. This time it will be better.



And sure enough, like broken clockwork, they are late again. They leave you waiting for hours, hopeless, sad, resigned, and familiar. You stand passive, staring out the window because you know what to do.

They finally arrive, mumble something in your direction, look away when you approach. But you're together again, and for a while it feels good to speed through a tunnel of green trees, blur surrounding the train as the sunlight flickers through the overhead leaves. There's an occasional glimpse of the river over your shoulder. Three crows fend off a hawk in midair, while a refinery flares gas from a rusty tower.

I wonder what do the Amish do for health care?  Later I Google it, and of course the answer is complicated.

In the lounge car, a Spanish-speaking couple plays dominoes. The white tiles clack on the vinyl tables mixing with the conversation, the whirr of the fans blowing air from the ceiling, the low, driving beat of the wheels below. In the dark lower level, old pale people sit in a dim room, comfortable and unsmiling, awaiting fates.

When the train departs so late that you leave when you're supposed to arrive, does that mean you've traveled back in time, or what?

Somehow two boxes of checkers appear on the lounge car tables. These are surely the cheapest possible versions of the game, made from the thinnest cardboard and the flimsiest red and black plastic, checkers thin as thumbnails. Compared to the tactile dominoes, the checkers make me sad. A game is not just an abstract concept, but a physical thing. Its appeal is not simply in the rules of engagement, but found in the visceral feelings it creates, the sound the checker makes when it strikes a think board, the feel between your fingers. To play checkers on a piece of paper with tiddly-wink is not to play checkers at all, and nobody does.

During the trip down the river, seven eagles perch on trees, soaring along the bluff line. Three pelicans fly low along the river pools.

Mounted hilariously on the wall in the café: the menu of sandwiches, snacks, and beverages. It's a large menu, but well over half of the things on it are loosely crossed out with a Sharpie. On the train, you're lucky if you get a small doughy microwaved cheese pizza and a can of pop. I'm lucky to get a bottle of decent pale ale and white wine. On Amtrak, be thankful when you get anything at all.

A father in cargo shorts stares out the window for an hour, resting his against the grey plastic side of the train car while his kid learns to read out loud, working his way through his book. Every once in a while, dad corrects his spelling, and despite the unredeemable dysfunction, I am hopeful. Any science will tell you that air travel is a terrible practice, killing species and wiping out the world's poor, and that we need other ways to get around. Somehow this underfunded, impassive, arbitrary, intentionally broken train strikes me as a realistic vision for an American future. Here on the Empire Builder, people resign themselves to a collective struggle, a rudimentary forward movement. Here on the Empire Builder, everyone is equal in adversity, committed to making progress despite the absurd broken promises ringing in the air overhead.




The voice of a resigned conductor blares from the overhead speaker, offering advice to people connecting to trains in Chicago.  Such an announcement on a train that's  six hours late train is a farce.

"More than likely you'll probably miss your train. I will pass information on to you shortly."

People's eyes glaze. A woman begins to agitate.

"I have information from Chicago," he says, as if Chicago is where information is found.

I can't help but daydream of Empire Builder meant to work well. What if the contents of the recycle bins in far the ends of each car were actually recycled? What if people actually threw their cans and bottles in them? Imagine if the train ran on time, and people could simply show up and get on or off when they were supposed to. Imagine if the interior was clean, and the food was good.

My favorite part of the trip is the thirty-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Winona to La Crosse, where the river opens into a wide valley in the driftless. This is the part of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that was not scraped flat by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago, where the hills still roll like ships in a storm. Here in the driftless valley, Mississippi islands rise into peaks like circus tents. Everything green or grey or blue, water and flying birds. Flocks. Clusters. Murders. Conclaves.

Confirmed: some Amish people do use Ziploc bags.

A 67-year-old lady starts telling a woman she just met, who is half her age and wearing a yellow scarf over her head, about something called "functional medicine". She's been watching an video seminar on her laptop for a few hours, and seems glad to share her new knowledge. Functional medicine is the belief that everything in the body is connected, but especially the gut. She begins describing "energy work" to the young woman with the scarf and the Harry Potter tattoo on the other. She herself is headed to a family reunion on an island off Massachusetts, and is worried for some reason about attending the marshmallow roasting event on the first night. They hit it off immediately and talk past La Crosse.

"Zinc can actually turn your hair back to a normal color," the older woman states.

"Oh, I've heard some great things about zinc over the past decade," the young woman replies.

I imagine the Amish could share some of these tips about medicine.

Another question. Which is more intelligible: the German-Dutch spoken by the Amish, or the ostensible English-language announcements that come out of the  Amtrak loudspeaker? The dialects have much in common.

The train is crowded, and the cafe car is full. One guy with a beer approaches  another guy with a beer.

"Is someone sitting here?" asks the guy with the IPA.

"Nope, it's all yours," replies the other with the Corona.

"Cheers," and they clink, and the next thing you know the guy from West Virginia who works for the Marine Corps is explaining the intricacies of facial recognition software algorithms to the other guy as Wisconsin suburbs speed past the window, as if he could understand them.

Cut to a discussion about the definition of collusion vs. the definition of conspiracy.

"I think Trump is just a fucking dumbass who took whatever information he could get," says the one guy, to the irritation of the other.

There are three kinds of Amtrak conductor announcements: the mumble, the exasperated shout, and the dramatic performance. The conductor today is a maestro of the latter. He turns the word "Columbus" into a five-syllabus song as complex as a bird call. He's a carnival barker for Wisconsin cities. He repeats it seven times during one announcement -- Coooollummmmbuuuusssss! -- making out with the intercom somewhere on the train. He's the kind of Amtrak conductor that loves wearing the special hat. I imagine how many more stops there are along the way, whether each announcement will reach the same highs and lows, whether he builds to a crescendo somewhere in Montana as the train scales the Rockies. A true believer, he has a ticket-punching-tool holster on his belt, embossed with his initials.
 

There might have been a Pokemon Go festival somewhere in Minneapolis, as there is a lot of discussion of Pokemon Go and the evolution of species.

When the train is full, as it is today, it contains an unstoppable energy. There's the constant shifting of voices, the back and forth movement of people up and down the aisles. They all do the "Amtrak shuffle", the reciprocal leaning and shifting required for two bodies to pass each other in the 2' wide walkway. This energy comes out of from the diverse mix, hundreds of strangers sharing a space for a time, the selfish seat hogs, the bedraggled parents, the old folks in stupors, the Mennonite families, the hipsters.

One of the biggest men I've ever seen barely fits on two adjacent seats in the lounge car. He has a black shirt, black shorts, black hair in a ponytail, and a backwards Pittsburgh Steelers hat. He too is into Pokemon go, and chats with the man next to him about video games all the way from Milwaukee to Tomah.

The porter working with the sleeper car passengers, an African-American man, seems the most determined of the Empire Builder's crew. He moves with more  purpose than the others, as he reminds a pair of travelers that if they need anything, they can press the call button. I wonder if he knows about the time-honored, epic history of black porters in America, how they used this demeaning, tiring job as a lever of influence all through the 20th century, how they used a variety of subtle means to achieve middle-class status, somehow, despite all odds, social barriers, and obstacles. I assume he knows all this. I assume he carries with him a sense of ownership over the profession, a history of how "red caps" changed the country using service as a tool for progress.

A guy is really desperate to smoke his blunt, and asks the conductor for the next stop where he can smoke. "

"Winona" replies the crewman.  "you're not the only one, I've got people chewing my butt on here," and they both laugh.

Just when you think you've seen every possible iteration of an American Flag garment, along comes a new one.

It's dark when the train rolls into Saint Paul. This time, it's only a half hour late. Hope springs eternal.