Trekking the Tracks

Why is it that - when preparing solo travel - I inevitably find myself online buying a train pass? Have I come to equate the pass with spontaneity, flexibility, a prescription to battle planning-procrastination? Probably. I like to think that traveling by train suits my sense of discovery, allows me to stumble into scenes of life that can’t be picked out of a guidebook, but chosen at first glance and committed to between the opening and closing of the doors.

But there is something more to it. At some point, in order to gain the experiences that I desire from travel, I must decide not to be a tourist. I must be a person among people who know more than I do about the focus of the moment. In a funny, slightly insecure way, I find that easiest to do on a train. As I settle into the seat and remove my coat, as I begin to notice the laundry flapping outside a window of a passing apartment building, the people around me unknowingly let me in on their secrets. Parents nurture or scold children, lovers fight and make up, old friends speak in excited voices. They forget to hold their masks up and in doing so, reveal a bundle of emotions and ideas that are representative of the experiences dealt out within their cultures and micro-cultures.

Having spent a good deal of time on foreign trains, I decided to test my theories about why Americans don’t ride trains the way the Europeans do. I bought a ticket on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train, a 36- (more like 40-) hour journey from LA to Seattle. Not only did I discover that my theories were wrong, but I found that I had misjudged the situation altogether. First of all, I know very little about how Europeans ride trains. (That is another subject in itself.) Secondly, not all train trips are created equal. My journey up the Left Coast has no right being compared to a ride from Philadelphia to New York. The question really became “What motivates an American to make a long journey by train?” The results were astounding.

I was not the only person in the Sleeper Car who had intentionally made the journey by train. I was not surrounded by grumpy people whose grannies had bought their tickets or who couldn’t afford the more expensive and quicker options up the Coast, nor did I find anyone who refused, out of either principal or fright, to accept the advances in transportation technology that we’ve made in the last five decades. Instead, the other passengers, all seemingly of sound mind and judgement, had consciously decided to shuck our national affinity for expediency in favor of the leisurely, lodge-like atmosphere of the swanky, wood-paneled Parlour Car.

That trip was nothing less than an exact contradiction of what American culture has become - it was inefficient where we value instant-gratification, personal where we seek privacy and I got nothing out of it which I might hang on my wall or set on my bookshelf.
Early on, I realized my mistake. As the other passengers settled into their sleepers, my partner and I settled into a booth in the empty Parlour Car. After several minutes, as the train swayed through the populous hills of what I imagine was Burbank, a man and a woman entered the car and struck up a conversation with us as they slid uninvited into our booth. I hardly had time to choose between glad astonishment and dismay when a family entered the car, filled the booth closest to us, and easily joined the conversation.

Throughout the 36-hour trip, we sat with these strangers discussing family and hometowns and work. Occasionally we stopped talking to eat or play a game of cards. It was like a posh camp in the woods. We marveled together over the view out the windows. We passed along the Pacific Coast and through somnolent small towns where people sat in lawn chairs watching us roll through their backyards. We saw junkyards and dumpsters that small-town officials had undoubtedly hidden behind buildings near the tracks in hopes of presenting tidy little city centers to passing motorists. At sunset, we stopped alongside a vineyard to let a freight train pass and watched the shadows lengthen from distant hills across the tidy rows of grapes as orange light caught the streams of water jetting from the sprinklers.
We had a cheese and wine-tasting session during which the host tried to sell us $12 bottles for something more like $22, and spent the better part of the day playing games, talking and watching the trees grow larger and the valleys deeper as we rolled through the Cascade Mountain Range.

None of this camaraderie was accidental. We were the only party that had not been on this or a similar trip before, and we may well be the only party that hasn’t done so since. Our fellow passengers were there because there were no movies, no headphones, just a car full of friendly people and a stack of games.

I learned something unexpected and valuable about my culture that day: despite all we see and hear to convince us otherwise, we do not want to be left alone. We want to step out from behind our computers and to meet one another face to face, to hear stories, to share experiences. We want to know and to be known, and if Starbucks is the closest thing we have to a neighborhood pub, we have to get creative.

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