MAY, 2011, ON BOARD THE AMTRAK COAST STARLIGHT — Writing this is a gamble, for I'm skirting the edge of recollection.
It shouldn't feel revolutionary to board a train. It shouldn't open my eyes in awe.
It shouldn't.
It should feel mundane. Yet the ordinary glory of contemporary rail travel punctuates every motion from here to there.
A shout of “All aboard.”
An engine whistle’s blasts.
Passengers scurrying back from the platform after breaks for cigarettes and sun.
A silver gleam as the train reaches southward, southward, ever southward.
It’s a Thursday
Late May.
2011.
The Willamette Valley sparkles beneath a cloudless sky. An hour into this trip, I've slipped into another lifetime.
Quiet descends upon the lounge car, sleepy and soft, as if we're semi-submerged, as if the sun outside is fake, as if the world ends beyond the windows. Indeed, if that preacher filling the headlines recently is to be believed, Doomsday's coming this Saturday afternoon.
Outside, The End is two days away. Inside this space, that could just as well be two years, or two seconds, or two decades from now. There aren't any clocks here. Like a casino.
Elsewhere, time stumbles forward. Here, we flow with the rhythm of a slight, not-quite-rumble beneath us, of a horn in the distance, of vestibule doors opening and closing, opening and closing. Breathlike.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale
A few chairs away from me, two middle-aged traveling companions plot the next leg of their journey. Intermittent snippets of their conversation pepper the silence. They reach my ears as inconsistent murmurs, arrhythmic and barely audible. They sound like lakewater lapping against a dock and heard from some sleepy cabin on the shore.
Words are almost meaningless here, anyhow. What other journeys could one possibly discuss, let alone plan, beyond this one? Can there be an existence further than this, where there is no time?
There is no further. Here, we just are. All of us. Individually and together.
A little boy races between the lounge car's tables, laughing beneath a fake gray mustache. We are this boy, grinning beneath a costume and hamming for our fellow riders. We are skipping ahead of our parents like him.
We are also those parents, just as we are their fellow riders. We trail behind a giddy, skipping child. We are enjoying the spectacle of his joy and their pursuit.
We are even the skinny 30-ish stubble-faced guy at another table. Just like him, we have one hand on a plastic cocktail glass empty in front of us while the other holds open a Murakami novel. We don the carefully curated casualness of his outfit. Our ironic sense of humor picked out his graphic tee and its unauthorized Star Wars references.
An older man sitting in the back of the car gazes out the window. We share his view, surveying a life once lived. We face the same past, our eyes framed by his Stalin-esque eyebrows and shaggy mustache. We are anglers, as he clearly is, and that’s why we wear that weathered, cream-colored tee-shirt, the one with the declaration “dad’s the reel deal” surrounding an image of a fishing rod.
We are these jubilant children, amused onlookers, image-conscious hipsters, and reflective fathers, but, most of all, we are silent. We’re slipping into siesta, lulled by a passing parade of Main Streets and farms for which we are the only spectators. For our entire lives we’ve been told these places have vanished and that our society has moved beyond the myths that once sustained them, yet there they are, still drawing our gaze as they flow past, hypnotically.
Maybe we're dreaming.
Maybe.
***
Hours pass.
Evening looms.
A mountain valley.
“Wow,” says a woman sitting at a small table in the train’s restaurant car.
“Wow…,” the woman repeats, half dazed.
Her voice drops off. She’s still staring out the window.
“Wow…”
She never finishes her sentence. Her face betrays both a profundity of thought and a futile search for words to match it.
“Wow.”
Awestruck as we cross the Cascades, the woman — her name is Erin— keeps repeating that solitary yet encompassing word.
“Wow.”
Again and again.
"Wow."
Again.
"Wow."
The sun sets further.
"Wow."
I sit across the table from Erin. She’s an insurance auditor traveling with her husband, Bill, who sits beside her. An older, birdlike woman named Ruby occupies the last seat. She and I have each been randomly assigned to fill out this table.
We're well into Spring, but snow still blankets the mountain forests. We share more than a meal. We share this.
"Wow," Erin says, once more, finally lifting her fork to finish her entrée. Bill, Ruby, and I quietly eat our own meals. Erin’s wonder speaks for all of us.
There’s nothing particulary remarkable about Erin — though I realize she resembles one of the subjects of a story I wrote a decade previously during a previous life of mine in Portland, Maine — but I find myself marveling at her capacity to marvel at the world unfurling before us. Bill points a telephoto lens at the landscape that’s stunned his wife. His camera work reminds me of the photographer I’d worked with when I wrote that story in Maine. The common thread: Observation without urgency. An admirable skill. Thinking about it commingles my sense of past and present.
"Wow,” Erin marvels yet again.
I marvel.
I marvel at the Earth, at the ingenuity of the human mind required for this moment to occur, at the circumstances of my trip, at the fact that I am here, somewhere no one, myself included, could ever pinpoint, still able to journey like this, yet closer to poverty than perhaps I've ever been in my entire life.
I marvel at the fact that just a day before this trip — yet also seemingly a lifetime before — I’d published what to this point was the biggest project I’d completed in my professional life. Then I vanished into this journey. I left the what-had-been en route for the what-now-is. Now I travel between mountain ranges, through valleys, over fields, and along coastlines.
My destination is a weekend that will begin as one of my life’s most romantic and end as one of its most heartbreaking. For now that romance is just a possibility, just a hope, but whatever it is or will be seems like an abstraction, and a distant one. Right now this meal is all that matters.
Our conversation resumes as dessert arrives. I have ice cream. Chocolate peanut-butter. Bill suggested it, though I would have chosen it without his help.
While we laugh about sharing names and favorite ice cream flavors, Bill tells me that he takes the train at any opportunity. Next month he'll even ride with his mom up to Dunsmuir for a big rail festival in that northern California town. Meanwhile, Erin describes the nuances of auditing to Ruby. Ruby, in turn, explains that she’s on her way back to San Diego from a trip to see her mother in Centralia, Washington. Though Ruby looks no younger than 65, when her tiramisu arrives she lights up with youth at the sight of its lush topping.
“Ooh, chocolate!” she giddily chirps, like a schoolgirl given an extra, unexpected treat.
Light flickers through branches of the firs lining the railway. Jumping through the dining car's upper windows as we climb through the mountains, the light races along the carriage’s floor like the glow of neon bulbs tracing an old Las Vegas marquee. It is a light only visible now, on this journey, in this railcar.
"Wow."
***
After dinner I retire to the lounge car. I try to edit the mess of a novel I’d written six months earlier, during the final throes of a romance altogether separate from the one that inspired this journey, but the pink sky and the silhouettes of volcanoes — first Mt. Scott, then Mt. Shasta — distract me.
The sun has all but set as we approach the tiny town of Chemult, Oregon. I join fellow passengers crowding the carriage's south-facing side, thirsty for last glimpses of scenery before the day evaporates. Some of us sit in seats facing the window for better views, but most stand on or next to them. The rest scramble for purchase on any raised surface. Everyone strains to peer over the tree tops. Fingers rapidly tap camera shutters and twitch on the face of tightly-gripped mobile phones. We shoot picture after picture, frantically struggling against the train's speed and the blurry passing of the surrounding forest to capture for futures that may never occur a moment that only truly exists here and now.
A woman in her mid-twenties stands on the chair next to me. When we tire of our own futile efforts to take pictures, we start talking. A wildlife biologist and writer who studies the movement of coyotes in urban environments, she’s on the move herself after a prolonged stop in Portland. We discuss her time there over cocktails in plastic cups. Turns out she’d been staying just a block or two from my place. She quizzes me on my favorite local beers. I don't have a good answer for even a simple inquiry like that, nor can I hold my own discussing her research, despite my genuine interest.
I'm embarrassed both by those shortcomings and by how hard I’m trying to connect. Honestly, I’d noticed her during a stop in Eugene hours earlier. During the layover I’d watched passengers coming and going on the train platform. She was among them, and the striking colors of her outfit — oddly-styled pink athletic shoes, forest green sweater, and high-end running pants — had stood out to me.
Sitting with our drinks, sharing the last drops of sunlight, I notice everything again, and I notice her, and I notice how even though she seems far out of what I think is my league she's still talking with me. In what the rest of the world beyond this train knows as a day’s time, I’ll reach my destination. The spark of potential that ignited this journey will indeed explode into an actual romance. Nearly as quickly, the mystery and chaos that is modern coupling will douse its flames, but as twilight darkens the lounge car I feel an incommensurate guilt for this new attraction.
Still, California and whatever I’ll find there remain merely anticipations. Here, in this temporary eternity, I sit side by side with a biologist watching ripples spread over the surface of Upper Klamath Lake and talking about the curious paths she’s found coyotes taking through San Francisco. Chatting into the darkness, into the night, we cross the state line at some point, though we don’t notice. In this moment, during this conversation, existence consists only of a few seats of an Amtrak lounge car somewhere on the far side of the southern Cascades.
We talk for ten minutes. Or half an hour. Or two hours.
Then, during some moment as impossible to locate chronologically as it is to place us geographically, my cell phone rings. The sound yanks me from the timelessness we occupy and drops me in the present. The actual now.
I have to answer the phone. It’s the woman I’m headed to see. Somewhere, sometime, I’ll realize that the brief eternal moment I’m sharing with the coyote expert wouldn’t exist had my caller and I not set into motion the brief eternal moment ahead of us.
***
Well into Friday I can't sleep.
I sit up at my seat. I shuffle into a ball. I stretch. I give up and finish David Foster Wallace's "Up, Simba."
Every five minutes or so I pull back the corner of the curtain drawn over the window next to me and watch what I can see of the moonlit landscape. Somewhere in Northern California I notice a lone campfire. It burns right beside the tracks, but its bright flames are neatly contained. Someone has backed a pickup truck up to a crossing gate, thrown its camper shell open to the night, and found home alongside our train. The scene underscores my middle-of-the-night loneliness. The flames vanish from view almost as quickly as they’d appeared.
I’m awake when we reach Dunsmuir. I think briefly of Bill, and Erin, and Ruby. Somewhere after we continue on, a lake’s bright, wide surface glimmers in the moonlight. It’s almost as if the lake is all mine. I know we’re somewhere near Shasta, but at this moment I feel like I’m the only one seeing or who will ever see whatever lake it is.
Earlier in the day I’d shared the entirety of the world with the families in the lounge car. Later my dinner companions and I marveled at the world through which we passed. Then the whole world encompassed the space I shared with a woman who tracked wildlife through city streets. Now, in this moment, the world is only mine.
This — like any rail journey seems to be — is a voyage impossible to repeat, one that can’t be emulated. Aboard this train we travel through a constancy of shifts and undulations, of drift between day and night and back. Our scenery is a ceaseless view of the world on stage, close enough to discern its actors and set pieces, but muted and kept at a remove.
We are neither within that world, nor fully separated. We are simply here, moving forward, on our way, wondering if it exists only here, where we are, with those around us. Will it only last as long as we remain awake? Will it persist as we sleep? Will it be the same world when morning comes?
It’s still dark when I close the curtain. A few stars still speckle the sky but daylight is approaching. I’ll finally drift off as we reach Chico, our next stop. We’ll push off after the sun rises.
I remain asleep as we flow upon the rhythm of a slight, not-quite-rumble beneath, of a horn in the distance, of vestibule doors opening and closing, opening and closing.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The sun rises. The world takes shape again, this time tinged by California’s golden dawn.
We continue our journey as we always have, a silver gleam stretching southward, ever southward.
This Week’s Souvenir
One morning in Early March, my day started slowly. I was sprawled across my couch, scouring old research for new freelance story ideas. My dog’s day started sleepily. He’s was sprawled atop the couch cushions, napping.
As he snored, I noticed an ad in a 1930s police journal I’d used while researching The Golden Fortress. It says little but I was intrigued enough by the name of the San Francisco hotel and restaurant it featured, the “New Poodle Dog Hotel and Restaurant,” to look it up. What I found was much more interesting than the ad suggested.
The New Poodle Dog was the latest incarnation of a San Francisco institution, one of San Francisco’s oldest restaurants, and, as history blogger Jim Smith described it “certainly its most famous.” Prohibition had killed off the Old Poodle Dog, which originally opened in the mid 19th-Century and helped introduce French Cuisine — and French Wine — to the Bay Area. Thanks to private dining suites on its upper floors accessible via private entrances — and thus ideal for extramarital encounters and other trysts — the Poodle Dog also had a scandalous air surrounding it.
The earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the original Poodle Dog (see a photo of the destroyed restaurant here). It reopened at a new location a few months later. In 1908, Poodle Dog chef Louis Cotard introduced a now-classic dish, Crab Leg à la Louis, or Crab Louis (aka Crab Louie). Author and food historian Erica J. Peters even located the first Poodle Dog menus featuring the dish in the San Francisco History Center’s ephemera collection.
I’m always amazed how much history lies beneath seemingly mundane surfaces one might overlook. There are stories every everywhere.
This Week’s Scenery
This Week’s Detours
I know it’s been a while since our last journey along the Scenic Route, but as I’ve written a lot already I’ll just mention two recent side roads I’ve explored:
Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files — Sometime last year I came across this wonderful newsletter from musician and writer Nick Cave. Of the many newsletters I receive, The Red Hand Files is among the few I make a point to devour. Each edition tends to stick with me, but one that remains especially memorable for me was a February edition wherein its February edition wherein Cave counsels a thirteen-year-old who asks how to live life fully, with creativity, in a disconnected, hateful world. Cave’s response was thoughtful, sensitive, inspiring and inspired. It was also the sort of advice I wish I’d read as a teenager.
The Vancouver Community Library — I say this with no hyperbole: the central branch of the Fort Vancouver Regional Library in downtown Vancouver, Washington is one of the most best public libraries I’ve ever visited. We brought our three-year-old to its expansive children’s section a few weeks ago and were pleasantly surprised by the imagination, creativity, engagement, and plain fun it inspired. Aside from the children’s section, it’s a beautiful library and I hope to return soon to write or read read outside on its fifth floor terrace.
Thanks for reading all this way! I look forward to seeing you along the scenic route, wherever, and whenever, it brings us.
What journeys — literal or figurative — are you taking this week? Let me know in the comments?
-Bill
P.S. You can buy any of my books here, and signed copies are available here.
P.P.S. Apologies for my months-long absence. A lot happened in March and late February that delayed this edition’s journey to your inbox. I’m glad it’s finally on the way, but I suppose I’m staying true to my vision when I set out on The Scenic Route.