Page 14 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

In the summer of 2008, I find myself needing to travel one-way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Port- land, Oregon. Normally, my method for solo travel would be a hunch-shouldered plane ride in coach, but this time I hesitate. The great inconvenience of the post-September 11th world is the airport, and I’ve dealt with one too many underpaid security guards with their please-step-back-throughs. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been on the Greyhound enough times (once) to know it’s not for me, so I begin to research the only option I’ve never explored. For the first time in my life, I choose to take the train. I’ve been on trains before, having traversed Great Britain repeatedly during my study-abroad semester of undergrad, but those trips clocked in at an hour
or two at a time and were in coach. This time, I’ll pull out all the stops—first class, sleeper car, the whole shebang. Never mind that I’m an underpaid graduate student. I want to see if the clock can still be turned back, maybe a century or more. I want to find out where the tracks lead when I don’t meet them at per- pendicular angles.
Rose-colored glasses securely fastened, I arrive at the Milwaukee Amtrak station on a late July afternoon, accompanied by my worn backpack, a borrowed suitcase, and a friend from whom I’ve bummed a ride. Because he’s a good friend, and faster than me, he carries my suitcase into the lobby for me as I wrestle the backpack over my arms. Watching him tote my luggage, the halcyon visions of 19th century privi- lege begin in earnest. This won’t be an irritable day spent in security lines and cramped airport seating. I’m getting on a passenger train, just like Bill Hickok, Mark Twain, and the dozen other sepia-toned faces in my imagination. I’ve forgotten the five hundred bucks I dropped for sleeper accommodations and the fact that a one-way plane ticket would have cost maybe one-fifty, because Agatha Christie never wrote about a murder on American Airlines Flight Sixteen-Twenty.
The Amtrak depot in downtown Milwaukee doubles as a Greyhound station, and one of the more inter- esting aspects of that duplicity is the way the lobby divides class with a few strategically placed artificial trees. The cavernous room is blindingly white and sterile. The east side of the facility—the Amtrak side—is filled with people oozing middle class. Their bags are clean, streamlined, off the rack from Sears. They eat fresh sub sandwiches from vending ma-
chines. Lots of mayonnaise. I have one myself—the best automated food I can recall. The west end of the lobby, on the other side of the protective forest, tells a different story. These travelers aren’t so middle class or so white. They eat salty snacks from the cheaper machines. Their baggage is worn and patched. One traveler carries his belongings in a crumpled brown paper sack. They would probably scoff at my exorbi- tant ticket price compared to their thirty-dollar fares.
I eat my sandwich and watch these two groups of people dance around each other, wondering if the travelers on my side have discovered my masquer- ade, if my blue collar is hidden well enough inside my borrowed department store suitcase. This is one reason I bought the ticket—to observe those for whom first class isn’t an experiment. My understand- ing of rail travel is based almost solely on movies and books depicting a refined nineteenth-century experi- ence filled with brandy snifters and gentlemanly card games. While I know this reality to be largely false, my goal is to pry such an experience out of the nooks and crannies of the railroad.
Already I feel lighter, less tied to the grinding stresses of the plugged-in world. Once I’m on the train, tucked into my sleeper room, no one on a television will tell me about a tragic mining accident or who’s ahead in the presidential polls. No radio will force me to listen to the latest pop music excesses. No cars will wake me at 2 a.m. with backfires or thumping bass. I sit and wonder why more people don’t take the train. Why we’ve come to accept the relentless barrage of news, entertainment, opinion, and competition with- out resistance.
Then I hear the grinding sound of the train pulling
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Shadow Rails
Chris dreW