Page 16 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Shadow Rails (continued from preceding page)
ing distrustfully around at the machine that’s swal-
lowed them.
Part of me, of course, enjoys this, even though I shouldn’t. A greater (or at least equal) part of me feels empathy for the residents of coach, forced to sit more or less upright for two-and-a-half days, to share the experience with anyone placed near them. But the illusion of superiority fades the more I consider that on a train no one really has much freedom. Not even someone who dropped half a grand on a sleeper room. The doors are locked on all of us.
Dinner on the first night is baked salmon. Good baked salmon. The kind I imagine first class passengers on airplanes dream of. Garlic butter, mashed potatoes, cherry chocolate torte. All free with first-class fare, all served on china with silverware. Hickok and Twain are never more present for me than in the dining
car. As a solo passenger, I’m seated with a variety
of people at mealtime. On the first night, I sit with a couple returning to North Dakota from Milwaukee. They traveled to Wisconsin for the wife to have an un- named surgery. She looks healthy, though a bit drawn. They’re farmers—wheat and beets. The husband
has piercing, ice-blue eyes, while hers are warm and brown. We talk politics amiably, which I’m surprised to find possible, even in 2008. Before we’re through with our salads, an old man joins us, nearly deaf and with a mouth like a merchant marine. He also farmed once upon a time, though in Iowa. His wife has been dead for two years, but his grief seems shielded by his profanity. I am struck by these farmers, with
their honest politics, their suppressed pain, and their easy conversation, and I wonder if the train soothes them as it does me. They’re a version of what I’ve been curious about—a sort of forced community on wheels—and they feel like an antidote for something resembling homesickness.
As the sun sets on the first day, we’ve not yet made it to Minneapolis, but I already notice the ground growing hillier. Greens turn darker as I stop by Room Eleven to swipe a second helping champagne. One of the last images I notice through my window before the sun sets entirely is an advertisement in one of the whistle-stop towns. “Let me off!” the faded billboard reads. “I wanna play billiards!” The word “billiards” sticks in my mind, another mélange 21st and 19th centuries, pleasantly forcing modernity to recede. People are still dying of AIDS and IEDs and other acronyms, but none of that touches me in my sleeper compartment as I watch the last dying sunbeams streak orange across the evening sky.
Sleeping in a train compartment is no easy business. 9
First, you must find your attendant to make your bed for you. It embarrasses me to do this, having made my own bed for two decades. It’s really no different from a hotel, but it feels different because I stand nearby and watch him do it. As a solo occu- pant of a two-person room, I have two options. The bottom bunk is formed by sliding the two oppos- ing seats together, while the top bunk simply folds down from the wall above the window. Because I have scattered my belongings in both seats, I opt for the top bunk. In hindsight, it’s a rookie mistake that will keep me jostling throughout the night. Once
in bed, I snap a net into place to catch me if I am thrown out of bed by the train’s unpredictable jolts and tumbles. Between the net and the tightly tucked sheets, I feel mummified as I flip the lights off. With the curtains drawn and the blinds closed, my room is as inky black as a mausoleum. I awake once in the night, sure I’m falling to the ground, but the sheets and the net hold, and I close my eyes again, sleeping well past dawn.
Trains force you to adapt your morning routine. Like a hotel, you’re given coffee and a newspaper and allowed to sleep late, but unlike a hotel, you don’t have the luxury of a shower in your room. Shower- ing on a train is a lot like peeing onboard the space shuttle—I always knew it happened but didn’t have
a clear sense how. It’s pretty straightforward, if not terribly comfortable. On the lower floor of the sleep- er cars are three shower rooms, stuffed to the gills with towels. Inside, I find a small changing area and
a decent-sized shower stall with a hinged glass door. Once behind the glass, you must press a small metal button every minute or so to keep the hot water com- ing from a plug-like showerhead. The real challenge is keeping your balance, naked and slippery, as the train careens around unseen corners. For the first time in my life, I find a use for the handicapped bars bolted into the wall. There are anonymous cream- colored soap-cakes in the changing area and plenty of washcloths. The trick is simply staying on your feet, or at least hugging a wall to break your fall. Showering, like so many aspects of train travel, forces you to accept that you’re not entirely in control, an idea more foreign in the 21st century than the 19th, I suspect.
The morning paper is a local one from Minot, North Dakota. Perusing it, I feel like an intruder. The obitu- aries are achingly personal, with their lists of survi- vors and funeral arrangements. As much as I want
to feel a kinship with the places I pass through, I’m really a trespasser, assuming too much in my easy feigned knowledge of these towns. Deep in the paper,