Fall Waning Back to School Moon
45th HS Reunion
Empire Builder September 28 10:30 am St. Paul
A freight lost a knuckle (?) in North Dakota and couldn’t vacate the track for the Empire Builder coming from Seattle. Result, a 3 + hour delay. We just started rolling right now, 10:33, 3 hours and 3 minutes after our scheduled 7:30 departure. Doesn’t matter. I’m on vacation. The first since a year ago February. Visiting family has a different category for me: visiting family.
Just passed over University Avenue. Trains take you thru the alleyways and industrial districts in America, interesting to me to see how commerce’s back office works. Just saw an unusual sight, a man riding a bicycle with a load of long lumber on a cart behind him. Shades of Beijing.
Went over to Bonnie’s on University for breakfast. A great old timey breakfast joint. Specials hand lettered on signs all over the place. Truckers and construction workers, a few hunters eating.
Each trip is its own adventure, the unexpected and the mundane often of equal interest.
I asked for a riverside roomette so I can watch the Mississippi below Hastsings. Just occurred to me that I also chose the sunny side, though the delay may take care of that.
The passenger car, #2830, creaks a bit and rolls gently side to side as we pass Irvine Park where I used to live and the Science Museum. Now we’re under the odd bird-cliff nest like structure of the now vacated Ramsey County jail. Strange that the criminals got such great views.
Big barges on the Mississippi draw oohs and ahhs from passengers. We’re pulling out of St. Paul,headed south along the big river, Father of Waters.
4:44 PM Outside of Milwaukee. The train slowed to a crawl about 50-100 miles ago. The tracks were underwater; we passed over a rail-road bridge with the Wisconsin River lapping over the ties and onto the track.
My roomette is #10, at the rear of passenger car #2830./ Right behind me is a window looking out over the tracks as we pull away from them. My fellow passengers flocked back here to view the track and its soggy condition.
Since we had three hours delay, the lunch would be the last meal though we will still be well out of Chicago around supper time. The dining car got mobbed so our attendant offered to go get my lunch. I took him up on it since the dining car is as far as you can get from me within heading into the baggage cars. He brought back macaroni and cheese, salad, vanilla ice cream and bottled water. A white meal. Perfect for Wisconsin.
Later on I had him make up the bed and I took a nap, rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the train. In case you can’t tell, I’m sold on train travel. It proceeds at a civilized pace, allows for watching changes in topography and culture, all with a degree of personal service and civility long absent in plane travel.
The train has slowed as we pull into Milwaukee, a northern fall evening complete with bright sun coming in at a low angle, leaves that have just begun to change and folks with long sleeved t-shirts and light jackets.
There has been plenty of time to just stare out the window and think. As we rolled along beside the Mississippi, the clouds were gray and low, in another month they would be snow clouds. Today they were the hand of autumn, ushering in the lowering skies, the introverted season has begun.
Tomorrow is Michaelmas, the feast day of the warrior angel, Michael. It carries a sobriquet, the springtime of the soul. And so it always seems to me. Fall and winter are the time when my inner life takes on renewed energy.
Fall and winter have their analogues in the last years of life, years I have just entered. I realized that my affection for the fall and winter, the time when introspection and spirituality become dominant, augurs well for my own aging. I am in tune with this time of life, just as Carl Jung predicted I would be, all those many years ago when I first learned of his division of life into two halves, the extroverted competence and achievement phase between, say 20 and 55, and the introverted, inner life oriented second phase, 55 to death.
We passed the Miller Breweries and now sit at the train station in downtown Milwaukee. From here we turn south after a mostly west to east journey from St. Paul, though one with a southerly tilt. The well-heeled northern suburbs of Chicago will offer up their limestone train stations, brick retail centers and neatly coiffed houses before we head into the hurly burly of Chicago’s near north industrial and warehouse districts.
It’s a damned good thing I have a night or two in Chicago. My connection to Lafayette leaves Union Station at 5:15. The time it is right now. I would have missed it for sure.
them. Like most leave takings, this one was bittersweet. We will not see Ruth’s smile, nor hear her mischievous giggle; the house no longer rings with mymamameee as Gabe, eternally seeking his mother tries to orient himself to the star of his young life.