Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon

South Bend, Indiana Room 5, car 2901 at the junction of Eastern and Central Time

Outside the train with his family is a young boy I encountered about 4:00 a.m. with his head down in the toilet. He looks better now, smiling and happy to be on friendly ground.

The train carried me through western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio, brushing Lake Erie, as I slept. The sound of a train’s horn becomes a machine age lullaby, the slight rocking of the train a metal nanny rocking you to sleep. I realized on the way down that this has an older association for me. Our home on Canal Street in Alexandria, Indiana sat only a couple of blocks from the Nickel Plate Railroad’s tracks. Each night at midnight the nation’s lasting functioning steam engine came through town and sounded its horn where the tracks crossed nearby Monroe Street.

It feels good to be headed north where 70 is a more normal high during the day, not at night. The heat and traveling alone began to wear on me on the last day in Savannah. I chose a refueling option with the rental car that made it optimal to bring the car back empty. Near the time I decided to go the airport to drop off the car I began looking for a seafood place for a last lunch. None appeared. Even with the air conditioning on the heat beat against the car. Wanting to shed the responsibility I drove to the airport and by the time I got there I was hot, hungry and bit nervous about my nearly empty gas tank.

In part this was a reflection of my desire to be quit of this place and, like the young boy, to be back on friendly ground. Back now in the Midwest, riding through Indiana on the way to Chicago, I have gotten there. The train makes travel simple, so I can focus on enjoying the ride.

Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon May 30^th, toward evening

Capitol Limited, traveling through the Cumberland Gap

We passed Cumberland, West Virgina 15 minutes ago. The train stopped near the Union Rescue Mission. Nearby a man with a sleeveless t-shirt, a gut and a gray beard shrugged. Beside him a four year old boy with no shirt mimicked his shrug. Exactly.

The Cumberland Gap is a true piece of Americana, the first straightforward path through the Appalachia’s. Until its discovery the west was difficult to reach for all but the most determined. We went through a long stretch of no phone service, maybe 100 miles in western Maryland.

At supper I met a guy who works for the Bosch company. He says the company has a charitable foundation. No big news there. If it works the way he said it does, though, the reality amazes. He says each year the foundation divides up the profits. The company is wholly owned by the Bosch family. They get 2-3% of the profit. The board which helps them manage gets the same. The rest, 94% or so each year, goes to the foundation for charitable work. Last year the profit was $67,000,000,000. That’s one hell of a lot of money. Or, at least it was before the bank bail-outs.

A weird thing on the way to the metro to the Smithsonian. I saw a guy that looked a lot like my Dad. He a Red Skins hat on and a Hawai’ian style shirt, but he had the Spitler nose and Dad’s distinctive cheek bones and squarish face. He looked enough like him to make me look twice.

I forgot about him. Then,while I ate lunch at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe, he came through the hallway beside the table where I sat. This second encounter caused my imagination to leap into high gear. What if it was Dad? Why now? What would we say to each other?

There was a moment where I pushed myself all the way into that scenario. I allowed myself to imagine actually encountering my Dad father, after all these years. What would our conversation have been like? A frisson of fear shot through me. Dead Dad, after all. I realized the conversation we’d had would have been much like the one’s in life. Interesting, but somehow disengaged, distant.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I would have asked a question or two about the afterlife.

The train just went around a curve, still here in the Cumberland Gap. I could see our engines and the other cars ahead of us. The sleeping cars come last in the train. I imagine that cuts down on traffic in the hallways.

I’ll sign off now as the sun sinks down below the Appalachian mount just ahead of us.