• Tag Archives Empire Builder

  • RailBird

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Riding into the Mist of Memory

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane Full Dyan Moon

    South Passenger Lounge, Union Station, Chicago, Ill. 4:00 pm 6/13/09

    Kate and I left home at 10 till 7 this morning. After an on-time arrival we are here near South tracks Gate D. We board the Cardinal around 5:30 for Indianapolis.

    So far Kate does not seem too worn down by the ride, although her hip has begun to bother her a bit. We met a

    Interrupted in Union Station by travel demands.

    Now pulling out of Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue) at 9 pm on the Cardinal. Or, is it 10:00 pm? In Indiana you can never be sure what time it is. I have a life long case of chrononemesia, never quite knowing what time it is in other parts of the world.

    The trackage here, as on much of Amtrak’s routes, causes the train to sway and buckle, then settles down for a time only to bounce up again. I hope the stimulus money goes in part to better laid track and more trains.

    The Cardinal is full as was the Empire Builder. It’s summer of course, always a busier time, but this is a route that usually has a lot of room. Not today.

    We met a lawyer pair at dinner, a prosecutor and a law clerk for a family court judge. We talked dogs, writing and jurisprudence. I also learned that Jerry West is not considered a good guy in his home state of West Virginia. He doesn’t take care of his momma apparently. Or, should I say, allegedly.

    At lunch we met Dominic, a soft spoken man from Spokane, Washington on his way to NYC. He said he sleeps in his roomette and when he wakes up he goes to eat whatever meal is availalble.

    Over breakfast we met a woman from Anoka who had just completed her master’s degree in nursing. She will be a nurse practitioner, a very skilled job. Kate struck up a medical conversation which left me happily watching the Mississippi River glide by with its unglaciated ridges and valleys.

    I finished a James Patterson summer read, the name of which I can’t recall right now only moments after finishing it. I’m still working my way down the list of first books I bought when I got the Kindle three weeks or so ago. It’s traveled with me to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Now to Indiana.

    Now we roll along in the dark, past the corn and bean fields. Being here always draws down the misty days of youth, so real, yet so long ago, so well remembered yet so changed in memory. Can we ever know who we were, let alone who we are?

    That boy, the one who saved his paper route money and bought a transistor radio, rides a train from his faraway home back home. The boy who fished in Pipe Creek, who played poker on school nights through high school brings another worlds memories back with him. The boy who shot out the insurance salesman’s window with his slingshot slides back into the strange world we all leave one day on the ancient trail of adulthood. It is not a two way trail, there is no going back, save in fragments.

    Those fragments we recall often carry the scent of shame, a burden of grief or those too brief flashes of ectsasy. There was the time Diane Bailey pulled my pants down in front of my friends. My mother picks up the heavy phone set, listens and tears well up in her eyes. Grandpa died. There was, too, that afternoon when I sat in my room, my 33 rpm record player sending out to me for the first time the leitmotifs of the Ring. All these things and so many more, some mundane but most soaked in the incendiary flame of hot emotion float into my heart as this train, this Cardinal dives further toward Indianapolis, further into the world left long ago.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • The Empire Builder

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                         Waning Flower Moon    9a.m.

    Made it to the station at 7:30 a.m. this morning. Kate pulled away in the tundra while I checked my bag through to Savannah. The ticket agent put SAV on my bag and stapled a tag with SAV onto my ticket. I asked about a roomette to Chicago, $196, I said no thank you.

    After 5 minutes of waiting, the conductor called Chicago. I went to the small makeshift wooden cart, Amtrak blue, handed my multi-ticket folder to a man with a real conductor’s hat. He looked at it and said,. “Chi.” The man next to him in a red vest handed me a peach colored piece of paper about 2 inches wide and 8 inches long. On it in block letters is CHI.

    “Second car to your left,” he said and pointed out toward the platform.

    There was a man in all blue standing beside an open door on a train with several cars. “Put the chit over your seat, please. This is very important. Up the steps to your left and take a seat up above.”

    I found a seat, dutifully put my CHI above a window seat on the east side of the train and sat down. I knew from the past that this would put the Mississippi River outside my window.

    Until the train started I read World Without End on my Kindle 2. After we began the slow roll away from the station,.I put the Kindle away to enjoy the trip through St. Paul from an unusual perspective. We rolled past the new High Bridge, then passed under the bluffs on Irvine Park, my old home.

    The call to breakfast came as we left St. Paul. I shared breakfast with a gap toothed retired farmer from Alberta who kept alerting me to the fact that we don’t know what hardship really is. Our other table mates joined us in a round of why we don’t like to fly anymore and why we were all so wise as to choose the train. The food was good and the menu had all the items available, unusual in my recent experience, but welcome.

    Since breakfast I have sat here in my window seat watching the unglaciated Mississippi River valley, its limestone cliffs and wide waters a visual treat. I look forward to this part of the trip each time.

    4:15 p.m. Metropolitan lounge Chicago Union Station

    Got in early. I discovered the first class lounges when I went to NYC a year and a half ago. This lounge has wi-fi, great cell phone reception, drinks, temporary bag storage, plug-ins, free drinks and comfortable chairs scattered around a pleasant room.  It has dark wood railings on the walls, dark wood pillars, subdued but adequate lighting and comfortable chairs and couches.

    When I checked in, the woman behind the desk took my reservation for dinner on the D.C. train.   It leaves at 6:50. The lounge provides a porter and a guide to the train.  All these services reduce the hassle of lay-overs and make the experience more enjoyable.

    After I checked my bag, I went upstairs and out into a chill, wet Chicago Friday.  People hurried past on the sidewalk, umbrellas tilted against the slant of the incoming rain.   The rain fell on my bald head and ran down my neck.  It felt great after 6+ hours on the train.

    The next two segments of the trip, Chicago to D.C. and D.C. to Savannah, I have a roomette.  I prefer the privacy and the opportunity to spread out.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged