In which we hear "Amtrak treated them like dogs!"... In defense of Amtrak... A meal with one of very few passengers of color...
On the Train Not quite Oregon 1998 Jul 30 Thursday
Back in my stateroom, I listened to a man from Montana harangue the sleeping car attendant because he (the Montanan) couldn't figure out how to turn his lower bunk back into a couple of seats. He also complained for a while about the train running late, and that we would soon miss his connecting train.
A mother yelled at her son to finish using the shower soon. She yelled that he should answer her. She repeated her request. A few times.
People walked past my room, along the hall. Whitebread. Whitebread. Whitebread. At one point a quartet of middle-aged gay men went past and I stared. Sure, they were all white, but they looked like maybe they didn't call come from Iowa. I stared. Later, going to lunch, I would walk past a young black woman passenger in the lounge and would stare again.
I read, looked out the window. I took notes on the scenery which I won't relate here. I can't figure out a way to make it interesting. I took notes about my neighbors across the hall.
My neighbors have spent more than 10 minutes talking about
- Where we are
- The name of the last stop
- How many miles to Portland
The woman is thinking out loud. The man cannot hear her, asks her to repeat. The man has trouble breathing, wheezes constantly.
I eavesdrop on our train attendant and another crew member. Recently, a train was 21 hours late, carrying a big family "on bereavement travel." Though the train was late, management hadn't helped these people, had just kept them on the train, not offerred to put them on a less-delayed bus. "These people chose Amtrak, and Amtrak treated them like dogs!"
Lunch was busier than breakfast had been, and I'd signed up on the waiting list. When my name was called, an hour and a half later, over the intercom, I walked to the dining car. The MaitreD sat me down next to a middle-aged lady, and seemed to be waiting for another two called people to come along to fill up the table. They never showed up, but eventually our waiter decided it was acceptable to take the order of the two people at the table.
She was an R.N. who said right off the bat that she really liked train travel. By this time, I'd figured out that I didn't. Of course, along with my dislike of train travel had developed a contempt for anyone who claimed to like train travel. But I didn't sneer and ask her how she could possibly like train travel. Instead I asked her, "What part do you like best?" She replied, "All of it," and goggled at me for a bit.
She lived in Gig Harbor, and was returning from a visit with a relative of hers with a PHd in Art Education, specializing in Women in Art. I muttered something about how people needed to get educated about women in the arts, but maybe she hadn't said "Women in Art" but "Women and Art" because she said that this relative would show people in her class some art and ask for reactions to it--and the different reactions between genders was "really deep." "Yeah?" I said. I forget what she replied. She certainly didn't talk about the different reactions. She probably started talking about some aspect of train travel. That happened often.
She talked about how she and her husband were "into sound," which turned out to mean mixing and stuff. Her husband was a drummer and an actor and learning sound--but also wanted her to learn sound so that she could learn how to make his drumming and acting sound better. They've apprenticed to some sound expert, and this is all seeming pretty interesting, but the next thing I know, she's talking about how she wants to check out the downstairs of the first class parlor car because The Coast Starlight (this train) has a giant screen TV with some special kind of surround sound. Some crew member had talked to her about this special sound system that they'd installed.
She was the one who told me that people in the cheap seats (like herself) weren't allowed up into the first class lounge, nor into the sleeper cars beyond. She knew about bargains--she talked about getting a regular seat, then asking the conductor if there were sleeper cars available for a few hours. You can sleep at night, and just pay the extra sleeper fare during the hours you're sleeping. All very well if you can sleep, I suppose. She asked me if I'd slept. Nope, not really. She nodded and said she'd always been "Kind of skeptical" about being able to really sleep in those things.
After lunch, I snuck her into the first class lounge. (During lunch, we'd seen the dining room crew catch some peons trying to sneak into th first class lounge, so maybe we really did have to be sneaky.) We walked downstairs, through a door, and into a little mini-theater. Theater seats faced a giant-screen TV. Some fairly ordinary-looking surround-sound speakers nestled in the corners of the room. There was no movie playing, but some kids were sitting in the front row, playing with some sort of game station. So the sound system wasn't that interesting, really.
Still, she chuckled over each feature in the room--the TV, the maps on the walls. I had kind words to say about the padding on the low roof beams, which saved me from a concussion. I was still finding this train pretty irritating. I'd asked her if the train always ran late--she'd shrugged, said it was often late, though not always. She didn't seem to understand how unacceptable this was.
She was adamantly in favor of trains despite all their problems. But I felt no contempt for this woman. On our way through the lounge, she'd laughed, dangling a half-full beer bottle from her fingers. "I met my husband on a train like this," she said, then clarified: "though he wasn't my husband at the time." Obviously this woman's otherwise sound judgement had been clouded by emotion.
Back in my stateroom, I read. I looked out the window. I listened to the ongoing travails of my neighbors across the hall. The woman continued to think out loud. The man continued to have trouble hearing, asked her to repeat what she'd said. Each of her passing fancies became a half-minute conversation of repitition.
Then the man spotted someone by the tracks flashing the train. Only he couldn't remember the word "flashing". He asked his wife for the word--"What do you call 'mooning' but turned around to show the front?" The man seemed to be very angered by the notion that anyone would do such a thing.
"He had no business doing such a thing. Why, I just... I just..." Such a wheezy man should not attempt to huff, and yet he did.
"A little buckshot, just a little buckshot, shoot a little buckshot, and I..." He again asked the woman for the word for mooning where the fellow's turned around. She asked him the same question back.
The woman said that she was glad that she hadn't seen the flasher, though she sounded sad. She asked, "Was he old or young?" The man replied, "I don't know. I didn't see his face."
He paused for a moment, added: "He looked kind of lumpy."
At dinner, I was seated opposite a Midwestern-looking lady of dreary WASPish descent who was holding a baby girl of African descent. The lady didn't seem happy to see me, though the baby liked some of the things my face did. Mom was from Eugene. I was from San Francisco. I had other things to say, none of which elicited more than grunts from the lady. I gave up on her and concentrated on making funny faces at the baby, who was more responsive. At one point, the baby stood up in her seat, holding onto mom for balance. The train went around a curve, and baby's eyes got very wide at the centrifugal force. "It's like surfing, eh?" I asked. Mom gave me a withering look. I wondered if it was a look reserved for long-haired California boys who dared to mention surfing. I was relieved to return to my little stateroom.
As the train moved through Centralia, I looked at the layout, trying to place the events in a historic clash between Wobblies and American Legion types that happened there. Of course, I had no way to confirm or disprove my theories, and was thus free to imagine that that hill is where the snipers kept watch, that building must have been the American Legion hall (but then I saw the sign saying First Assembly of Christ), and where was the river where the Wobblies fled a mob of enraged mob of Legionaires? Still, I didn't complain when the train pulled out. Maybe something interesting happened in Centralia once, but it looked like not much had happened since then.
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