I arrived at the Chicago Union Station an hour before I needed to get there, a schedule mistake that cost me the Field Museum with Sue the litigious Tyranosaurus Rex and the stuffed man-eating lions of Tvaso (shot by Val Kilmer, as I recall). Like Amtrak, I have chronic problems with timing.
This time I got assigned an aisle seat. Window was held by a Spanish-based American sailor. An interesting, rather intense, fellow, he spoke in a detached deadpan punctuated by violent bursts of laughter. He was a railpass regular and was writing a travelog on Amtrak advice. His previous journey on this pass had been interrupted by the engine breaking down, domineering freight trains and the discovery of a legless corpse by the track (as first on the scene, the entire train had to wait 4 hours for the authorities). The trip before that had erased a car at a road crossing. He told me this as the current train sat high on a levy, stalled in the green canopy of a forest, ten minutes out of Metropolis, as a smoky wraith that once had been brake linings wafted out from under one of the cars. After an hour the train was moving once more - the worse to happen after that being the Chief's subsequent elimination of all but the odor of a too-slow skunk.
Somewhere about La Plata, Missouri the conversation turned to very meta. He tried to convince me that time did not exist, citing the New Age-y "Power of Now". I tried to convince him that language, and by extension, artifacts such as books and the Internet are as integral to memory as grey matter. Quantum mechanics came up, which is always a bad sign.
We sensibly turned to the America's Cup.
Having obtained cash for this trip, I discovered that Amtrak do take plastic on board - I now regret that one tip I left on the Texas Eagle. I decide to try the dining car for dinner. My verdict: the food was okay, but overpriced, but the conversation was worth it. On my first night, I shared a table with a retired couple from Kansas celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, and a twenty-year-old blond woman with the sparkly make-up now in favor, who had emerged from the 24-hour-party that was the smoking compartment. Like so many people I know, she was in the process of escaping Michigan (Kalamazoo, in this case). Her destination was her uncle's apartment in southern L. A. and an yet-to-be-determined job in southern California. As for the retired couple, she had been a nurse, and he had been a high school driving instructor. They were also both registered pilots and had owned a plane. Somewhat thrown for a loop, I asked (in not so many words) how the hell they could afford such a thing.
"Well, it was expensive, but if you like something enough, you make room".
A good philosophy. They recommended that I should get my pilot's license (Mum?); I noted that I should work on my driver's license first.
The second dinner I shared with a effusive young mother and her two-year-old son, Ty, and a retired Vietnam veteran. She was Californian transplanted to Colorado; he was a Texan - I lived in fear of civil war. I managed to divert one conversation about taxes but then inadvertently returned to dangerous topics when discussing Southern Methodist University's rather obvious courting for the George W. Bush presidential library. Ty had the best comment:
"Oga baba jam wahumag oky dada laha CHOO CHOO!!!"
Posted from Heather DeShon's living room
