(HOST) Commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Moats recently traveled cross-country on the train. Round trip. One of the things he encountered on the way out was the land itself.
(MOATS) One of the main topics of conversation among people taking a long trip on the train is – taking a long trip on the train. When you share a meal in the dining car or spend an afternoon in the observation car watching the endless rangeland roll past, everyone wants to talk about how the train is so much better than the plane, and it’s even cheaper now than driving your car.
Sure, it takes a little longer, but get this: I got on a train in Albany one Friday evening, and Monday morning I got off in Washington state. If you don’t count the nights, that’s two days of travel, which is only one more day than it takes to travel by plane.
A flight is a flight, but a trip by train is a journey.
You get a sense that you’re actually crossing a continent. And the continent reveals itself to you as it is, unencumbered by highway signs telling you how far to the next town, or even the name of the next town, and untrashed by the ubiquitous commercial phantasmagoria of gas stations, fast food, and sleep-in-a-box motels. Instead you go through all those little towns, one after another, and between them you’re out there in the woods or swamps or prairie or mountains.
At one point I began to make a list of the ordinary things I saw:
The charmless bungalows and sagging sheds, the warehouses and bare brown yards and cars in driveways, the leafless trees and stubbled fields, the weedy hummocks and gravel pits. It’s not glamorous or pretty, this view of America, but it’s real. And when you get out on the Plains of North Dakota and Montana, you see that human habitation is barely clinging to the wide, wind-swept earth.
It’s a story that most Americans know by heart: the story of the land – how the tidy farms and towns of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the lovely wooded landscape, open up to the wide expanse of the Great Plains. There is a lot of sky in the Big Sky State. There are also a lot of tumbledown abandoned towns.
Eventually, you get to the Rockies, which are huge and grand, and finally you arrive in the West.
You see this story unfold as the train makes its deliberate journey across the landscape. It’s good to bring a selection of books and a willingness to relax. You should also bring a willingness to encounter other people. For better or worse, you will meet all kinds of people on the train. It’s a kind of Canterbury Tale, a pilgrimage to the vastness of America.