(HOST) Commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Moats recently traveled cross-country on the train. Round trip. This morning David recalled that one of the things he encountered on the way out was the land itself. This afternoon, David reflects on the trip back and the people he encountered both ways.
(MOATS) I took the train across the country, and the only time I had a seatmate was between Albany and Chicago. He was a young teacher returning home, and as he typed a journal entry into his laptop – I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it – but every time I glanced toward the window, I saw what he was writing, as in: "Sometimes she’s totally crazy, but I love her, so what does that say about me?"
Train travel is more an experience than an ordeal, and for those traveling long distance, it’s a shared experience. You can stick to yourself if you want, but if you’re on the train for 55 hours – each way – as I was, you have the chance to meet a good cross-section of odd and interesting people.
There was that love-struck young teacher. Then in the dining car I met a widowed piano tuner from Wisconsin and a Catholic priest returning to the several parishes he serves out where North Dakota meets Montana.
And there was the young mother with her two children who joined me in the dining car for breakfast. She and her family had moved to North Dakota, because of the booming oil and gas business. She complained that the wind blew constantly out there on the Plains, and she needed to dust the house every day just to keep up. The little girl who sat across from me said, "I wish you were my daddy." The mother said, "Uh, I think you mean you wish your daddy was here." "That’s a better way of putting it," I said.
I sat one long afternoon in the observation car with a woman named Lois, widowed four years before, who lived in a cabin in the mountains of northern Washington. She took in foster children in emergencies and gave them the kind of firm and compassionate attention they needed. She was 68 years old, and her own grown children worried about the bears in the mountains around her cabin. But she said she had a gun, and besides the bears never seemed very interested in her.
There was also the abundantly tattooed, long-haired guy, whose growly voice could not be ignored. This guy was made for bar fights or worse. When the attendant was handing out pillows, the guy said, "I always wanted to light one of those on fire and throw it at somebody." The attendant was nonplussed. "Well, if that happens," he said, "we’ll know who did it."
If you get tired of the people, you can retire to the sanctuary of your seat and the view out the window, a changing landscape that is the common experience of everyone on the train. It’s this common experience that makes train travel a social occasion.
This kind of shared experience doesn’t happen much anymore as we move from the isolating pods of our cars to our motel rooms and homes. And the only experience shared these days on airplanes seems to the common misery.
That’s why the train can take you on a pilgrimage to your destination, but also to an experience at once forgotten and familiar.
People on the train are usually pleased to remember what it was like when Americans traveled and lived together with reasonable politeness and tolerance.
It’s still happening on the train.