I don’t want to mention any names, but the author of a recent AVA article describing diddling woes and decrying Amtrak travel seems a tad shortsighted, excusable perhaps, as is the naiveté of a novice. Apparently, it was the writer’s first cross-country jaunt aboard the admittedly sometimes tacky-tracky trains, curiously promoted of late as America’s answer to the luxurious European Orient Express.
As a seasoned Amtrak veteran (well over 25 years) I concede some of the complaints are well-taken. For instance, I have never found a sane maitre d’ in an Amtrak dining car. Male or female, to a person they are paranoid, para-Gestapo, sado-schizo, unorganized, control-freak egomaniacs (I do not exaggerate) who can make the whole steaming kitchen staff constantly cower under an endless reign of ranting and raving. Amtrak must have quite the basic training program for these creatures, turning them out to dementia, ad infinitum.
The author of last week’s critique seemed, however, to be traveling by train for all the wrong reasons: in a hurry; looking for a VCR that wasn’t broken in order to watch movies; personally required but a superfluous speedo sampling of the passing scenery; wanted someone on the Amtrak staff to offer him a bedtime sweet, as well as good food in the dining room. Once on board, he did learn that in this life you have to find your own bedtime sweet. And no one except children and the most uninitiated has boarded an American train since the 1940s expecting a decent meal, regardless of all those glossy, glitterati brochures.
Consequently, as much as I chafe under rules of any sort, I feel compelled to offer, well let’s call them guidelines, for the guileless trainsquatter.
1. Never travel with Amtrak unless you are hopelessly in love with trains. This allows you to give wide berth, so to speak and as it were, to the innumerable faults to be found in this mode of transportation. Remember, Amtrak is victim to the ineptitude of its own pseudo-corporation, run by the government and controlled by Congressional idiots who have spent years trying to bring about Amtrak’s demise, yet another favor to be paid to special interests such as petroleum “oligarchies,” auto corporations, airline airheads and federal transportation tediums. Despite their dismal efforts, it is encouraging that trains are always full-up with the faithful, as well as the unaware.
2. Never reserve a sleeping room; travel on coach. The quality and comfort of berths and roomettes in the past was terrific, if not inexpensive. The new sleeping berths Amtrak has purchased seem to be the stuff of nightmares. Although, when last I traveled from the Bay Area to Chicago aboard the California Zephyr in autumn ’98, those with sleepers to whom I spoke appreciated their rooms, the cost of which included three meals a day, for which they paid over $700 for one-way passage.
I paid around $200 for round-trip coach. (With the privilege of detraining for a day or two at towns along the route.) Not only does this low far prohibit subsidizing the iceberg-lettuce-stomped-shoe-leather-steak syndrome Amtrak kitchens, it gets you a large, comfortable seat, lots of leg-room, lots of windowspace with a view to both sides. Windows were reasonably clean; we could photograph through them. All coach cars are bi-level; seating atop. Downstairs there are constantly cleaned dressing rooms with facilities for freshening up with soap and water, restrooms and luggage storage areas that go unguarded.
In coach, there is an unspoken honor system; you may leave your chair to wander and never worry about losing what you’ve left behind to thievery. I do hide my 35mm camera and always carry my money belt.
Some bring aboard blankets and pillows. but with luggage and a food basket, that would be too much to carry. Instead, I wear a floor-length heavy knit sweater and use that at night as a blanket. Amtrak offers pillows as the train begins its journey, free of charge, that you may use for the duration; tiny things, but surprisingly adequate.
A nice trick when you travel coach, is to go to any lengths to keep both adjoining seats to yourself. (If you are traveling with a partner, sharing the two-seated space is alluringly comfortable for couples.) When threatened by invasive new passengers, when you risk losing that second seat which enhances your comfort, privacy and freedom, when the thought of sleeping next to a stranger terrifies, feign is the password. Sprawl, pretending to be asleep, across both seats. Few will be rude enough to disturb you. Or, act wretchingly ill, blind and lame. Be heartlessly oblivious to anyone’s needs but your own.
Exercise for three days and two nights is pretty much confined to running up and down stairs or getting up on summoned sea legs to stroll the wildly wobbling cars to get to the observation car, which is all windows. And there are a few stops along the way that release passengers for periods of walking outdoors. These wonderful sojourns often occur at odd hours of the night. The rub-a-dub is walking at 4am around Salt Lake City under the cathedral gold and green lights of the old orange marble depot. Upstreet is the NBA’s Jazz team basketball temple; way upstreet is the zillion candle-power lighted Mormon Temple, perched on the side of a hill. The cold night air was refreshing. An unexpected, dramatically neoned theatrical wares shop across from the depot had the air of a French circus. The light of the city pervaded the hour of quiet darkness. In the hushed handful of passengers, everyone’s breath could be seen as a wistful mist, breathing out fading autumn and breathing in onrushing winter.
As for the VCRs aboard, last trip they were all working; for me, “Titanic” wasn’t. I stayed with my books and the passing panorama. If you board a long-distance train to watch the movies, have you not lost, or never understood, the aesthetic reasons for a journey? Look at the larger picture, the overwhelmingly beautiful scenery.
3. Take note of the terrain. Trains often go where no other conveyance can go. Intense observation makes my connection to the land intensely personal and clears the cluttered shores of my mind of useless driftwood.
Consider some of these cameo scenes. Wood-slatted snow tunnels on steep Sierra mountainsides that allow shafts of brilliant white snow light to scar the darkness. Skiers sweep out of nowhere, daringly schussing downhill toward the train, fast as the action in an old silent film, only to swerve away from the tracks at the last moment. Running with a remarkably beautiful mountain stream, the Truckee River, miles of deep blue water rushing over white rock. A multitudinous marsh, dead of selenium poisoning, stretches forever on the other side of Reno. Beautiful even in mournful death, I remember when it was teeming with wildlife and wild colors, so breathtaking I wanted to live in its midst. The wondrous Colorado River thread with the railbed through part of the Rockies. On its banks are tall conifers that host hordes of great bald eagles as they watch the river water, waiting to dive for dinner. During summer, the Colorado is a playground for river rafters. Traditionally, without fail, boat after boatload, everyone turns tail, bends over, drops their pants and moons the slowly moving train cars on the rock ledge above.
There are two spectacular descents out of the Rockies. One, heading east, when at dusk, the silver serpent sidewinds out of the majestic range directly above Denver, a city built of jewels glowing in the twilight. The other, returning west. The train weaves through narrow Glenwood Canyon, still close on the banks of the Colorado. Partially covered with bright green lacy growth, the steep mountainside, layered rust-colored slatelike stone, is close enough to touch and turns blood-red in the late afternoon sun.
Racing across railbed on a manmade stretch of land only yards wide that cuts through the middle of the Great Salt Lake, which is a ghostly white apparition in the night, crossing under a full moon. The indescribable cunning of Nature to have created the mammoth flat-topped carved redstone buttes that are the backbone of the Utah desert.
On to Omaha at dawn, the green city that once ran red with slaughter houses, its depot now crumbling like a Roman ruin. In the heat of summer travel, Iowa is like a tropical jungle. The train creeps through thick, torridly humid woodlands dense with wildflowers: orange day lilies, tall purple iris, brown-eyed Susans, pink lady slippers, violets, Queen Anne’s lace, Bleeding Heart, swinging vines and white birch trees all but conceal the cornfields beyond. Cross the Mississippi River at Burlington. A new, white otherwordly sculpted bridge for autos reaches high above the mystic expanse of rolling water I still, in my heart, call home.
Only on the train, as it approaches Union Station in Chicago, can you see the underbelly of the great, gutsy city, its hidden steel and stone, the underpinnings that form the base of its tough elegance and streetwise beauty.
For me, the train can’t go too slowly!
4. Never book train connections. Heaven knows, you will reach your destination… whenever. You haven’t a prayer of getting anywhere on schedule. The days of the conductor’s crack stopwatch and setting the grandfather clock by way of the dependable 5:15 whistling through town on time are gone. Relax and learn to love the delays. Spare yourself the wide-eyed terror of racing for the train that is just pulling out of the station. Avoid the feeling of sheer hopelessness when the smirking conductor offers to call ahead and see what other arrangements might be made to get you to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, because the train you are now on will arrive in Chicago four hours after the LaCrosse train departs. Plan an overnight stay; reserve a hotel room before you leave town.
5. Never eat Amtrak food. Avoid the dining room entirely, unless you want to experience its frenzy just to see how pleasant it could have been. Bring along your own basket of food, nibbles that, for the most part, need not be heated. Fit part of the basket with a small portable cooler for perishables. Take along a good paring knife and small bowl, as well as a small ice bucket. Some suggestions for munching: fresh and dried fruit, raw vegetables cut into crudité, vinaigrette for dipping, roasted veggies in marinade for sandwiches, pasta salads in small portions, aged hard cheese like parmigiano reggiano or asiago which you can shave onto sourdough, crackers, sweet or savory breakfast bread, smoked fish, roast chicken, jerky, tuna, a jar of olives and artichoke hearts, tapenade, juices, maybe some bittersweet chocolate truffles, ginger snaps and a moist molasses cookie or two. I take a bottle of red, although Amtrak does not allow such going on, so be discreet. They, of course, want you to buy booze from their lounge car.
For a change of pace along the way, augment your basket. When the train stops for servicing in various cities, leave the depot and search out a restaurant with food to go. There’s a nice tempura and sushi spot in Denver that will quick-pack a disposable bento box; a rib, potato and salad joint in Omaha.
Make “friends” with the lounge car cafe attendant. Assume an attitude when first you approach that silently asserts he owes you a few simple favors and you owe him a whopping tip. He has the ice for your cooler (use ice bucket, here) and he has a microwave if you need food heated. He also has early morning, steaming hot coffee, tea, condiments, paper napkins and plastic utensils. But beware! He sells canned soups hideous to both sight and taste; he peddles snacks and sandwiches galore that are an affront to your palate and cholesterol level. Don’t touch the canned tuna salad, it tastes sugar coated. The hot dogs are passable if you pile them with mustard, etc. etc., etc. If I get a little tipsy on wine, I develop a craving for those teensy weensy gray White Castle burgers, due to morbid melancholy. I ate them when I was a little girl.
6. If you must go at all, never enter the dining car without a book, writing paper and some sort of expansive periodical that can be held up in front of your face while you read and eat. Should your dining companions, chosen by the maitre d’s sinister whim, best be ignored, open the book, write a letter, or whip out that AVA and spread it out and up to cover all, the time-tested way to end any conversation.
Who might you meet? It’s the luck of the draw! Last journey, I met a very interesting couple from South Africa; an elderly, sweet couple from Oakland; a Cherokee steel worker cum union organizer, in semi-native regalia, out of work and looking for a new life; a buttoned-down Brooks Bros. stockbroker who left his wife at home in the Chicago suburbs, because she preferred shopping malls to choo-choo trains, to ride the rails for a week on his own; a staccato clip-clip German documentary film-maker, his unintentionally comical cameraman tagging at his heels, both incessantly roaming the aisles, stopping to interview Amtrak employees for what, in my estimation, will be a piece of questionable quality on American train travel. All were enjoyable. But then, I probably would have been amused by Mr. Show Biz with his down the arm hat trick, alluded to by that Amtrak rider/writer as something of a jerk.
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