I bought a rail pass in Portland which was good for 15 days and 8 trains, anwhere I might want to go served by Amtrak.
Granted, that put some limits on destinations, but that didn't really matter very much given my purposes. I like motion, the rocking chassis of a machine conveying me onward over the continent. I like the manageable, packable life. I like the ever-changing background of faces. I like the many inconveniences and delays. The unexpected turns and accidents, the fervent possibility of mild cataclysm. A few nights before leaving, I heard a second-hand story of a cross-country train re-routed thru Wyoming, where the old lines buckled under the carriages and the engine jumped the line. Miles from any platform and hours from a relief train, the passengers had to disembark onto the prairie and pass the night inside a cattle shed. The lucky devils.
Many people say they like travel when in truth what they really like is arriving. I like the process of getting there moreso than the place itself. I would go to India if I could find a compelling enough means of conveyance. So I chose a city I had never been to - Minneapolis - and set course. There was really no great reason for being there, only for going.
The train crested the western slope of the Rockies and began its descent to the plains. I feel accomplished whenever I cross the continental divide. It is like coming into another country. Or rather, it is coming into another country. The plants and animals are different, the waters flow the other way. The land of origin is now irrevocably behind, and before you is an open scape of grasses, wheat, sheet metal towns and fence wire loping off to the horizon.
The Great Plains, are sometimes contemptuously viewed by those who favor sudden shifts in altitude as a bland and featureless place, like the middle chapters of a period romance novel, best skipped over so as to get to the more exciting parts. Point your finger out directly in front of you and sweep your arm in a long arc. There, you have traced the horizon.
Growing up, some of my best friends were trees, which gave me the notion that happiness involved being rooted to a place. Why anyone would choose to live somewhere a tree could die if left unwatered mystified me.
However the prairies, far from a lack luster footnote of geography, are the defining feature of the continent, and hold no small sway over what it means to be of this land. Think of 'America the Beautiful.' Sure, there's the sea-to-shinging-sea part, and that bit about purple mountains, but think of the amber waves, spacious skies, fruited plains. If we were an island - like Britain or Hawaii - we might have had a national identity allied with the sea. Yet I've been to towns within spitting distance of salt water - Orick, California, Sedro-Woolley, Washington - where the bars still hung with rodeo memorabilia and patrons swaggering under belt-buckles. These men who drank gawdawful beer and never called home anywhere near a roaming buffalo, yet whose speech was of cattle and diesel where geography would have suggested winds and tide. The pattern may be seen again in mountain towns and hill towns, and towns wrapped up in forest. If there is a town in North America that does not have its bar of wrangler wannabes I've seen it on no map.
The comparison is frequently made between the prairie and the ocean. I can see it, and I agree that my sentiments are largely familiar to those I have felt at the shore. They do have some commonalities. The spareness stirs wonder at what lay across and no matter how far back one pushes the horizon, yet it goes on. My childhood opinions have changed. Those early ideas based off arboreal contentment I've realize are ill-suited to the bipedal. I no longer see the plains as territory to get across - a long stretch between good lattes - but to enjoy the crossing. Everything that ever thrived here survived because it moved when the season required. The buffalo, the Indians, wild horses, antelope, wolves, even the grasses themselves, scattering by wings, burrs, and fire and shifting stalks in the wind.
The train comes to a stop in Havre for several hours to let a freight train pass. An old, coal-fired engine sits beside the tracks in a fenced-off area. The thing is an industrial behemoth, all wheels and gears and black with the promise of manifest destiny. Compared to it, the amtrak passenger service looks like a line of over-size lunch tins. The passengers go about the station, chatting, stretching their legs. One particularly fit traveler pulls out some sort of excerise device and executes an abdominal workout on the pavement. There are a surprising number of smokers, who enjoy a first then a second cigarette until the crew drains the septic and the stench drives us all aboard, save the few for whom this is the final destination.
I've come to enjoy the plains, yet am still surprised when a train pulls into a prairie town and people get off. I always expect the reverse. There's that old-rooted prejudice coming out again.
The train goes on, eastward over the prairies, and I sit and watch the darkness go by.
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