The Way to Waterloo

Travel on a Train in America

Boston’s South Station

Around 2015 I started a project of moving from a comfortable life in Maine to a less comfortable life in the Pacific Northwest. The downgrade in "comfort"  was intentional,  in some respects, but I'm not going to talk about that now. 
In a span of several years I crossed the country many times, twice by train, three times by RV, and a few more by plane. The train trips are by far the most memorable. Not because they were pleasant and enjoyable, they were in a way, but because of the "troubles," a word used by a friend familiar with my experience. Memorable travel is not a plane ride - planes are mere transportation - or a stay in a starred hotel. Travel, as written about by the likes of Paul Theroux, or Bruce Chadwick, involves exposure to unknowns, unpredictability, and sometimes danger. 
Most people don't travel. They take a trip, or a tour, or a cruise, and do things people have done ahead of them. I am not a very intrepid traveler myself. I wish I was more intrepid. Trains are my preferred mode of transportation, dare I say travel. The trips are all different, in some way colorful, and engaging in unexpected ways. I've never flown on an airplane and not wanted to quickly forget. The train trips I reride over and over. 
This train starts in Bangor, Maine, and ends in Seattle. We won't get all the way to Seattle today though. Not even to Chicago. The train was delayed. Debris on the tracks, doors and toilets frozen, waiting on a siding for the freights to pass. 
If you're a stickler for schedule, and need to be somewhere on time, long distance train travel in America is not for you. And sometimes, you'll see, the scenery sucks, they tell you to hold it until the next station.  We start at Dysarts, an iconic Bangor truck stop. 


Can I get you pancakes honey, asked a waitress named Honey. 

No thanks Honey, I gotta catch a bus. 

Love waitresses in rural America. 
I’m a stranger off the street. 
“Pancakes honey?” 
Only place I'm called Honey. 

No windows in the cinder block bus station. 
Two chairs upholstered with elephant skin, 
I mean maxed out wrinkled from the ‘70’s. Everybody outside anyway because there’s no smoking in the building. Out there smoking and looking at their phones. Harriet and I stand upwind, don’t say much. I feel like saying something about smoking, but that might make a scene. 
Most things I think about saying in public would make a scene. 
Nowadays a scene can be a serious thing. A handicap of mine.

We’re in Bangor, Maine. Stephen King lives close by. This truck stop scene, big belly bearded drivers, a mile of tarmac, diesel stink, pure Stephen. You think he makes that stuff up, but he’s just writing down what he sees of Maine's rural weirdness. 

The bus arrives late, swallows the suitcases, and departs for Portland, and the Downeaster, Amtrak Train #680. USA Today newspaper prints a short news item for all fifty states. Looking up Maine, a woman from Alfred will be tried in February for stealing Christmas wreaths from the town cemetery. Who is she? What was she thinking? Steal from the dead to give to her friends. Put a dead person's wreath on her own front door? 

The rising sun sulks between the sagging blue collar motels of Old Orchard Beach. A summer town incongruous in January, with careless plowed streets, icicles barring the windows of the beach ball store. Blue, yellow, red, behind the ice. 
Beachballs blown out to sea. 
A lapsed backwash of alleys, swamps, busted fences, graffiti, 
a billion red bricks making walls  all the way to Boston. 

North and South Train stations built a mile apart. 
Where is autocratic development when you need it? 
Can you tell me how to get to South Station?
Whoa, do you know how far that is, it’s a long, long, way. 
Yeah, I say, It’s a mile. 
Like I said, a long way. 
Can you tell me how to get to South Station?
Do you know your way around Boston?
Can YOU tell me how to get to South Station?
You can’t really say, how to get there, from here.
But see that gold building, go over that way.

Mill Town, Massachusetts

Of course South Station is a Greek Revival Temple. 
Train tracks are welded now, no more clickety clack. 
The train is sold out, which means sitting next to someone. 
Let's abbreviate Massachusetts:
The Berkshires, lots of trees, hours late into Albany.
Next enter the Rust Belt in the dark, Erie Canal. 
The old James Fenimore Cooper Wilderness, 
Iroquois warpaths outside the Body Parts Car. 
the akimbo geometry of limbs jutting into the aisle. 
The cowboy last seen throwing down shots in the club car
Asleep on the floor. One way to sleep on a train. 

An Iowan farmer came east to buy an antique fire truck
That crapped out after an hour on the road,
So he called the guy and got his money back, 
Damned white of`him, he says, to the black man beside him. 
You a football player. 
Yes. 
I could kinda tell you might be, said the Iowan farmer. 

Forget sleep,
Count the hours til coffee
When the dining car opens at six.
Serenity and I share a table at breakfast 
She’s a member of OPAL, and a believer in The Termination. 
Or, the End of the World. But, she explains, ET’s are on their way to earth to help us through these tough times. She raised her children in a commune in California. She’s susceptible to the influence of higher powers, she says. On her way home from visiting her daughter in New York. We can’t talk about anything she says. I’m too old fashioned and she’s a city girl. Poor Serenity woke up in the night, heard the train's ventilation system, and thought she was being gassed. 

Ohio Farm

Pink sky in the East. Cornfields and white barns. A sign at the dilapidated station in Bryan, Ohio says, “If you see something, say something, Hopefully it’s nothing.” 

Elkhart, Indiana. Urban wilderness. Saxophones, trumpets, tubas. 
Once I bought an Elkhart saxophone too broken to play. I liked it anyway.
“The Brass Band Capital of the World”, is also the RV capital of the world.
Winnebago, Thor, Forest River, and Jayco are built here. This is where
Wild west dreams come true in the landscape of moldy mattresses, tires, broken glass, 
crumbling concrete blocks. Discarded clothes, or are those bodies, smeared into weedy gravel. It's hard to tell sometimes, what you're really seeing. 
The trees along the track mowed with a brush hog, leaving branches and trunks splintered,
Like the violence of bombs. Even when we’re not bombing something, we make it look like we have, 
“Waterloo, Indiana folks. Waterloo. Waterloo, Indiana,” says the train voice, and I can tell he enjoys announcing and pronouncing the word Waterloo very much. 

This is fifth grade American History. 
A pall on the land. 
Anomie of abandonment. Da, da.
Dirty, trash, Shadows. 
Capitalism chews things up and spits them out. 
On the other hand, here, have a shiny automobile. 
Trade the poker chips for another landscape. Da.
Lonely in the Heartland. Thank you, amnesia. 
I pull my jacket over my head and pick my nose. 

The guy ahead has been on his phone for an hour. 
Da, da, da, sounds like he had a stroke. No wait. 
Black leather jacket, something Russian, Slavic. 
Da da da. Is it necessary to yell like that? 
Would like to strangle my fellow traveler. 

South Bend makes you want to cry.
Recycle bins as big as the houses.
Broken cinder block fire pit,
Three legged plastic chair,
Let’s grasp a straw of nature
La de da,
A home place among fences, 
Railroad rights of way, blasted trees, 
Deflated swimming pools,
Ambiance of gray grime.
A fire of drywall scraps?
faded fat tires of plastic tricycles
And the vacant lot volunteers 
Goldenrod and sumac standing by. 
It's as if someone pulled the plug 
And all the color drained from the world. 
This must be the American Dream in black and white. 
In Rome, marble corinthian columns litter the Appian Way.
In South Bend, mattresses. 
Da, da, da, says the black leather jacket. 

Photos by me, through the train windows.