Underway on the Rails

I’ve been away for a week now and have seen hundreds of miles of country, some arid, some snowy, such as it is here in Tyrone, home of Via Negativa’s Dave Bonta.

Travelng by train is a curious mix of fast food convenience, nineteenth- century nostalgia (several stations in Illinois had hosted debates in which Lincoln was a participant), and the feeling that you’ve entered a fifties-style diner where a group of locals is sitting around shooting the breeze, but by virtue of having boarded the train, you are automatically a member of the group.

Several people pointed me to a recent New York Times article about train travel in the US. Most of what’s in the article has rung true for me, though I think every single passenger on every train I’ve boarded since last Tuesday could have written a different version of that article.

Nice to have two nights at Dave’s. I’ll be on my way to Boston tomorrow via Philadelphia. I’ll travel through my mother’s childhood and adolescence, feeling their force with none of the details that memory catches like butterflies, rising on a warm spring day. I am not sure what my own childhood train memory trip would look like, but I’m about to follow my mother’s.