Intro
So, I decided to take Amtrak to DC to spend time with my Yankee-Doodle-Dandy grandson and his parents instead of driving up there on 95 in a 2007 Mini Cooper jockeying among speeders headed to New York and those big rigs spewing their diesel that travel at varying speeds. Nor did I want to deal with Fourth of July airline woes, the inventible delays, the soullessness of the spaces where you wait in cramped quarters among others.[1]
Advertising it as a nine-hour trip, the website boasted of Wi-Fi and electric plugs, a cafe car, and microwavable entrees (though they didn’t present the menu quite like that). I was all aboard. It would be an adventure, and indeed the trip back ended up being an adventure featuring coincidences, camaraderie, a micro-overdose, and a very belligerent wheelchair bound forty-something rage hollering with stitches bridging a freshly broken nose.
On the trip up, which ended up being ten hours, I spent a bit of time staring out of my window contemplating the wide-open spaces in one of the reddest parts of the reddest of states, acres of corn, acres of woods, lonely manufactured homes in the distance with no neighbors in sight, dying towns with water towers in need of painting, all this rushing or creeping past under the mournful warning of the whistle – though it doesn’t sound like a whistle but more like a sad exasperated industrial sigh.
I tried to put myself in their places, to imagine what their lives are like, like Lucinda does here.
I walked out in a field,
The grass was high, it brushed against my legs.
I just stood and looked out at the open space,
And a farmhouse out a-ways.
And I wondered about the people who live there.
And I wondered if they were happy and content.
Were there children and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?
Lucinda Williams, “Side of the Road”
Chevy Chase
So I spent two days hanging with my older son Harrison, his wife Taryn, Taryn’s mother Sue, and, of course, Julian, a mighty master of nouns, who calls me Rusty. His uncle Logan he calls Lo-Lo; Logan’s wife Ivette he calls Te Te. He calls his maternal grandfather, Pop Pop and Pop Pop’s girlfriend Fi Fi.
Lo-Lo-Te-Te-Pop-Pop-Fi-Fi.[2]
Casey Jones, You Better Watch Your Speed
We went to a playground on day one and had a lovely birthday party day two, but the next thing you know, I’m in an Uber headed to Union Station, and the driver pantomimes/asks if he can stop for gas, pointing to a gauge looking dire. I told him I wasn’t in a hurry, so he got out and sprinted into the Circle-K to stand in line at the counter to purchase forty-dollars’ worth of unleaded.
Despite the delay, I got to the station in enough time not to be stressed. A train station is much more straightforward than an airport. I love the fact that you can get on without showing a ticket. Anyway, though I’m not supposed to be superstitious, I look for omens. If this were a short story, I’d make the ride much more creepy, dramatize it as foreshadowing, a bad bodement that things on the trip could very well go wrong.
But anyway, I climbed aboard, a spry 70-year-old two-bag toting fedora sporting dandy of sorts. They cordon you into cars headed to the same latitudes, Rocky Mount, Florence, Kingstree, North Charleston as opposed to Georgia and Florida. There were only singleton seats next to others, so I asked the fellow pictured below if he minded if I sat next to him. “Not at all,” he said in a pleasant Southern California voice that has a nice balance between vowels and consonants.
This fellow, whose name is Derrick, smelled of alcohol but was not in the least intoxicated, so at first we sat silently, he listening to music via earbuds, I reading from a dream journal I created in the last century. I had grabbed it off the shelf because I couldn’t find a notebook, and I knew the journal had blank pages. The first entry is dated 2/12/80 with a dream in which I’m a juror in a show trial. The last dream entry is dated 3/1/97. Here’s the dream:
I dream I encounter a sort of Jungian “wise old man.” He’s a cross between Ezra Pound [the opposite of a wise old man] and Ashley Brown [a former professor with a speech impediment]. He [the Jungian old man] has a goatee but a kind young-seeming face. His speech impediment is gone. He speaks many languages but is humble – [illegible] of over-indulgence but admits he’s travelled that path. He says he’s going off to church to “become learned in eternity.”
The journal also contains lists of books I read over the years starting in 1992 and ending in 2004.
Perhaps an hour elapses in silence. After I finish reading the journal, I reach for one of the novels I’ve brought, Richard Ford’s Be Mine, whose plot revolves around a 74-year-old man caring for his 47-year-old son who is dying of ALS.[3]
My neighbor reaches down to procure another Bud Lite and asks me if I would like a beer. It’s eleven-something, before the cafe car serves alcohol.[4]
“I’d love one,” I say. “You coming from DC?”
“No, Baltimore. I’ve been staying with my best friend who has ALS.”
“What a coincidence! This novel is about ALS. One of my best friends died of ALS.”
He takes a photo of the cover and tells me about his friend, who has had ALS for about a year. His friend, whose nickname is Ziggy, is still ambulatory. Derrick spends weeks at a time with him, rigging up inventions like a hand-operated thing-a-ma-jig that raises and lowers the umbrella on a patio table. Derrick is relentlessly upbeat. He and Ziggy live in the present, which is what the narrator of Be Mine is attempting but failing to do.
Over the course of the next two hours he plies me with Bud Lites, so I get his address so I can mail him a copy of my novel Today, Oh Boy. He also offers me his vape pin to take to the restroom to hit on some cannabis, which I politely turn down. However, he insists I take this piece of chocolate, legally purchased in liberal Maryland. “You got four more hours,” he said. “You ought to take it now.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yes.”
So I did.
There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool
I don’t enjoy tripping; a slight buzz is enough for me.
When I used to occasionally drop acid back in the early 1970s (when coming down off the strychnine-laced drug was physically painful), I’d swear off it forever. One time in ’73 I threw away my paraphernalia, my incense holder, etc., which I attribute to the traces of Protestant guilt that remain in my bloodstream despite my agnosticism. Yet, years later, I’d relapse and accept a hit as a gift in communal gatherings, even though when I’m tripping, I crave solitude.
Anyway, all too soon I was way too high and started suffering bodily discomfort. It was like being in a bad dream in murky light, but at least I knew it was a dream. I practiced breathing exercises, stared out of the window at a surreal rush of staccato-ing images, green vegetation tearing past, trains blurring by in the opposite direction. I tried to will my way into enjoying the present, which, as the effects waned over the ensuing hours, I was able to do, and by the time we hit Florence, I was in control enough to sway my way to the cafe car for a Stella.
The end was in sight.
No Expectations to Pass Through Here Again
The North Charleston Amtrak station must be new. It’s white and gleaming, the restrooms immaculate. The bad news was that it was pouring, and I was having trouble procuring an Uber, essentially because I live at Folly Beach. Finally, the app claimed someone was on the way, but the tiny car on my screen was going around in circles, alternating from 6.1 miles to 6.2 miles, so I called the driver and asked if he was headed to the train station, and he said yeah, and then the car on the screen started slowly heading to the dot of my location.
I was standing outside with others when a rough looking wheelchair bound wreck of a human in filthy sweatpants suddenly rage-screamed at the top of his lungs. I’m a really accomplished nothing-doer in situations like this, so I pretended that nothing unusual had happened, but unfortunately, he rolled up to me and asked to get him a cab. I shook my head no. He got abusive, so I went inside and stood next to the no loitering sign, but he followed me inside anyway, so I donned my scary pissed-off mask and hissed, “No, I’m not getting you a cab.” His eyes were glazed; he had stitches in his nose, which was bruised and broken.
I went back outside to wait on my Uber when a cop car pulled in. I verbally greeted the officer as he went inside and received a tense nod of acknowledgement.
Finally, my driver arrived, and as we left the parking lot, I saw two cops talking to the wheelchair man.
Alas, as he were headed home on Cosgrove, I heard the driver’s GPS voice say, “Take I-26 East,” and I said, “No, go straight,” which he did, which seemed easier but then I had to tell the driver where to turn from the back seat, and once again I was in an unfortunate Uber situation, which I supposed was a fitting bookend to my travels. The driver wouldn’t pull into my driveway, so I hauled out my bags and ran around to the garage in the pouring rain, fumbled for the light switch on the second piling, procured the hidden key, and stepped into the safe solitude of 516 East Huron.
The entire trip had taken twelve hours and by that, I mean the train trip. Real and unreal.
[1] BTW, like George Cohen, the composer of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” my grandson Julian was born on the 4th of July.
[2] It’s all yours, Ms Moni. Write a song, compose a rhyming children’s book about a 4th of July family get together cause I’m all eat up with lassitude and can’t get round to it ever..
[3] The other novel I’ve brought is Anna Karenina, the perfect book to read on a train!
[4] I’m not making this up, an email notification just came up on my screen :
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| Hey Wesley,We wanna hear all about your train trip from Washington to North Charleston on Jul 05. Can you spare just two minutes to share your travel experience? |
| If you did not travel, but still have feedback to share or need assistance filing a claim with the carrier, please email us at contact@wanderu.com.Thank you!Cheers,Chiku & the team at Wanderu |
You Do Hoodoo 