Trains, Planes, and Bar Cars

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Trains are oddly intimate with the world around them; running down the California coast you feel you could jump out the window and into the sea, or, in Oakland, stretch out and take a sip from a gangbanger’s Big Gulp. The outside world loves you back—everyone waves at trains: children, of course, but also fieldworkers, Portland WASPs on family bike rides, llama ranchers, prison soccer teams, badass girls driving vintage black Mustangs. A sound track plays on an endless loop in your head. The Magnetic Fields, “Born on a Train.” A line from Tom Waits: “Burlington Northern pulling out of the world . . .”

What a world it is: the backside of America. Really, it demands the vernacular: the ass-end. Warehouse districts and trailer parks. Dirt farms and scrap yards. A mountainous compost pile made up entirely of imperfect cut flowers, stinking like a perfumed corpse. Rolling into Los Angeles, the day’s last light appearing beige through the smog. And along the aqueducts and behind the walls that cloister the suburbs are the hardy citizens of Ass-end America, the nowhere campers and nothing-doers, the migrants, the desperadoes, the old men who pass their days sitting in patches of shade. They are the only people who do not wave.

In the middle of the night, a hobo campfire. A real hobo campfire!

The shine started to fade as I tacked east from Los Angeles, alone now, with lonely train songs in my head. Billy Bragg: “Train took my baby away from me . . .” I began to pay attention to certain details of train travel. Like the toilet breakdown in car 31. The refrigeration failure in the bar car. The fact that half the menu items in the dining car always seemed to be sold out. Does every water tap have to be either the measliest trickle or a pneumatic blast that sprays out of the sink at crotch level? As for the view, it’s great—until dark. Then, perhaps, a movie? I understand the concept has been quite a success in other areas of the transportation sector.

It is probably a blessing that there is often no cell phone signal, but no wireless Internet? Seriously? On the train I was writing by hand. With a pencil. Somewhere between the humble villages of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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