The Lake Shore Limited finally rolled into Chicago, three and half hours late. My son and his new friend, a ten year old we had met the night before while he and his mom were playing cards and my son and I were playing board games, took one another’s hands and walked along the platform towards the station hall. We parents snapped pictures from behind. Both boys seem a bit obsessive; my son with his trains, the other, older boy with numbers and math and patterns, and in one another they seem to have found someone who was both understandable and willing to understand.
They were staying in Chicago for a few days. We said our goodbyes – we didn’t exchange information, the mom and I tacitly understanding that this was just serendipity, and between their differences in age (ten versus six) and location (Belfast, Maine versus Seattle, Washington), any implied promise of ongoing connection would simply create false hope. Maybe their paths will cross again some day and if they do, I have no doubt there will be recognition and joy and the start of a true friendship and love. But on Wednesday afternoon, we simply went in our different directions.
Our next train – the Empire Builder – was delayed. Amtrak’s long distance network was in chaos after flooding in Wisconsin had left trains stranded, crews scattered in the wrong places. They were going to assemble a new consist out of spare cars in the yard and hopefully we’d be on board by 5:15pm, three hours late, four hours after our arrival.
We stored our bags and went out into the city. My son marveled at the scale of the buildings above him, the Willis Tower piercing the low clouds, its top invisible. We walked down West Adams Street to the Berghoff, an old German restaurant that looks exactly the same as when my grandfather ate his lunches there sixty years ago. My son ate bread and butter and I had the weiner schnizel a la Holstein, with creamed spinach and spaezle and pickles and a couple gibsons. We walked around a bit more and then he asked to go back to the station, to play board games in the departure lounge.
Other passengers, in varying states of boredom, frustration, and calm, watched as we laid out our game pieces and board and cards and started building rail networks from coast to coast, my son’s stuffed animals acting as additional players (one of the bears won the game, actually). Grandmothers stopped by to ask about what we were playing and tell us about their grandchildren and describe the games they liked to play.
Eventually the train boarding was announced, and we packed up and shuffled back to the platform. We met a nice couple with their three year old girl and her grandfather just behind us in line, and my son and the little girl struck up a quick friendship (well, not so quick – we were in line for the better part of an hour – the announcement was premature). Our roomette – a tiny two-berth closet – was just above their bedroom in the same sleeper car. I got my son a hot dog from the cafe and put him to sleep, and I went to the observation car and read for an hour or so.
I’m rereading Proust’s Remembrance of Lost Time, which is somehow appropriate for a much-delayed train ride across the country but it also is not, as a quick scan of other passengers’ books revealed. I’ve always had a very bad “reading over other people’s shoulders” habit, and walking through train cars, I inevitably try to see what everyone else is reading. On the Empire Builder, it’s mostly Dan Brown novels, bad mysteries and the like, but there are more than a few bibles and holy books (there are a lot of wool-clad Mennonites and several Mormon missionaries), and one gentleman is reading an ancient copy – it must be from the 1920s or so – of Sherlock Holmes. I don’t know why I do this, and that night, I tried to explore my motivations a bit. Basic curiosity is at the core, and a nagging sense that I’m missing something that I’ll only find in what other people experience. There’s a part of me that always wants to find a new book to read and thinks maybe I’ll find it in someone else’s hands; there’s another part that wants to be sure I’m reading the most complicated book on the train, that wants to prove my superiority (laugh); and there’s that part of me that wants to see if someone else, anyone else, might ever want to talk about what they are reading and why and what I’m reading and why. I haven’t found that yet, though, by reading over people’s shoulders.
I sat down and opened my book, and another guy looked up, saw the cover, scowled a bit, and returned to his novel. Oh well.
The train was four hours late as I climbed into the upper berth and shut my eyes.
I didn’t sleep well – I don’t sleep well these days, haven’t for months, especially since I had the dog killed. I woke up at 3am, the train rolling slowly in the dark, and took out my phone and found out where we were – stuck in Wisconsin, alas, now six hours behind, trailing slow freight trains who were also behind schedule. I listened to my son snore faintly below me, I tried to read in the pale low blue night light, eventually I fell into Wikipedia holes and learned about the development of the US strategic nuclear deterrent in the 1950s and 60s. Three and a half hours later my son started to stir, softly reciting Monopoly rental rates to his bear as he woke up. He sprung up after a few minutes, needing to go the bathroom, and I quickly dressed and helped him out of the closet and towards relief. When he got back, he put on his shorts and we went to get breakfast.
Seven hours late.
After coffee and cereal, we set up shop in the observation car, stuffed bears and other friends, activity books, pencil and paint cases, board games and decks of cards. A group of mismatched older travelers, heading west to Glacier National Park for a fiftieth wedding anniversary, sat across from one another at two tables, looking at the fields of Minnesota, trying to guess the crops.
“Soybeans?” asked one woman, to no one in particular.
“No, sugar beets,” called out another woman sitting at a different table.
“Oh, that’s it honey – sugar beets,” the first woman told her husband. You thought those were potatoes – but they must be sugar beets, there’s a Tate & Lyle refinery, look, sugar!”
“Well, I was kind of right. Beets are a tuber, so are potatoes. I was close.” The husband kept up his steady gaze out the window towards the fields.
The family with the little girl found us mid-morning and we began to play together. They live in Germany but were from the states, and they were taking the wife’s father on a long-planned train journey to Glacier for hiking and back. My son was playing his train game with me and his stuffed animals, and we wrapped up the game and switched to Uno with the girl and her father. Then we switched to craft books and general play and conversation. For the second time in as many days, my son was finding playmates without hesitation, just for the sheer joy of finding someone interested in him and with whom he could share some time.
The Mennonites got off in Grand Forks, North Dakota, just before lunch, and the two families went off to feed. My son and I were seated with a couple who had boarded in Fargo, two academics, tall and gangly the way prairie people are, with long bony hands, her hair cropped very short with horn rimmed glasses, his face gaunt with prominent teeth and chin and nose. Despite the heat they wore long hiking pants; they were bound for Glacier too, but didn’t seem interested in my son despite his rampant cuteness. The boy ordered decaf coffee and a hot dog; he started drinking coffee about a week ago, takes it with milk but no sugar, the milk mostly just to cool it off. The dining car attendant was marvelling at him, and he told her (and everyone within earshot, which was basically the entire car) about how his grandfather had bad coffee at the rehab facility he went to after his surgery. Most people – except our table mates – smiled and asked questions. Our luncheon companions did not.
After lunch my son asked to have some quiet time with his craft books. We headed back to the roomette, and I drifted into a nap as my son was scissoring up a page with fold-up houses. When I woke, the houses were built, and we hadn’t moved. Afterwards, heading back to the observation car to start up game time again, I saw the couple from lunch in coach seats. He was reading a book about effective techniques for family therapy; she was marking up a manuscript on child psychology.
Eight hours late.
Back to the observation car, the little girl was waiting, watching Mister Rogers videos on her dad’s phone with her grandfather while her parents shared a bottle of wine and some quiet time together. My son sat down next to her as her granddad made room, and they watched the tiny screen, huddled together, arms locked together, all wide smiles and wide eyes. I sat next to the grandfather and talked with him about children, about living long distance as a parent, about his experiences in Indiana and his thirty nine years of marriage. We both thought the parents could use some time alone, and for about an hour they chatted while granddad and I watched the two pairs of girl and boy, both lost in their worlds.
Eventually the older of the two couples got up and walked over to check up on the kids (and, just as likely, on the two old men). They were grateful for distraction for their daughter, and one generation replaced another as the grandfather stood up and went to get a nap for himself. The woman had fallen in love with Germany while still in high school; they came together in grad school and she brought him to live there a week after the marriage, taking a cruise ship from New York to Rotterdam for their honeymoon and their move. They had been living away from the states for seven years and the longer they stayed away, the more they found it difficult to imagine living here – America just seems so, well, absurd. Expensive health care, bad public transit, strange tribalism – we didn’t talk politics but as we rolled through the empty plains before Williston, we talked about fracking and energy, how understandable it was that people in North Dakota would sell out their land for hard cash but how tragic it felt as well.
My son popped up his head, and the dad asked somewhat ironically if he liked the landscape – endless flat light brown fields of wheat and abandoned high prairie to the horizon, the occasional cottonwood grove or windbreak tree line, fracking pipes with gas burn dotting here and there, the big, beautiful, blue sky, with high clouds and the sun turning orange behind them. We had been talking about how fracking storage units were forced to be painted brown to blend in with the landscape – but my son said it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. The dad, taken off guard, asked why. My son said it was because of the telephone poles.
We both looked out, and noticed the faint quiet grid formed by the poles stretching towards the horizon and paralleling the train in even lines, every few miles, until they vanished, the perspective lines constantly shifting in the frame formed by the observation car window as we rolled along the rails at eighty miles an hour.
The late August sun started to set, the angles feeling tighter against the horizon than they had felt a month ago when my son first came to Maine, the trip beginning to take on the feeling of an ending journey. We got our reservations for dinner – theirs first, ours a bit later – and we pulled the children away from Daniel Tiger and King Friday the 13th and went to get ready.
Still eight hours late. At least we weren’t losing more time.
At dinner the son and I sat with a young couple from Minnesota, on the train for a long weekend trip to Portland, Oregon. She was an architect, a couple years out of university, working on industrial buildings for a global design firm. He was in his senior year of university after spending four years in the Air Force, studying geography and geographical information systems. I’m sort of fascinated by that field and we talked excitedly, my son every now and again dropping in comments which actually were vaguely on point – saying things like “Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark” and “Kansas City is not in Kansas, and that’s not right” – which made me very proud of him. He got a steak, I got a steak, the boyfriend got a steak, the girlfriend got chicken.
They asked what I did and I said I was a banker, unfortunately, but they were sympathetic – “the world needs bankers, don’t worry” – and it helped that they knew the company I’m going to work for, in fact the boyfriend was a customer and had very complimentary things to say about it. I told him I’d do my best to keep his money safe and keep earning him the benefits he’d come to love, and that I thought it was a privilege to work for him. I warned him that I was a history major in university, which he thought was pretty great. He talked about Civil War history, I told him about my undergraduate thesis on shipbuilding. We looked out the window – moving slowly past the badlands of eastern Montana – and he and I gave my son a lesson on erosion and soil density as he asked why there were big holes in the side of the hills, and why we could see lines across the sides of the cliffs.
My son announced he had to go to the potty, and as he trotted down the aisle, the two of them talked about how beautiful my son was, how talkative and smart he was, and how much steak he ate even though he was so little. They laughed at how he ordered a decaf coffee and actually drank it. They asked about his mother, and I gave them the thirty second speech of the story of our divorce that I’ve practiced so many times in situations like this. They congratulated me – us – on raising a such a great little boy, as he came back to the table flapping his hands. Apparently the restroom was out of paper towels.
The little girl and her parents came by the table as we were finishing up, and saying our goodbyes to the younger couple, my son and I followed them to the observation car. It was getting late and the other family was going to be leaving at the national park, now expected to be reached around three in the morning, and needed an early bedtime. My son asked if the little girl wanted to see our roomette and she said yes – where was he getting this skill with women? certainly not from me – so we followed them back to the sleeper car. My son gave a tour of the bunks, told her where the animals slept, proudly showed her the box of tissues and his water bottle, and then the girl offered to show her bedroom to him. The parents and I looked at one another with raised eyebrows and bemused expressions. The two kids walked down the stairs and we burst into deep, exhausted, parental laughter.
My son looked up from the top stair at us and said “What?” Nothing, son. Just take the little girl to her bedroom and get the full tour.
We got ready for bed and he fell asleep almost instantly, tucked into the top bunk (thankfully – it’s smaller than the bottom one), and I headed to the bar for a nightcap. I read some more Proust – “Swann in Love” from the first volume, Swann’s deep narcissism masked by his elegance and his aestheticism or perhaps emphasized by it, while he uses and discards the objects of his affection even as he dimly recognizes his own callousness, his own awareness that his feelings of love are so far from what love actually is – and it struck me that Proust, so often accused of narcisissm by critics, is really simply the most sensitive portraitist of that syndrome. And if one is so sensitive, if one is so keenly aware of how others express their own blinding insecurities through finding fault in those they ensnare, then aren’t you really quite the opposite? But Swann reminded me too much of real people, and I put the book down. As I was finishing my drink, the grandfather appeared, with a nightcap or three of his own, and we continued where our last conversation had left off.
Take the following paragraph with a grain of salt: I like who I like, and if you’re reading this, I probably either do or would like you. But in general, I like Americans more than Europeans as individuals, but somehow I can’t stand what Americans have done to this country, and have far more sympathy for what Europeans have created on their own continent. I like European literature, generally, more than American, but at the same time I find American literature filled with people who are more real and more sympathetic, and European literature, while better written, to be populated with a bunch of thoroughly unlikable characters – either that, or the likeable character is clearly out of place, clearly not right for the European world that they are forced to inhabit. My favorite visual artists are generally Americans who live in exile in Europe, or Europeans who live in exile in America. I like my music Canadian, though. I’m probably as Canadian as my friends in Alberta think.
The grandfather and I talked for a while after he bought me a second drink, picking up where we had left off in the afternoon. He talked about drives out west, seeing the parks and the desert and the mountains, the difference between that and the farm country of northern Indiana. His road trips seemed to be solitary, or maybe with a friend, his wife staying at home. After awhile, as always happens for random partners on a train, the talk lagged and we listened to the rails. I finished my glass, told him what a pleasure it had been to talk with him, wished him well, shook his hand kindly even though he raised it with difficulty for the embrace, and while he stayed behind, I walked back to the roomette, dark and quiet with my son curled around his bear, and crawled into the bunk underneath.
I woke up at five in the morning. There was a note from the little girl’s father, saying that she liked my son and hoped he could come visit in Germany and they could sleep together. My son read it and asked if we could do that, and I said I think so, we’ll see what we can do. I suppressed another tired parental laugh, noted the father’s email address left at the bottom, and tucked the letter away.
The family must have gotten off, nine hours late, at four in the morning. But the train’s delay had broken the Empire Builder – the conductor, exhausted, told me that we’d only make it to Spokane and then we’d take a bus for the last three hundred miles to Seattle. We’d get in late afternoon if we were lucky, and he admitted that our luck hadn’t been good so far so it was only a guess.
We had a last breakfast and a laugh with the diner car ladies. We played some more board games and my son met another little girl, who was a lot less refined than his girlfriend from the day before and he didn’t really enjoy playing with her. She wanted to eat his tiny plastic wind-up train with her dinosaur hand; he was sort of confused by the idea of eating a train of any kind. We went back to our sleeper, to pack and for him to do a little more crafts. He wrote a note to send to the little girl in Germany. I typed some thoughts into my phone and texted an update to the son’s mom in Seattle – we’d be late, still time unknown, thanks for your patience, updates to follow – and thought maybe I could go back to Proust. My son is no Swann, thankfully. He is not building an empire either, and the American empire we have just crossed holds little hope for his own future. He has, though, fallen in love.
Next summer, we’ll see about going to Europe. It’s time he started using his passport again.
Postscript: We met the other little girl, with the dinosaur puppet, on the bus ride from Spokane to Seattle. My son was a gentleman, even though she got motion sick and wet herself, and he made her laugh and even showed her the card and picture he had made for the girl from Germany. She liked it – at that age, I suppose, there is no jealousy. I hope he stays that way and that the young girls he meets do as well. I doubt it, but hope springs eternal.