Perpetual Motion
Day 1:
On the road again! Well, on the rails at any rate. Today I set off on a cross-country train ride from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. To say that I was excited about the prospect of being on a train for four days and nights is the understatement of 2016. I love trains. I’ve been looking forward to this part of the summer for months. Changing landscapes? Perpetual motion? The soothing monotony of wheels on steel? Blissful anonymity? What’s not to love?!
I learned from my last artist residency that I wasn’t going to have nearly as much alone time as I thought I would so prior to getting to The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona next week I was looking forward to some pre-residency, solo, stare out the window at America, meditate on the infinite complexity of humanity, and maybe listen to the DNC on the radio time.
Turns out that’s not how train rides work. Thinking that this trip would be a solitary adventure is akin to going off to summer camp thinking that it will be all peaceful communion with nature and poetry writing on a canoe in the middle of a lake when really everyone knows that camp is about mixing six kinds of cereal for breakfast in the mess hall every morning and water balloon fights with your bunkmates. Everyone but me that is.
Jarred and Adam, two Virginia natives with seats across the aisle from mine quickly disabused me of the notion that this would be a canoe poetry kind of trip. Within ten minutes of sitting down, Jarred and I were heatedly debating educational philosophy. Soon I was being entertained with tales of Southern shenanigans, naked sleepwalking, and obtaining graduate degrees in Social Studies, which Jarred insists does not stop being a thing after fifth grade though I remain skeptical.
Soon after, I met Ken and Nancy a married couple who were riding the rails all the way out west, up the coast of CA, and back east on the Trans-Canadian Railway; the same train trip they had made 40 years before. Be still my heart. I hope I grow up to be like them. They, like, oh, most people on the train, are big National Parks fans who are actively working on visiting all of them and within 30 minutes they’d given me half a dozen book recommendations. Ambitious travel plans, all the books, and naked sleepwalking stories all within the first eight hours of the trip! Train people are clearly my people.
Before we knew it, night came to The Crescent and people started to lean back in their chairs, which recline like La-z-boys, and rest their heads on their inflatable neck pillows. Since I’d performed two outdoor, acrobatic performances in 90 degree heat earlier in the day, I soon joined them.
Day 2:
Late in the day we passed over the surface of Lake Pontchartrain (the lake that flooded the city of New Orleans during Katrina) in the rain, on tracks barely higher than the water level. My seat mate, a NOLA native, said she’d never seen the waters so choppy. Thanks Meg, very reassuring. We passed the Superdome and pulled into New Orleans station. We had a 12 hour layover for the night so I set out to see the city with my new, top hat wearing friend David, a self-described Deistic Magician and NOLA native, who showed me around the French Quarter where wire frame balconies and brassy street bands abound. On our way to the banks of the Mississippi, which rise unnervingly above street level, he showed me which street-side Tarot readers truly have The Sight and told me about the renovations he’s making on his house, which 12 years after Katrina is still being repaired, like so much of the city.
Day 3:
At 7am I was back at the Amtrak station to board The Sunset Limited from LA to L.A.. A coach ticket for the Sunset Limited, which is cheaper than a Greyhound ticket, gets you a seat on the top level of a double decker train car and access to the observation car with walls of windows that extend up onto the ceiling for max landscape viewing. There’s a dining car for those so inclined but I came prepared with a weeks worth of rice cakes, peanut butter, canned lentil soup, two bars of chocolate, ready rice, carrots, avocados, and other such hearty provisions that can be consumed sans kitchen.
For this leg of the journey I had nothing to distract me from books and window gazing contemplation. Except for Matt, Colin, and Duncan who were pretty much distraction incarnate. Die hard soccer fans and players, they were making a pilgrimage from NOLA to L.A. to see Arsenal play a match that weekend. They won me over when they heard me talking to my Mom on the phone about how crucial that minute of microwaving is in making minute rice stomachable so they brought me back falafel from a hour half-hour long stretch break in Houston. After two days of eating cold lentil soup for dinner, falafel is the way to my heart. Also beer. Apparently everyone but me also knew that cross-country train trips are 0% geared toward meditative thinking and 100% geared toward playing drinking games with strangers. By the end of the first day we had about nine nicknames apiece. Mine were, to the best of my recall: Natasha aka Beaujolais Nouveau aka Jammy Jammy Wine Drips aka Jammy Drips aka Jam Jam aka Jam Jam Tam Tam, aka AKA.
There’s really nothing to seal a bffship than a four hour layover in a foreign city. It just so happened that that night we were stopped in San Antonio from 11pm to 3am, which gave rise to an impressive to-do list entitled The San Antonio Seven. The last two were my contributions to the list, in case that wasn’t obvious.
The San Antonio Seven:
1. Drink a beer.
2. Drink a margarita.
3. Take a shot.
4. Eat delicious food.
5. Sing karaoke.
6. See The Alamo.
7. Walk along The San Antonio River Walk.
I am proud to say that not only did we accomplish each and every one of these tasks, we closed out the night with standing ovations at The Republic of Texas bar with Matt’s rendition of Mr. Brightside followed by mine and Duncan’s duet of Enter Sandman. Mic drop. We made it back to the train with ten minutes to spare only to find that I now had a seat mate and she was taking up all of her own seat and three quarters of mine. Fortunately, Matt still had an empty seat next to him so I grabbed my sleeping bag and took to my new seat, which provided space to breathe and plenty of awake time to do so between Duncan and Colin’s snore chorus and Matt’s alarm going off every five minutes. Ain’t no intimacy like train intimacy. There was no rousing Matt, who sleeps like a hibernating cicada with years to go until morning, but he didn’t have a passcode on his phone so I figured out how to shut it off before a mutiny ensued. You’re welcome car 11. You’re also welcome, Matt, seeing as the last time someone entrusted their passcode-less phone to me I put my number in as Your Worst Nightmare and spent the rest of the night calling them at odd intervals.
Day 4:
The following day was broken up by staff announcements that were, as Matt put it, “just the right level of professional.” Merrill, who worked concessions and had a voice like Rod Roddy from Price is Right, repeated daily such gems as “Well folks, due to forces outside of my control, my dinner break is now over and the snack car is open once again.” and “Goooooooood morning passengers! Due to forces outside of my control, I am awake and the snack car is open so come on down for a fresh cup of coffee and a jimmy dean sausage saaaaaandwich!” Other train announcements included an escalation from “Please don’t smoke in the bathrooms folks, we will definitely kick you off if you do.” to “Folks, we know you’re smoking in the bathrooms. Do you think we don’t notice? Please don’t smoke in here. We’ll kick you off immediately. We’re not kidding. Also, parents, if your kid misses the seat, please clean up after them. Same goes for you, men. I know the train sways from side to side but if I can hit the bullseye, so can you.”
All the while, eccentric, ground-bound people would board and depart the train. At one point an 18-year-old goth girl onboard told not just me but many strangers in the observation car how beautiful my eyes are. She later found train love with a goth boy who got on in El Paso. Future Ken and Nancy? Another passenger I got to know was a Cambodian tattoo artist named Adrienne who would definitely have given me a train tattoo if he hadn’t checked the bag that carried his equipment. Next time, he said, in the same way camp friends promise they’ll see each other soon.
Any time I’d come back into the observation car from a nap, listening to the DNC coverage, or reading in my seat (it did happen on occasion) there would be a beer waiting for me and a plan in the works for what breweries and burrito joints to stop at on our next mini-break. Best. Cohort. Ever.
On our last night on the train we made a 7.30pm dinner reservation in the dining car, put on our finest lounge wear, and did our best to pretend we were in a Wes Anderson film. There, we greeted our friend Dennis from the observation car, his wife and mother, Conductor Saun, and the new couple who had just boarded in Tucson. #lifeinasmalltown.
In the last week we’d passed through East Coast cities, southern bayous, the endless, beige expanse of West Texas, the Marfa Prada art installment, the Rio Grande, boarder control at Del Rio, which is directly across from Juarez, Mexico, and desolate farms smattered across the lands.
We soaked in the last sights of dust devils, jackrabbits, pronghorns, long horned cattle, red rock mountains, and Dr. Seuss-ian cacti. We had our last beers, played our last games, and reclined our seats for the last time before pulling into Los Angeles at 5.30am Friday morning, 86 hours after boarding a train in Philadelphia.
There wasn’t such a clear Through the Looking Glass moment on this trip as there was driving through torrential rain to The Smokies, however, four days journeying across ever shifting landscapes with a bunch of crazy, generous, playful, perpetually tipsy, rail riders is remarkably Wonderland-esque. Who needs canoe poetry when you can have four days of water balloon fights? Let the Southwest adventure begin!
