Dispatches from Amtrak car 2715.

I’ve come to realize that one of my favorite things about Amtrak is watching people find their place in the quasi feudalism that exists among the veteran travelers and those who have just boarded.

The first moments of an Amtrak adventure go like this:

Our virgin traveler begins her journey by paying the hidden Amtrack fees by waiting an extra 110 minutes past the 2am call. Now having hastily just dropped her over sized duffle bags somewhere beside a scouring ticket agent, she is scuttled up a shin biting stairwell by her fellow grunting passengers. For a moment she recalls the lifetime as a Vermont bovine.

Half way up at the right angled corner she is met by a brusque mother of two Samoan children, wrangled by harness and leash. They scream, “I want it first!” in mantra.
At nearly four years of age, the older of the two is caked in spaghetti sauce and recovering from a sinus infection. The crimson and chartreuse stains resemble a retro Bubbalisicious t-shirt or vibrant Rorschach test. Pulling mother followed by a cadre of cigarette smokers in tow the lot press down the three feet of confined space to the yellow step stool and the platform beyond.

Once above deck, the passenger steps into a delicate nexus of zombified holding containers. The scene could come from any scifi film after Alien. Popularized by the Matrix and followed in toe by Ian McGregors sore thumbs down sleeper The Island.

Dull eggshell lighting and the bent limbs of travelers contorted into a dream state over hardened sofa chairs litter isle. This is the home stretch to her seat. Along the way she will piss off three people whom she will continually encounter over the next two days. Every time she leaves her seat for the bathroom or goes down to the commissary they will be there vaporizing her with laser glances and crossing her path in the air locker between cars wishing her an early death behind a nervous smile.

!

When the fresh legs breach coach quarters a 35-hour vet can see them from a car away.

Typically fifteen years into retirement, sporting swollen ankles and fleshy neck folds- they walk as if to dignify the poopie pants swagger that has suddenly overtaken them. Bowlegged and broad faced with wariness; they resist being tossed between the reclining seats, making progress all the more difficult.

Does anyone help? Perhaps Maybe a supporting arm to the eldest of the bunch?
Fukkin’ hell no way!
It’s a right of passage we have all endured and to give even an empathetic eye would be to break an unspoken pact among the seasoned passengers.
And that’s how you’ve got to roll in the hard isles of Amtrak.
If you can’t hack it, next time you’ll go Jet Blue.

But if you do, you’re a sukka bitch- cuz all the tru freight riders know:

Waking in a slurry fluttering of eyelashes and muscle ache to the peach and violet dawn breaking through the ponderosas on an unnamed mountain pass, I was groundless at last. The soft tumble of rail carrying my questions and expectations further away from the person I was the night before, carrying me to who I will become this year. I could have been dead because in my heaven this is every morning. The sweet haunting mystery of waking up hundreds of miles from where you fell asleep.
Born again as a ghost.
A wild horse drinks beside a mountain stream/I see the tail of this steal beast weave along the distant cliff behind me. I wake for this moment only and dissolve back into a black slate that is the depth I know as dreaming.