Riding the rails

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment; railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed and never upsetting your drink.

--Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

So begins Theroux's popular account in 1975 of his great circular adventure, his travels on a series of trains, from London, across Europe, the Middle East, India, and through Southeast Asia; and his ultimate return westbound across the vast expanse of the old Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express. As with any good travel writer, Theroux studies not only the people and places he encounters, but how they affect his own consciousness and attitudes. He evokes brilliantly the weirdness, the humor, and the pathos of the lives he encounters, lives of both locals and fellow travelers; he also candidly describes his own occasional loneliness and boredom. Passive travel, sitting, hour after hour, watching the sights appear and pass before his window, induces a state of near hypnosis, a sense of altered reality, even of hallucination.

I didn't grow up listening to the Boston & Maine Railway, but next month I will go by rail to Boston and Maine, to attend Doug's wedding. While riding the rails on Amtrak may lack some of the glamor, as well as the third-world complexities, of train travel across India, say, or down the Malayan peninsula, I do expect it to offer some of the same rewards and challenges.

I leave Seattle on a Sunday at 4:45 p.m., and arrive -- if, as seems unlikely, the trains run on time -- in Boston at 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday. That's over three straight days of rail travel, aside from a scheduled six-hour break in Chicago on Tuesday, at which time I part company with the Empire Builder and climb aboard the Lake Shore Limited.

This long, slow procession across the continent, from one ocean to the other, fills me with excitement, dismay, and anticipation. I study the timetables with minute attention, marveling that I will actually stop, at least for a moment, in such forlorn -- or at least obscure --towns, towns that to me seem to sit smack dab in the middle of nowhere: Whitefish MT, Wolf Point MT, Stanley ND, Fargo ND (unforgettable movie images!), Red Wing MN (Garrison Keillor's summer base), Tomah WI, South Bend IN (ok, football legends), Sandusky OH, Erie PA, Schenectady NY, Framingham MA.

The strange and beautiful place names of the American continent, names of places that exist only at the margins of my consciousness -- in "fly-over states," as we coastal residents so lightly dismiss them -- and yet towns and counties that must seem entirely normal and common place to the people who proudly call them "home." In their eyes, it is I who'll be the strange one, the blank face in a train window, the stranger frowning with puzzlement at a world that is so deeply American and yet that seems so foreign to my own experience -- staring out as the train stops but for a minute, and then continues onward, rushing swiftly out of sight.

I'll stare, I'll observe, I'll attempt to understand, while absorbing only the vaguest image of each train stop, whether small town or substantial city. One by one, I'll mentally scratch them off my list of places I've never yet visited, looking ahead in the timetable to see what's next.

More later on this transcontinental pilgrimage.