how to see the country

AWP in Chicago was terrific, but my favorite part of the whole thing was going home.

Maybe that’s because I had such a great trip back.  I was well enough recovered from the flu to ride Amtrak for the return journey, which meant getting to see a grand swath of the middle of this country.  Except for the (admittedly lengthy) dark portion of the trip, I kept my eyes glued to the landscape.

There are a lot of great reasons to ride the train.  High Country News – one of my favorite regional news journals – reported recently on a Department of Energy claim that train travel is 17% more energy efficient than plane travel, while emitting four times less carbon dioxide per passenger mile traveled.  It’s often cheaper, there’s a heck of a lot more leg room, and you can move around at your leisure.  I had a semi-reasonable dinner and a glass of wine in the dining car with some interesting conversation.

Yes, it takes longer than flying.  Much longer.  But the views can’t be beat.

I rode Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, which cuts west through Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas; corners through a bit of Colorado; loops through New Mexico; and then barrels across Arizona and California to meet the Pacific in L.A.  I got my fill of flat.  The Midwest is a mystery to me, and I saw long stretches of its fields, laid out in a strict geometry of right angles and neat furrows.  Punctuating the fields were little well-kept clusters of tall, narrow houses, broad barns, and trees kept like pets for comfort and protection.  Every so often the whistle blew and we pulled in to a station in a snug little town.

There was something terribly vulnerable to me about this landscape.  Houses sat optimistically perched on green grass and looked like they could be plucked up and flung away with no advance notice.  The neatness seemed a hedge against disaster, the prevalence of red (barns, roofs) a kind of cheerful superstition.  It seemed profoundly old-fashioned to me.  To me alone?  Or to me because I’m used to messiness and disorder, both in physical landscape and in social constructs?

I love that the train lets you see things at a level slightly higher than a car would, and takes you in much closer than a highway ever does.  It goes slower than a plane and faster than a bicycle.  If I wanted to know those places, I’d need to get off the train, walk around, talk to people, stay a while.  

I didn’t have time for  that, this trip.  But at least I know they’re there – and that I’m much more interested in them, in the ways people live there and interact with the landscape, than I knew before.

Which is a whole lot more than I could say for flying over. 

 

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