(The following story by Daniel G. Kelsey appeared on the Allegan County News website on October 29. The following is a three-part journal of a railroad adventure on the Adirondack line begins in Part One with travel to New York City. Parts two and three will feature upstate New York and Montreal.)
KALAMAZOO — A young woman sat on a bench across from me at the train station, cradling a cell phone in her lap, ruminating. She dialed a number and left a message ending with, “Call me.” She cradled the phone in her lap, ruminating, and dialed a number, getting into a spat with the person on the other end. “Shut up,” she said before the call got less angry.
A couple claimed the other end of the bench from the young woman, the wife flaring up in a harsh whisper, the husband making “tone it down” motions. The wife called someone on a cell phone, frowning through a long conversation, the husband looking resigned.
The women carried on side-by-side conversations, an empty stretch of bench separating them, each with her shoulder turned as if to fend the other off.
Crossing country
Heavy farm implements stood unused in cold fields. But for the rain, farmers might have worked on a Tuesday in October, taking in beans, most still unharvested, or corn, all still unharvested. A constellation of pumpkins waited for sale near the tracks in a small town. In places the woods fired up with fall color even on a dull day. Lakes and swamps looked saturated with the downpour. Yellow and red leaves darted past the windows on the air outside the coach, thrown into chaos by the train’s turbulence despite a heavy load of water.
Surf was up on Lake Michigan.
Chicago
A cell phone chirped in the coach’s mid section. A woman who earlier declined to let me photograph her daughters and their dolls answered.
“We’re passing that big ball park. Where the White Sox play. We’re passing it, but I mean we’re just crawling.”
About the time she signed off, another cell phone chirped, and a man riding in the next seat beyond the mother answered. He talked all the way to the rail yard.
“We’ll be at your place in twenty minutes.”
Commuters darted through Union Station like leaves on a train’s air turbulence. Hot deli soup burned the roof of my mouth. As I waited to board the Lake Shore Express, a playoff baseball game blared from a television in the Amtrak passenger lounge, the Yankees taking a 4-2 win from the Red Sox to return to New York from Boston with a 3-2 lead in games. The two teams would beat me to the Big Apple.
Crossing country
Seen from a train, one landscape mimics another before sunrise on a dull Wednesday. Upstate New York in the dark might as well have been Illinois, Texas, New Mexico, California or Oregon. While I ate pancakes in the dining car, the train followed a wide curve beside a waterway with too regular a course for a river. Diners sprinkled their talk with the words “Erie Canal.” Vegetation in full color defined the canal banks and blazoned the region’s swamps despite the rain.
A retired Nebraska farm couple, Frances and her husband (whose name I never learned), shared my table at breakfast. Orlo, a New Mexican retired from classified scientific work for the government at Los Alamos, made up a fourth. He told of having worked on a test of a cobalt bomb in 1962 that punched a hole through the atmosphere and created a hot spot on the moon. Frances frowned and asked skeptical questions. Orlo said the test ignited the Earth’s ionosphere for six hours until the ships of three races arrived from outer space to put out the fire.
“God sent down his workers to end what we started.”
New York City
My train reached the metropolitan area almost in concert with the lovers in a novel I’d been reading while on board. The fictional characters and I had little in common, though, because they arrived from the Caribbean and had enough prior familiarity with New York to know what shops, restaurants and landmarks to visit. The lovers departed for Florida from Manhattan before my train came in to Penn Station.
The trip of roughly 1,000 miles from Kalamazoo to New York by way of Chicago took a few minutes more than 24 hours.