KANSAS CITY, Mo. — You see things in a new way from a train window. Maybe it is the high perspective — the elevation of the track and of the coach itself, according to columnist C.W. Gusewelle in the Kansas City Star.
You look down from there into neighborhoods of tidy little houses — one street of them after another — with their cropped lawns and storage sheds and dog pens and iris beds in bloom. And it is as if you can see directly into the lives lived there.
This train is the westbound morning one out of St. Louis. Engine, three coaches, a cafe car with tables, two conductors on board.
We roll past a building with the alarming words “ALL DIE” writ large on its trackside wall. And it’s true, of course. There’s no disputing that all flesh is perishable. But it isn’t a philosophical announcement. It’s only the name of some shabby little manufactory.
First there’s the commercial district, then the intricate sprawl of habitation, giving way at last to open country. In a season of relentless rains, every stream, even the smallest, runs foaming and muddy-full.
This day is bright, though. The sunlight falls in a dapple of gold and sharp shadow down through trackside woodlands that, again because of the car’s elevation, the eye penetrates more clearly than it would if you were passing there afoot.
A bit westward, now, the terrain inclines up on either side in gentle undulations. And that green landscape could be southern England or the French Dordogne — anywhere, almost, except the always-known.
Presently, a bit ahead and off to the right, a plume of steam rises from the cooling tower of the Callaway nuclear generating plant on the Missouri River at a place called Mokane — hardly more than a hamlet when, nearly 50 years ago, I hunted quail there in the willow brakes.
There’s a man at the rear of our car — a big, mouthy fellow in an orange sweat shirt — playing cards and conversing in a shout, as though life itself, his own, were a gratuitous public entertainment. His bleats can be heard over the sound of the wheels on rail.
But then there comes the three-toned music of the engine’s whistle at a crossing. It’s a sound that carries across the miles, across the years, a sound almost as much dreamed as heard.
And the loud man’s eruptions seem less annoying. There are at most two dozen of us riders in all. More will come aboard at later stops, but only a few more, and others will leave. At best, we’re a thin company.
And in a time of what a train song calls “the disappearin’-railroad blues,” any paying passengers, even noisy ones, are welcome.
Just before Jefferson City, a vista opens to the great river, seen across an expanse of drowned fields. Then, in a sudden way, it is running right beside the track, and the immense power of it can be seen: curling, frothing, eddying, bearing rafts of flood wrack and enormous logs.
Another day or two of heavy rains, another few feet of the river’s rise, and that rushing brown soup could cut service on this line. But the forecast is for a run of fair days, though an ugly bank of dark cloud has risen up ahead.
“Jeff,” the conductor calls out over the crackling intercom. “Five or six minutes to Jeff.”
And unlike the tacky, temporary installations from which riders now must embark, even in many major cities, the station there is the real thing. Though small, it has about it still that memory of rail as the splendid means of passage.
And so the day went, with clouds thickening and dropping showers, then giving way just as quickly to sun on corn-rowed fields and banks of tall purple wildflowers rushing past the window, and more stops to take folks on or let them off. And, after a time away from it, the river again.
Slowing, then, past another generating plant, this one coal-fired, past graveyards of wrecked cars, past a derelict steel plant and slowing more, past a cemetery for people, the buildings of the city rising up ahead.
We slide to a stop then, finally home. My watch says we are two hours late, made so by having to give way to freights, which evidently had priority, and by one small mechanical problem caused by debris on the track.
But what do two hours matter in any reasonable life?
We are home safely and in comfort, in a seat that lets a rider stretch his legs. Beside a window, not a porthole, that gave an ever-changing view of the living world, not just of cloud or aerial photograph.
And as long as they run that train, I’ll make the trip no other way.