The "San Joaquin"

The San Joaquin is a stubby little five-car train, lacking the quiet yet muscular grace of the California Zephyr, the road-weary dignity of the Lake Shore Limited, or the dispassionate science of the Acela Express. She rattles down the Valley at a prodigious speed, sure, but the passengers feel every bump, jolt, flat spot, and switch point transmitted from steel rail to steel wheel to decidedly non-steel human frame. She is a boisterous thing, most ungenteel, howling madly at the innumerable grade crossings between Sacramento and Bakersfield. And she is not much to look at, either; in the name of efficiency, her engineer pilots the train from a tiny control compartment in one of the coaches, the engine pushing the train from the rear: an absurd sight, particularly at high speed.

Most of all, she is a democrat, carrying businessman, tourist, student, laborer, and eccentric all in the same class, without any of the knowing pretension of the East Coast's business class and quiet cars. She is used for many purposes: the foreign traveler bound for Yosemite, college-age types going north to Davis or south to Riverside, lawyers headed to conferences in the Bay Area, those lacking cars commuting between Wasco and Hanford. A democratic train, each man treated like another; that is, like a slightly more intelligent, though perhaps less financially and nutritionally valuable, kind of cattle.

The scenery, too, is quite democratic; none of your grandiose snowy peaks, nor stately, navigable rivers, nor ancient, whispering forests, nor trackless deserts here. The best she can offer is the distant Sierra Nevada to one side, the equally distant Diablo Range to the other. Southbound out of Stockton, the San Joaquin crosses a freeway, her direct competition, on a concrete overpass; she passes cluttered backyards, grain silos, orchards dripping with fruit, fields parched and dying, filthy rail-yards, second-rate cities striving hopelessly for the grandeur of coastal California, little farming towns perfectly content in their humility.

It is these little towns on which the Valley's wealth depends; both city and town know it; and it is these oddly-named little towns – Denair, Madera, Corcoran – that the San Joaquin greets loudly and cheerfully each day. Her headlight parts the winter fog, her whistle shatters the silence of August evenings, the noon sun beats angrily down upon her, the setting sun glimmers off her stainless steel cars in a happy silvery amber. She is the San Joaquin; this is our valley and she is our train; we do not know life without her.

In West Virginia

I'm sitting aboard the westbound Capitol Limited at the depot in Martinsburg, West Virginia, one of the oldest operating train stations in the United States – built in 1847. A very active little town during the War Between the States; in fact, the whole town except the station was apparently burned to the ground, by North or South I do not know. Stonewall Jackson himself may have ridden along the tracks on which my train now sits. The tracks themselves are full of history. According to the route guide which Amtrak so thoughtfully provides, we are traveling along America's first railroad, in the modern sense: the Baltimore and Ohio, completed in 1852.

The East seems so much older than anything I am used to. Its long history is reflected in land and building alike – everything more settled, calmer, more stately, and perhaps a bit more tired. Wood, meadow, red brick, whitewashed wood paneling: all of them have seen plenty of winters.

The East is also much more confined than the West. At every turn, whether in city, town, or country, it seems as though the buildings, forests, and stones are closing in upon the train, and we barely escaping their embrace. California's Central Valley and the grand-scale landscapes of Arizona, Wyoming, and New Mexico, where one can see for miles in any direction, are replaced by walls of trees in the immediate foreground, a literal green blur, defined only by the gaps between leaves and branches that, at speed, become endless striations exactly parallel to the ground.

And then they suddenly fall away to reveal the briefest glimpse of a small farm set among gently rolling hills coated in a charming mix of green and gold, the one in gentle contrast with the other. A little farmhouse, a red barn, a humble silo, a few outbuildings. Cows grazing companionably, horses trotting about in their paddocks. This is little America; the date could be any time between 1850 and 2012. That is the East Coast I saw, and though I will always favor the West, it is lovely in its own way.

Riding the Subway

"'Is it not...epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria...

'I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam.'"

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908

I live in a city without a subway system. At home, the accepted form of transportation is the private car, and the city is laid out based on the needs of drivers. So when I travel, the subway is always part of the adventure. In the tunnels, there is nothing more mysterious than the lights and doors that flash by the windows. Utter darkness – sight quite useless; sound the only sensation – then, for an instant, the orange glow of a lamp, dusty stairs, an iron rail, a sealed door. Then – gone, vanished, replaced once again by blackness.

Where do those doors lead? No one knows, not a soul, none but the MTA people, a reticent bunch. One is left to guess, the imagination running freely toward increasingly fantastic answers: evacuation routes? the sewers? Mole-people hideouts? Purgatory – Lewis' grey town and its dismal ghostly inhabitants?

Riding the subway is a sort of mystical experience, really. How else to describe going below ground at Herald Square, hurtling along twin rails through the void at an indeterminate speed, the sightlessness broken only by passing lights and the occasional train, and eventually – miraculously – rising back into the sunlit world at Eastern Parkway, five or six miles and a river away? Looking out the window of one train into another running on a a parallel track at the same speed is an absurdly compelling image, one that a filmmaker ought to exploit. People, lost in reverie, more or less unaware of one another, surrounded by the void of the tunnel – it is almost too surreal to be believed.

A lonely station – 190^th Street at half past five on a Friday afternoon, for example – is a spur to the imagination. The distant, haunting sounds of steel complaining against steel drifting in from beyond; dim, careless lighting barely sufficient to separate the platform from the black portals that lead in every direction. These portals are a fright – heavens, who can say what might come crawling out of them? Dwarves; demons; nameless, ancient horrors; ghosts of tunnel-builders; even trains of silver and black that pass in and out of sight on their journeys to destinations unknown.

Riding the subway is not a mere necessity of city life. It is a sojourn through one of the few remaining places of mystery left to our modern age, a harrowing of a world in which we are strangers. Every time I rise from below onto the streets of the living, I indeed feel as though I had won a “battle against chaos”.

New York: Nothing New to Say

What can one possibly say about New York that has not already been said many times before? I have little or nothing original to add. Three rushed days in the country's great city do not justify the assured, didactic tone of the travel writer.

I suppose in going there I felt some sense of obligation. At first I resisted, alternately arguing that it was too cliched, too expensive, too time-consuming for such a short trip. The real reason for my reluctance, though, was that the notion of the city intimidated me. Everyone talks of New York as if it were a fearsome, terrible monster, an eater of dreams and destroyer of souls, a whitewashed sepulchre, an uncaring, pitiless, inexorable force.

And yet I felt that I must go, if only to count myself as reasonably well-traveled within my own country. I could not imagine an Englishman never having been to London, a Frenchman never having been to Paris, an Italian never having been to Rome; how, then, could I countenance being an American who had never been to New York? And besides, as Chesterton said, “no man should leave anything in the universe of which he is afraid.” I booked the ticket and put the whole thing out of my head for the next few months until the approaching date of my departure forced it back into my attention. From then on, I was nervous, right up to the moment my train shot crossed the Hell Gate Bridge and entered the North River Tunnel.

Then it was upon me, everything, everything at once: the roar of the express train in the tunnel, the crowds at Penn Station, the maddening, unceasing noise on the streets, the utter lack of greenery, the crowds on 6^th Avenue, the every-man-for-himself traffic, the crowds on 35^th Street, at Grand Central, at the Staten Island ferry terminal, on Jay Street in Brooklyn, in Washington Heights: people everywhere in constant motion in a thousand different directions. One has to move, and move quickly, or be trampled under. The only way to stop is to fight towards an alcove in the side of a building like a drowning swimmer struggling for the riverbank. To stop in the path of traffic is to be an obstacle, an annoyance, a cause for intense irritation if not an outburst of rage, and the same goes for the slow walkers, or those who walk two and three, even four, abreast.

I hated it all for the first several hours, cursing the city and constantly checking how much time I had before I could leave. Then, when at the end of the day I was finally able to check into my hotel, I chanced to open the little room's curtains and look out. There before me rose the Empire State Building, impossibly tall, awash in a warm gray glow in the setting sun. I could not have had a better view. I believe my jaw literally dropped for an instant before I hurried to find my camera. First time in a city? Certainly not. First time in this city? Absolutely.

From that point on, without making any kind of conscious effort, everything about the place suddenly felt quite natural. I quickened my walking pace, dodging the immense tour groups and darting between slow-moving middle-aged women. I realized that 'uptown' and 'downtown' were the watch-words of the subway system, and that once one got them straight, everything else fell into place -- only once did I get on the wrong train.

And the city charmed me with a series of very agreeable vignettes: the Three Lives & Company bookshop in the West Village; the 190^th Street station and its pedestrian tunnel, burrowed in the side of a hill like a hobbit-hole; the shocking beauty of Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters; Ristorante Il Melograno in Hell's Kitchen. Actually, getting around the city was more fun than any tourist attraction: the defiant independence of jaywalking across 5^th Avenue, or the rattle and jerk of the A train, or navigating by street sign and coming to a gasping halt at a park bench after having survived a murderous trek through Times Square.

This was a tourist's New York, to be sure; an outsider's New York; a West Coaster's New York; a caricature New York, perhaps; a New York unlike that experienced by those who rise and go to work there each day. I would never dream of living there. But to visit every so often, to see a different kind of America? I think I could be persuaded.

Breakfasting

On Amtrak, you can't escape eating with strangers. There simply aren't enough tables available for everyone to maintain their privacy. There is potential for good and bad here, all depending, of course, on the qualities and personalities of your table-mates. Sometimes you'll meet someone quite interesting and be able to hold a entertaining conversation for the length of meal. Sometimes the meal will be a sore trial in civility.

In one instance, I was seated for breakfast with an aged couple from the car in front of mine. These people were of the kind that act older than they probably really are, this being most evident in their conversation. They were set in their ways, to say the least; the strange experience of American rail travel was not an adventure, but a bother. Both husband and wife had little to say other than to complain about the quality of the food, the size of their compartment, the train's unpunctuality, etc. At one point, the woman rather tactlessly informed the harried steward that she planned to phone Amtrak with a list of her grievances; as she put it, “everything that's been wrong.”

I knew I was in for a memorable half-hour as soon as the steward, a Steve Buscemi sound-alike, pointed me to their table. “Did you just wake up?” the wife asked.

“Uh, well, yes, actually, I did,” I said, smiling to cover my confusion at having been asked such a question immediately upon sitting down.

She nodded. “You look like it.”

I smiled again, said nothing in response, and ordered orange juice. The wife did the same; her husband hemmed and hawed before calling for coffee.

“I have an orange tree at home,” he told me as the steward set down the cup. “I can't drink that stuff.” He pointed to my glass, which I, a Philistine, drank uncomplainingly (wickedly pulp-less though the stuff was).

They both took their coffee with milk (the wife insisting to the steward that she not be brought half-and-half). Once the milk had arrived – in a separate cup from the coffee – the husband went to pour just as the train ran through a set of particularly rough switch points. “Oh Jesus!” he muttered as milk and coffee splashed onto the tablecloth. “Look at that.”

He was a perfect caricature of cantankerousness. He ordered French toast and immediately latched on to the supposedly unnecessary supply of two syrup packets. Nevertheless, toward the end of the meal, he opened the second and poured it out on his plate. “I thought this would be too much syrup,” he explained as he did so. “Now I realize they give it to you to disguise the taste of this bread.”

We were by this time making a station stop at Lawrence, Kansas. In the station parking lot there was a brightly-painted, multi-colored van of some sort, a real neo-hippie look. The wife pointed at it with her fork.

“That looks like what the Filipinos do back home.”

“Maybe they have a lot of Filipino immigrants here,” replied her husband.

“They do that a lot,” she said. “Asians do that a lot.”

“Whatever keeps them happy. Hey, this is a pretty good biscuit.” (his wife had not wanted the biscuit that came with her scrambled eggs) “You should ask for the recipe.”

She seemed to roll her eyes, saying quite grimly, “I don't make biscuits. I make cinnamon rolls.”

They were bound for Indianapolis, there to visit their son and his family. “I wanted to drive,” the husband told me. “She wanted to go by train – once, before she died.”

Morbidity (reality?), come forth! “And I had him make funeral arrangements for me – for both of us – before we left,” the wife returned.

“I haven't taken a train in forty-five years,” the husband went on. “And I don't feel like I've been missing much.” There followed a long explanation, which would be even more dull to read than it was to listen to, of how their lower berth was much too close to their compartment's built-in sink. At some point, though, they finally asked the inevitable question: where was I going?

“The East Coast,” I said. “All the way to Boston.”

The wife nodded knowingly. “I've never been to Boston.”

“I was there once a few years ago,” I replied. “It's a really nice city – great place to visit, I think.”

“He won't take me.” She motioned with her coffee mug to her husband.

He shrugged, not understanding the premise of her complaint. “Why the hell would I want to go to Boston?” he asked sullenly. “I've never been to Boston.” I stifled an amazed laugh at this unapologetic fallacy, for he was perfectly serious.

“He wanted to drive,” the wife repeated a few minutes later. “He wanted to drive to Indianapolis. He'd rather just sit around all day and watch television.”

“I like to watch television,” her husband groused.

“That's what old people do.”

“I am old. We are old.” And he picked up his knife to spread jam on the other half of that biscuit.

They were an amusing couple, though of course not intentionally. Later, in the privacy of my compartment, I chuckled imagining what that man must have been saying every time the railcar jostled, pitched, and clattered along a particularly rough section of track in western Illinois.

I laughed then, and I do now with the recollection, but I probably oughtn't. For to that man and woman, none of the above was funny in the least. Think how unpleasant their lives must be with such poor attitudes – toward the world, toward each other! Think what it must take in miserable, drawn-out years of petty quarreling, squabbles over trifles, striving for the moral advantage to produce two so clearly unhappy, discontent, liverish people! How sad I knew things must be when the husband mentioned that he was not particularly looking forward to their destination: their son's family in Indiana.

“We'll probably wear out our welcome,” he told me candidly. “She wanted to stay a month; I said two weeks. And I don't know if I can put up with him for that long.” He said it without a smile.

Pity the house that lives so joylessly!

Packing

“In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen. As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious. To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy. I didn't want to go. Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn't.”

–Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

To this I have little useful to add besides an affirmation of Steinbeck's observation. He is quite right; until the very moment it begins, a journey is such an abstraction as to seem unreal and impossible. It will surely never happen, one tells oneself. And yet I leave tomorrow, perhaps not for three months, but quite long enough for the event to stand out in my mind as fundamentally unnatural.

Over the last year, my weekly routine – class, work, meal, sleep,repeat – has become so entrenched that it is hard for me to imagine being away from it for any length of time. And indeed, it seems unwise, even foolish to do so. But nonetheless, there it is, the fact unyielding:in just a few hours I'll step off a station platform and begin crossing the country in much the same way people did fifty or sixty years ago.

STUDIO A: New Episodes

We Electronic Media Production students at Fresno State are still working on Studio A, a Fresno-area arts/music showcase. I direct and Garrett Horn produces. Why not check out our YouTube channel?

Our latest show features LEGO artist Carl Merriam and music by Eve's Burden. Here's Part 1: