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Tales of Traveling Across The West

Surviving New Year’s Eve On Board The Amtrak

By Joseph Friedrichs, 1-07-08

She says she’s a stalker. It doesn’t bother me. I’m too tired to get off the wooden bench at downtown Portland’s Union Station. My train was arriving soon anyhow. How far could she really stalk me?

“Yeah, when the kids in my school need pencils or pens, or just whatever, they come to me,” the girl says. “That’s why they call me the stocker.”

I shift uncomfortably and realize that this 18-year-old high-school student from Wolf Point, Mont., who has been pacing in front of me for the past ten minutes, has no idea I thought she was a genuine crazy person. It’s 2:15 in the afternoon on the last day of 2007. My mind feels yellow from a lack of sleep. This girl, Samantha, her and I and about 40 other people are departing from Portland and heading east. New Year’s Eve will be spent on board the train.

Why? Because we are of a very special breed.

While most people rang in 2008 with bubbling bottles of Champagne, dancing at wild parties or surrounded by friends and family, I opt to spend mine with strangers on board the Amtrak. I have no plan or even much of an idea as to what will go down inside the train during arguably the most spectacular party day of the year. And to end the suspense, let me tell you what happened: At the strike of midnight I cheers’d a plastic Champagne flute containing non-alcoholic sparkling cider with two boys of the ages 10 and 12, their mother and Samantha. Then I went to sleep.

I’ve never traveled via Amtrak before this trip. It always seemed appealing, but the quick flight to Minneapolis or across to North Carolina was so much more efficient. I mean, seriously, it takes 36 hours to get from Portland to Minneapolis on the Amtrak. 36 hours! Do you realize how much can be accomplished in 36 hours? I could have cleaned the house, washed my clothes, painted a picture, taken a swim, lifted weights, taken a nap, fed a cat, gone insane, seen a movie, wrote a poem, talked with the neighbors, gone out for dinner, met a woman or even just sat on the sofa drinking beer. Instead, I opt for the Amtrak.

And that brings us back to the beginning. With Samantha pacing recklessly in front of me. It’s very cold outside and a fierce chill sweeps through Union Station each time a door opens.

“So where you going anyhow?” Samantha says.

“Minneapolis. Well, actually, St. Paul.”

“I’ve never been there,” she says. “What’s it like?”

“It’s nice. Same as anyplace.”

I pick up my copy of John Fante’s “Ask The Dust” and pretend to read.  It’s my only defense. Then a booming voice comes out of a loud speaker and informs us that our train is ready to begin boarding.  I rise from the bench and we all shuffle like animals onto the train. The cars are blue and silver and massive as I walk slowly across the cold cement. I find an open door at the third car and swing up a narrow staircase. The inside of the cars smells like burned plastic. I ignore my seat assignment and move to the back of the train. I feel comfortable walking through the main aisle. Most of the seats remain empty as the passengers dispense from car to car. I drop my bags in a small open space behind my blue seat and then sit down. Outside a smoked cigarette is burning its last down on the track. Puffs of gray smoke roll through the frigid air.

And then the boys arrived. I’ve had to deal with younger kids most of my life. Of my 16 cousins, nearly all of them are younger. Here’s how the drill works with younger kids: act cool and they will treat you like some kind of god. These lads sweep through the train like a couple of scorching fireballs. The sound of their voices slams throughout our car and my brain. And naturally, they plop down directly in front of me even though all the seats are empty for at least ten rows up.

My initial reaction to the boys is rage. How could I get stuck next to these little rascals? What kind of twisted fate am I dealing with? New Year’s Eve?

By the time our train is moving out of Portland my mind’s so clouded that my internal thoughts are a language I can’t comprehend. Strange tongues isn’t the right phrase, but it’s the first one that comes to mind. We move slowly at first, crawling down the tracks past blocks and blocks of warehouses and apparently abandoned buildings. Stacks of pallets and rows of dumpsters provide the scenery. For some reason a dancer from Mary’s Club where I was earlier in downtown Portland enters my mind. She told jokes and had a tattoo of a mermaid embroidered on her back. I was leaving all that behind. The West. The madness. The past.

My phone rings and it’s my friend Henry. I feel uncomfortable speaking in the quiet cab so I quickly dart through two sliding doors. Still unfamiliar with the settings, I’m unaware I’ve just entered the sleeping cars. This isolated section of the train is the equivalent of first class on an airplane. I take a few steps down the main aisle and enter one of the unlocked “private” rooms. I pull a dark curtain shut and answer the phone on the fifth ring. After a brief and meaningless conversation there’s s a loud knock on the small silver door.

“Yes?” I suspiciously respond, giving a slight lift to the curtain and peaking out.

“You got a ticket?” a large black man standing outside the door asks.

I open the door and start to stutter.

“Ye, ye, yeah. It’s up on my, a, a, seat.”

“Well if it’s up on your seat, and your seat is up there,” the man says, pointing back to the coach section, “then you need to get back up to that seat.”

Foolishly, and quite brazenly, I tell the man that it’s no problem. Then I step back inside the VIP room and tie my shoe.

Fact 1: My shoe was not untied.

Fact 2: The man, Darryl, probably noticed that.

Fact 3: I am an idiot.

“How far you going on this train?” Darryl asks.

“St. Paul.”

“Well let’s hope you make it.”

Indeed. I give Darryl a nod and return to the masses where I belong.

In the brief time I spent violating Amtrak rules in the sleeping quarters it’s become dark outside. If there’s one thing about Amtrak, it’s that time is a completely irrelevant concept. I spend the first several hours checking the clock to see what time it was before coming to the harsh realization that if there was any hope of not losing my mind on this trip, I need to give up checking the time and absolve into letting the train take me whenever and wherever it’s going to. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There’s 32 ½ hours to go before I speak my first words to the boys. Samantha’s found her way back to our end of the train looking to play some cards. Or perhaps a game of Scrabble. I had neither; nor did I care to get involved with any type of game. I knew the boys and their mother, Theresa, were likely to have a wide range of travel games as I had seen them scrounging through a pouch of entertainment earlier in the night. I poke on the back of the younger brother’s seat. His name’s Dakota, he says, and he’s 11. His brother is Ben and he’s 13. Our group was formed: Theresa and her two young sons from Sandy, Ore who were heading to Fargo; Samantha, the high-school student from a small town in northern Montana; and to top it off, of course, myself. I now realize exactly who I am in this world. I’m just another sucker on the vine.

The next few hours involve nothing spectacular, at least according to the standards of the always unforgiving New Year’s Eve. I sit back scribbling notes and writing strange poetry. I talk with the group but mostly just pay attention. 

“Oh, I bet girls like that,” Ben says.

“What?”

“That you listen.”

Theresa begins to pinch her forehead between her thumb and index finger. I laugh. The other three in our party continue to play king’s corner. A fascinating game, that king’s corner.

Close to 10:30 p.m. Samantha decides to sleep. She insists we wake her before midnight. The remaining members of our party head east two cars to the lounge area. I order a $4 can of Budweiser, Theresa a cocktail of some kind and the boys get hooked up with some gummy worms. We play a game of Scrabble in the lounge car. The highlight comes when Ben actually is dished out the word “s-h-i-t-t-e-r” to start the game.

“Astronomical odds!” I yell.

“What does astronomical mean?” Ben says.

None of us have an answer.

The Scrabble game continues until 11:40 when we choose to head back and wake Samantha for participation in welcoming the new year. She’s less-than enthusiastic as Dakota raises her from slumber by rummaging through her backpack for a box of Chicken ‘N Biscuits. Regardless, Samantha gets up and by 11:55 the five of us are gathered in the tail end of an Amtrak car moving east.  Our energy is high and Ben has the bottle of sparkling cider in his mitts ready to be peeled open. Unfortunately it’s a capped bottle rather than a corked one, but hey, this is New Year’s on the Amtrak and you take what you can get.

The alarm on my cell phone rings at midnight with a loud chiming of computer-generated bells. Ben pops the bottle with an opener he has implanted on the back of his belt buckle. We all slug cider in huge gulps from our plastic cups. Fireworks explode above downtown Spokane and my heart fills with strange joy. I have visions of the future, of wonderful things to come. Twenty minutes later I’m asleep, same as the rest of our party.

-----------------------

I wake early on New Year’s Day and have breakfast with Theresa, Dakota and Ben. Beyond any shadow of doubt Amtrak serves the worst $6 breakfast money can order. I spend the rest of the day admiring the beauty of Glacier National Park, the Rockies, Montana and a North Dakota sunset.  At one point I consider bolting from the train when we stop in Glasgow, a really, really small Montana town. A bar here is no more than 20 yards from the exit of my train car. Neon lights glow in the windows. A woman stands outside in the freezing air smoking a cigarette. Even though I’m wearing a pair of slippers I stole from my friend this Christmas, I consider sprinting to the bar for a shot of tequila. I tap my fingers on a small table. I rub my chin in consideration. And just as I rise to venture out on a “hard-partying journalist” adventure, Ben, Dakota and Samantha are coming down the stairs to the bottom of the lounge cart. They ask how the writing is coming along and we’re no more than 30 seconds into the conversation before the train continues east. There’s no way I would have made it to that honky-tonk bar in Glasgow, taken a shot, and then made it back to the train in that amount of time. I’d have been stranded in Glasgow with no hope. Alone.

We bid farewell to Samantha when she hops off in Wolf Point. Six hours later Theresa and the boys exit the train at Fargo. I’m now very exhausted and my body feels as though it has been out to sea or on some incredibly-difficult adventure. My bearings aren’t straight. My legs are wobbly. There’s a chance I have strep throat.

But I’m back in the Midwest, if even for just a short stint. And tonight when I fall down to sleep the sound of the Amtrak wheels sliding across frozen rails will coast through my mind. Just as it has for the past 36 hours. And as I know it will again. Soon.

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