Iron Road Ranger

A few summers ago I rode the Southwest Chief out of Chicago Union Station. Weaving my way along the platform through the throng of soon-to-be-passengers, I held my ticket to the conductor. He snatched it from my grasp, yelling above the deafening din of energised engines “Three o’clock to LA, next car buddy!” I climbed up into the steel leviathan, its chrome skin branded ‘carriage 34113’, and found my seat. This would be my home for the next forty-two hours.

I travelled coach; no beds, just deep chairs that reclined so far Business Class on a 747 would blush. There were cars with cabins and beds, but I opted to keep my left kidney rather than pay the extra. Like one of those interstellar ships from a 1960s sci-fi novel it was endless, a myriad of passengers in couches, the observation deck with its all-encompassing windows, the dining car where you could get anything a regular, landlocked restaurant could provide from its hidden kitchen.

The train was a cross-section of the country. From the Berkley student who didn’t fly because he believed the CIA could kidnap your plane to the two redneck ladies saluting lone trailers we passed and the “true Americans and pioneers” who dwelt there. The four-year-old wearing an Obama t-shirt stalking the train chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS” to the frail lady I shared dinner with one night who told me wanderlust-filled stories of her youth in West Germany, a glint in her eye only a fellow traveler could understand.

I spent most of my time in the observation car with my journal, a copy of Into The Wild and my thoughts; sitting and gazing out of the glass walls to the ever evolving country in front of me. We fled the Windy City, tore out of the suburbs into green pastures and cereal fields billowing in the wind, snaked across the endless plains I remember from old Westerns on a Sunday morning, leapt the ocean-sized Mississippi, slithered through the claustrophobic Colorado Rockies, broke through the deserts and rock-fields to eventually pull into the urban sprawl that could only be Los Angeles.

On the Southwest Chief I didn’t meet a single other foreigner - I met real Americans from all walks of life. We formed a surreal community, all disparate folk yet with a solidarity in our means of travel. We traded stories, shared secrets and mused on almost everything. But as we reached the end of the line, disembarked our temporary home and collected our bags we all walked our own way - never to see each other again.