field report from the Capitol Limited
Dec. 15th, 2002 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joebelknapwall3:13pm DC-Union Station
Superliner coach, seat 17, at the window. We're drifting out of Union Station at a walking clip, heading westward, or maybe northward, or some curious other direction that's destined to end in Chicago, at another Union Station, a linguistic loop.
I've never taken a long train trip before, having only ever taken the four-hour metroliner to New York--a breezy trip if not a particularly elegant one.
This one's not particularly elegant yet, as we rumble through the rough underbelly of the system, trundling languidly through the extended sidings of DC's rail nexus, but I'm already entertained, catching sides of familiar sights I've not seen. I'm having a hard time not grinning at the whole experience of it, which helps to explain why someone once told me that I should pretend to be retarded when I'm enjoying things most people find tedious so my goofy aura of joy will make some sort of sense. I concur, to a point, but think that I can still pull off "youthful free spirit" as an excuse for a few years yet.
We're picking up speed, cruising over the grim northern suburbs like a police helicopter in search of someone bad, so I think I'll stop writing for a while, perch at my window, and watch the world roll by outside, at least until it gets dark.
3:32pm
Was watching the urban backlots unfold and suddenly realized that we were coming up on the part of Rockville where I used to work. My first semi-professional job was there, lost in a sprawl of fading garages and low cinderblock offices for has-been companies and not-yet-been enterprises.
The train line ran so close to the back of our building that our microfilm camera operators all had to stop filming when they heard the train horns nearing or wind up with blurred images. I'd to sit in my little room, under yellow lights that protected the diazo film from accidental exposure, just watching the railbed and the passing trains, especially the Superliners, which I always imagined to be full of fabulous people going to interesting places, going anywhere but where I was then, stuck in a permanent traffic jam in between a troublesome past and an uncertain future.
Feeling like a time traveler, I watched that grimy window where I used to sit pass by and imagined seeing my younger self framed in it, listlessly copying microfiche and wishing I could be on this train, going where I'm going, going somewhere, going anywhere.
3:53pm
I'm having a hard time shaking the airplane habit, so unused to having so much space to unfold that my body keeps instinctive curling up into torturous airliner yoga positions. I have to keep forcing myself to relax, recalling old exercises from a modern dance class to let my body uncoil from its tension. Sunset is flooding the coach and the mountains are rising to the right side of the train, lit in luminous shades of insane yellow like a Van Gogh.
4:47pm Martinsburg, WV
A town that looks like it used to be somewhere, or maybe like it's almost ready to be somewhere again. There's a colossal red brick roundhouse complex here, half in ruins and yet still dignified, its smashed-out dark windows framed with elegant brickwork and signs that the architect cared to make it something more than mundane. A B&O caboose, resplendent in xmas lights and wreaths, perches on the stub line by the old maintenance roundhouse, and the diagonals of heavy steel braces holding fragments of wall on one end of the complex seem to imply that this place hasn't seen its last days just yet.
We're holding here for a smoke break, a curious indulgence to the nic-addicted that makes me wonder if they'd provide a similar service for people with, say, an addiction to public sex, if enough people on the train shared the addiction. It'd be a splendid setting of industrial decay for a trackside quickie, at the very least.
5:54pm fade to black in West Virginia
I'd entertained a foolish thought that I might be able to catch a quick glimpse of my old cabin in WV on the way, but it's so dark out that it seems almost as if the train crew has switched off the scenery for the night.
I know this darkness well--this is the mountain dark that sucks the light out of a flashlight beam, leaving only a pinpoint of light in the distance as the sole witness that the thing is even switched on. It's the kind of dark that revives my childhood fear of the dark, and it's the reason I learned the ancient art of using a chamber pot in the days before we had a semi-functional indoor bathroom in the cabin, when a trip to the toilet meant a trip through outer space to the musty old outhouse.
This dark is that pre-industrial, primeval, "still getting used to hominid life" kind of dark, where the stars burn burn burn so bright that you can actually see the grey haze of the Milky Way, the reminder of something so big it can barely be imagined, and that's been nothing but a memory for a century of urban ascendancy.
Here and there, I catch the orange luster of a raging bonfire in the woods, surrounded by a circle of barely-lit celebrants making light under a curtain of astronomy, and I feel oddly proud of my species in spite of our seemingly endless catalog of failures.
6:29pm Cumberland, MD
Cumberland's one of those places that makes you thankful for dire poverty, which is definitely no fun for humans, but perfect for architecture.
This town's economy had been submerged for ages, my entire life at the very least, and you can pinpoint the collapse in the frozen styles of the buildings. Lovely brick and block edifices climb the valley walls, forties glass department store facades still hawk a mishmash of wares, and extraordinary sights blend with a chaos of truckstop madness. This town could almost be an italian mountain town, if not for the highways and fast food holes and complete lack of a prosaic rural pace--it encrusts the valley from peak to peak, a strange historical urban confection in a state as small as Maryland, and so far from anywhere. When the railroad and canal were king, Cumberland reigned, but now it's something else, a few moments in time preserved by suffocation.
1:19am the wee hours lounge
I was having a hard time getting into a proper mental state after Cumberland, hovering in between attempts at a sweaty, fitful sleep and trying to read the books I brought along for the ride. I sat and listlessly watched the scenery drifting by as we pulled into the sprawl heralding Pittsburgh, aided by the sudden extinguishing of the coach lights around 10:30. I was hypnotized by the ominous chemical plants and the monuments of heavy industry, seeing things on scales we never see in Maryland, or at least in my part of the state. We passed one factory for what seemed like an hour, its broad and filthy windows glowing like the face of a jack o'lantern and revealing hulking, unidentifiable shapes within, all brilliantly lit in sodium yellow and looking almost defiantly desolate. I watched and wondered, pondering what could come from those acres of enclosed machinery, feeling overwhelmed at the realization that there are factories like this everywhere, all over the country, all over the world, the inexplicable machinery of daily life, the mechanism of a world that's just too damned big and complex to ever hope to understand.
When we pulled into the station in Pittsburgh, the train stopped along side of a huge institutional light fixture the size of a toilet. It hung there like a bloated, jaundiced lightning bug, directly outside my window, soaking me in a urinary-grade yellow glare, washing the poetry out of me and lulling me into a sickly sleep that lasted several hours.
I woke up as the final minutes of a five-hour minidisc were playing out in my earphones--the last bits of the BBC radio version of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which I'd transferred over for the trip. I ejected the disc and exchanged it for another I'd made of low-key music and sat for quite a while, just watching lights passing in the window like I was traveling in outer space and feeling more relaxed then I've felt in ages.
I fidgeted a bit, thinking I'd go back to sleep, but decided instead to roam the train for a while, exploring some of the cars I'd been too timid to explore when everyone was awake.
The lounge car is completely deserted, or rather, it's completely mine, and I'm sitting here, typing this in my own private car, watching the spectacle of midwestern afterhours in a splendid solitary mood and wondering where we are.
6:27am the wee hours lounge part 2
I'm awake again, probably for the day at this point. I'm not well-suited to sleeping in a chair, even a wide and nicely adjustable pair of chairs, so I'll probably be a bit tired today. I'm in the lounge car again, not alone this time--am just in my superspy mode, wearing my headphones, but eavesdropping on a curious conversation about how best to dispose of a gun used in a crime, how to reload quickly, and other such things. Now they're talking about mixed drinks, and I'm more alarmed than I was during the gun chat--thinking once again that it might actually be possible to be bored to death.
Never mind.
I'm not sure what time it actually is now. I think I'm on the other side of a time line or some such nonsense, and it's making me wonder how these train schedule cards work when you cross time lines--does the arrival time refer to the time in the time zone you left or the one you're coming into? Such deep philosophical questions...
I've made a startling discovery on this trip, too. I know where sofas go to die. When they're on their last legs, with cushions sagging and coming apart at the seams, they make their way down to the train tracks and give themselves to the stars in the sight of the passing trains. Then, the great sofa fairy winnows them away to nothing, from sofa to shreds to springs and frame to nothing--the great cycle of life as rendered in furniture.
7:51am dawn impending
It's funny, every time I've gone to the lounge car to write (out of necessity because of the relatively loud key action of my portable word processor), people have approached me to ask if I'm a writer.
I say yes, and fabulize the details whenever the harsh reality seems less than what I'd like. This ride has been both more and less than I expected, not quite to Orient Express standards, but infinitely superior to airliners, those crowded, rushed intercity buses of the air. As a nod to the romance of history, I said yes--I am a writer, traveling by train, and for this moment I'm the very picture of genteel elegance, albeit with bed-head.
Chicago is minutes away, somewhere off in the haze still, but ripe to rise from the landscape like concrete flowers blooming. I'm repacking my bags, undoing the sprawl of accessories, and combing my hair as the great jurassic skeletons of drawbridges and factories pass me by.
8:56am (my time)
7:56am Great Hall
Waiting in the great hall here, in amazing near-silence. The architecture of this place is a lot like that of the Union Station from which I departed 17 hours ago, but a bit less polished and nearly deserted, except for some folks sleeping on the wide wooden benches here.
My ride's here, so more later...
Superliner coach, seat 17, at the window. We're drifting out of Union Station at a walking clip, heading westward, or maybe northward, or some curious other direction that's destined to end in Chicago, at another Union Station, a linguistic loop.
I've never taken a long train trip before, having only ever taken the four-hour metroliner to New York--a breezy trip if not a particularly elegant one.
This one's not particularly elegant yet, as we rumble through the rough underbelly of the system, trundling languidly through the extended sidings of DC's rail nexus, but I'm already entertained, catching sides of familiar sights I've not seen. I'm having a hard time not grinning at the whole experience of it, which helps to explain why someone once told me that I should pretend to be retarded when I'm enjoying things most people find tedious so my goofy aura of joy will make some sort of sense. I concur, to a point, but think that I can still pull off "youthful free spirit" as an excuse for a few years yet.
We're picking up speed, cruising over the grim northern suburbs like a police helicopter in search of someone bad, so I think I'll stop writing for a while, perch at my window, and watch the world roll by outside, at least until it gets dark.
3:32pm
Was watching the urban backlots unfold and suddenly realized that we were coming up on the part of Rockville where I used to work. My first semi-professional job was there, lost in a sprawl of fading garages and low cinderblock offices for has-been companies and not-yet-been enterprises.
The train line ran so close to the back of our building that our microfilm camera operators all had to stop filming when they heard the train horns nearing or wind up with blurred images. I'd to sit in my little room, under yellow lights that protected the diazo film from accidental exposure, just watching the railbed and the passing trains, especially the Superliners, which I always imagined to be full of fabulous people going to interesting places, going anywhere but where I was then, stuck in a permanent traffic jam in between a troublesome past and an uncertain future.
Feeling like a time traveler, I watched that grimy window where I used to sit pass by and imagined seeing my younger self framed in it, listlessly copying microfiche and wishing I could be on this train, going where I'm going, going somewhere, going anywhere.
3:53pm
I'm having a hard time shaking the airplane habit, so unused to having so much space to unfold that my body keeps instinctive curling up into torturous airliner yoga positions. I have to keep forcing myself to relax, recalling old exercises from a modern dance class to let my body uncoil from its tension. Sunset is flooding the coach and the mountains are rising to the right side of the train, lit in luminous shades of insane yellow like a Van Gogh.
4:47pm Martinsburg, WV
A town that looks like it used to be somewhere, or maybe like it's almost ready to be somewhere again. There's a colossal red brick roundhouse complex here, half in ruins and yet still dignified, its smashed-out dark windows framed with elegant brickwork and signs that the architect cared to make it something more than mundane. A B&O caboose, resplendent in xmas lights and wreaths, perches on the stub line by the old maintenance roundhouse, and the diagonals of heavy steel braces holding fragments of wall on one end of the complex seem to imply that this place hasn't seen its last days just yet.
We're holding here for a smoke break, a curious indulgence to the nic-addicted that makes me wonder if they'd provide a similar service for people with, say, an addiction to public sex, if enough people on the train shared the addiction. It'd be a splendid setting of industrial decay for a trackside quickie, at the very least.
5:54pm fade to black in West Virginia
I'd entertained a foolish thought that I might be able to catch a quick glimpse of my old cabin in WV on the way, but it's so dark out that it seems almost as if the train crew has switched off the scenery for the night.
I know this darkness well--this is the mountain dark that sucks the light out of a flashlight beam, leaving only a pinpoint of light in the distance as the sole witness that the thing is even switched on. It's the kind of dark that revives my childhood fear of the dark, and it's the reason I learned the ancient art of using a chamber pot in the days before we had a semi-functional indoor bathroom in the cabin, when a trip to the toilet meant a trip through outer space to the musty old outhouse.
This dark is that pre-industrial, primeval, "still getting used to hominid life" kind of dark, where the stars burn burn burn so bright that you can actually see the grey haze of the Milky Way, the reminder of something so big it can barely be imagined, and that's been nothing but a memory for a century of urban ascendancy.
Here and there, I catch the orange luster of a raging bonfire in the woods, surrounded by a circle of barely-lit celebrants making light under a curtain of astronomy, and I feel oddly proud of my species in spite of our seemingly endless catalog of failures.
6:29pm Cumberland, MD
Cumberland's one of those places that makes you thankful for dire poverty, which is definitely no fun for humans, but perfect for architecture.
This town's economy had been submerged for ages, my entire life at the very least, and you can pinpoint the collapse in the frozen styles of the buildings. Lovely brick and block edifices climb the valley walls, forties glass department store facades still hawk a mishmash of wares, and extraordinary sights blend with a chaos of truckstop madness. This town could almost be an italian mountain town, if not for the highways and fast food holes and complete lack of a prosaic rural pace--it encrusts the valley from peak to peak, a strange historical urban confection in a state as small as Maryland, and so far from anywhere. When the railroad and canal were king, Cumberland reigned, but now it's something else, a few moments in time preserved by suffocation.
1:19am the wee hours lounge
I was having a hard time getting into a proper mental state after Cumberland, hovering in between attempts at a sweaty, fitful sleep and trying to read the books I brought along for the ride. I sat and listlessly watched the scenery drifting by as we pulled into the sprawl heralding Pittsburgh, aided by the sudden extinguishing of the coach lights around 10:30. I was hypnotized by the ominous chemical plants and the monuments of heavy industry, seeing things on scales we never see in Maryland, or at least in my part of the state. We passed one factory for what seemed like an hour, its broad and filthy windows glowing like the face of a jack o'lantern and revealing hulking, unidentifiable shapes within, all brilliantly lit in sodium yellow and looking almost defiantly desolate. I watched and wondered, pondering what could come from those acres of enclosed machinery, feeling overwhelmed at the realization that there are factories like this everywhere, all over the country, all over the world, the inexplicable machinery of daily life, the mechanism of a world that's just too damned big and complex to ever hope to understand.
When we pulled into the station in Pittsburgh, the train stopped along side of a huge institutional light fixture the size of a toilet. It hung there like a bloated, jaundiced lightning bug, directly outside my window, soaking me in a urinary-grade yellow glare, washing the poetry out of me and lulling me into a sickly sleep that lasted several hours.
I woke up as the final minutes of a five-hour minidisc were playing out in my earphones--the last bits of the BBC radio version of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which I'd transferred over for the trip. I ejected the disc and exchanged it for another I'd made of low-key music and sat for quite a while, just watching lights passing in the window like I was traveling in outer space and feeling more relaxed then I've felt in ages.
I fidgeted a bit, thinking I'd go back to sleep, but decided instead to roam the train for a while, exploring some of the cars I'd been too timid to explore when everyone was awake.
The lounge car is completely deserted, or rather, it's completely mine, and I'm sitting here, typing this in my own private car, watching the spectacle of midwestern afterhours in a splendid solitary mood and wondering where we are.
6:27am the wee hours lounge part 2
I'm awake again, probably for the day at this point. I'm not well-suited to sleeping in a chair, even a wide and nicely adjustable pair of chairs, so I'll probably be a bit tired today. I'm in the lounge car again, not alone this time--am just in my superspy mode, wearing my headphones, but eavesdropping on a curious conversation about how best to dispose of a gun used in a crime, how to reload quickly, and other such things. Now they're talking about mixed drinks, and I'm more alarmed than I was during the gun chat--thinking once again that it might actually be possible to be bored to death.
Never mind.
I'm not sure what time it actually is now. I think I'm on the other side of a time line or some such nonsense, and it's making me wonder how these train schedule cards work when you cross time lines--does the arrival time refer to the time in the time zone you left or the one you're coming into? Such deep philosophical questions...
I've made a startling discovery on this trip, too. I know where sofas go to die. When they're on their last legs, with cushions sagging and coming apart at the seams, they make their way down to the train tracks and give themselves to the stars in the sight of the passing trains. Then, the great sofa fairy winnows them away to nothing, from sofa to shreds to springs and frame to nothing--the great cycle of life as rendered in furniture.
7:51am dawn impending
It's funny, every time I've gone to the lounge car to write (out of necessity because of the relatively loud key action of my portable word processor), people have approached me to ask if I'm a writer.
I say yes, and fabulize the details whenever the harsh reality seems less than what I'd like. This ride has been both more and less than I expected, not quite to Orient Express standards, but infinitely superior to airliners, those crowded, rushed intercity buses of the air. As a nod to the romance of history, I said yes--I am a writer, traveling by train, and for this moment I'm the very picture of genteel elegance, albeit with bed-head.
Chicago is minutes away, somewhere off in the haze still, but ripe to rise from the landscape like concrete flowers blooming. I'm repacking my bags, undoing the sprawl of accessories, and combing my hair as the great jurassic skeletons of drawbridges and factories pass me by.
8:56am (my time)
7:56am Great Hall
Waiting in the great hall here, in amazing near-silence. The architecture of this place is a lot like that of the Union Station from which I departed 17 hours ago, but a bit less polished and nearly deserted, except for some folks sleeping on the wide wooden benches here.
My ride's here, so more later...
