We never say goodbye. Its been too often we've been headed different directions. The train didn't waste time chugging in and chugging out. A hug and a wave and I was off. I found my seat and settled in with a long ride ahead. It was not my first time on the Empire Builder. But I had never seen the Great America West by train, a captive audience to the purple mountain majesty and amber waves of grain. There would be no stopping along the way for a staged photo with the World's Largest Buffalo or Concrete Sandhill Crane, no roadside cafes or bars from which to observe the locals. Just a widescreen view of the sky for hours and hours and hours. This is a long ride for someone with nothing to think about.
There are always interesting characters on trains, always have been. Trains seem to attract a certain type of person. On past Amtrak experiences, I've come across a Buffalo Bill impersonator with a nasty racist streak about him, drunkenly ordering a black man out of "his seat", though he was clearly in the wrong car. I've encountered a Welsh backpacker in his mid-50s who knew a great deal about emergency preparedness. On this particular journey, there was a man on the train who walked with an exaggerated limp, as if one foot was at least 6 inches shorter than the other. Everything about his persona suggested he was at home on trains, and had it been a different era he would have made a perfectly decent hobo. He had the general appearance of a straggler, with long greasy hair and beard, dirtied clothing, heavy work boots, poor teeth, and a gruff slurring voice. The stench of alcohol drifted after him wherever he limped, permeating the air. He was accompanied by a younger woman who seemed, except for her travel companion, to be rather normal. She would assist him down the stairs to take his smoke breaks at every designated smoking stop, and walk him to the bar car for his next drink. When his slurring voice got louder, she would shush him. When his steps became less steady, she would guide him through the aisles of the car with patience. It was a strange relationship, as far as I could tell.
As the train rolled on I tried to read, but could not keep my eyes from the window. The earth and sky lay before me with such beauty and imperfection that I found I had to attempt to capture it on film. But my camera could not recreate those colors and textures, the blurring of the movement.
I watched the sun set over North Dakota knowing the sun had never set for me in such a gorgeous way. As it met the flaming hills of the badlands and disappeared to twilight it brought to mind something my neighbor's father had once said as we all watched the sun set over the Chippewa Valley years ago.
"Just before the sun goes down, if you look closely, you can actually see the world turn."
When night came I lost consciousness, awakening as the train would roll through tiny towns, letting its whistle blow through the lonesome darkness of the night. The carcasses of empty trucks and cars lined the farmyards like a deserted drive-in cinema. A veritable graveyard of decades of former vehicles of the residents of that land. Beneath the soil lay the bones of buffaloes, horses, and Indians, rust leeching into the dirt until they mingled there, past and greater past decaying and settling together. One day we will all be just like dinosaurs.
In the early morning hours the sound of running footsteps down the train car startled me awake. The train had come to a halt, and outside was an unidentifiable platform lit with just one light. For a brief moment my disorientation placed me first at Limerick Junction, where maintenance concerns once left me waiting in darkness for a train back home to Castletroy, and then at a town near Heidelberg where a suicide on the tracks had forced me and my fellow passengers to disembark and wait for hours in the night for a bus that never came. But as my surroundings became clear I realized we must be in northern Minnesota.
"Where is he? Oh my God, where the hell is he?" a woman was hissing under her breath. It was the woman who had been accompanying the hobo man. Her tone was frantic, and she was bumping a large suitcase through the aisle toward the stairs. I gathered that her stop had approached sooner than she'd thought, and she was now hurrying off the train. But she reappeared, pacing the train car and running her hands through her hair, looking ever so tired and very worried indeed. A porter soon joined her, talking in hushed tones and sweeping the car with a flashlight. The hobo man, as it appeared, had gone missing at the most inopportune time. The train began to move again, and the woman yelled. A crackle of a walky-talky halted the motion and soon the conductor was in our car, hurrying through the aisles with his own flashlight. A suitcase was recovered, belonging to the missing man. Then a pair of boots. His only boots.
Naturally, my thoughts went straight to murder. Could the man be stuffed into an overhead compartment somewhere? Thrown from the train by some faceless enemy? Had he wandered off the train at a previous stop and failed to hobble back in time? Or had he simply passed out in a toilet somewhere? I felt the train jerk to a start, though I had already drifted into slumber, and I presumed the issue had been resolved. But several hours later, as the first light of dawn turned the sky to a pinkish grey, I heard a voice. A gruff, slurring voice, loud and unpleasant.
"Goddamn missed the last stop and now I'm gonna miss this stop too!" I jerked awake, knowing that voice could belong to none other but the hobo man. Peering out the window onto another lonely train platform somewhere in Minnesota, I saw the man hobble off the train rubbing his eyes. He stood there in his socks, with no baggage to speak of, looked around in confusion, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He sat down on the pavement outside the tiny station and lit up, seemingly unconcerned that his wife was hundreds of miles away, worried sick and reporting him missing, while he was here, shoeless, in God-knows-where with nothing but the clothes on his back and a dwindling pack of cigs. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he was never seen nor heard from again, traveling the tracks and living out of boxcars, swapping stories for whiskey and wearing his socks thin on the dusty road so kind.
I went back to the city then, back to where the lay-ups are covered in graffiti and the mills crumble while the condos rise high. I went back home to my life as a flatlander where trees break the horizon and the mountains stay buried beneath the earth waiting to be born. But I can still hear that lonesome whistle call.
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