Amtrak Days

Earlier today, at the outset of what has been a very, very long day, I found myself jammed in between the window and a man about my size in the back of a U.S. Airways Express jet, if you can use that word for what we were in. It occurred to me that there was another time in my life when I traveled alone, nearly as often as I do now. My parents periodically put me on the Amtrak train in Croton Harmon, for the five-hour trip up to Syracuse, during my years as an undergraduate there, from 1981 to 1986. Confined as I was in that little seat, I yearned for the space and the freedom of the Amtrak trains.

My activities then were so different than they are now. I don't think I ever had a laptop; I graduated in 1986 and didn't get my first laptop until five years later. There was no Kindle and no cell phone. I may have had a Sony Walkman somewhere in there.

Mostly, though, I read, wrote, chatted, if I was feeling confident, or played solitaire. One of my favorite things to do was go to the bar car and write in my journal. I absolutely loved the scenery on that trip; it's mentioned in Raymond Carver's masterpiece, Cathedral, when the narrator feels stupid after asking the blind man if he sat on the left side of the train on his way up from New York, because that's the side with the great views of the Hudson. You get the Hudson, you get the Catskill Mountains, the Adirondack Mountains and the Finger Lakes on the trip. It goes all the way up to Montreal, though I never took it that far.

I used to sit in the club car, as it was also called, and scribble thoughts in my journal -- probably mostly about the melodrama that was passing for my love life at the time -- or about how I wished I was writing more than I was. Sometimes I'd have a beer or more. You could still smoke on the train back then, which I did. And I really enjoyed the taste of those nasty microwave croissant sandwiches and the cheesy, buttery smell of them comes back as a sense memory when I think of it. The scalding burn on the outside edge and that middle bite of still-frozen ice. I loved it!

I was pretty shy back then, so I don't remember many interactions. I do remember being approached by an older man who walked with the help of a cane. I don't recall much about him, except that he had angular features and spoke with a slur that suggested he'd been drinking.

"Introspection or creation?" he asked.

"Excuse me?" I answered, intimidated.

"Are you writing by looking within or without?"

"Without, I guess. I'm writing a story."

He went on to talk about Flannery O'Connor, recommending her work to me. I wrote it down, and still have the journal somewhere. I think it's in my sister's basement in Brooklyn, gathering mold.

The other conversation I remember was with a woman who sat next to me up to Schenectady, where she lived. She was a model in New York, and I enjoyed chatting with her. We hit it off, buying each other beers. I remember thinking she had the most perfect face -- her skin was very dark, what I supposed the word "onyx" to mean, her cheekbones were strong, and her nose was thin. Her eyes were almond-shaped. I was sorry to see her go, and when I asked for her number, she smiled and said, "Bye, Dan. Good luck to you."

Nowadays, on flights like the ones I take all the time, people are on their cell phones before takeoff and after landing, and on their Kindles, iPods and laptops in the time in between. There are very few of the kinds of interactions like the two I've described from my youth. It makes me ask my question yet again -- is all this technology bringing us closer together, or it pulling us farther apart?