The Lakeshore Limited, all aboard.

I took the train from Wisconsin to Massachusetts. Most of the saner people I know wonder why I would do such a thing. I continue to seal my fate as a whackjob in the eyes of my friends.

In part, it was a continuation of my quest in slow, in part an expression of my frustration with the deterioration of the air travel experience, and in part an effort to internalize my own carbon footprint, to understand viscerally what it means for me to use less.

Aboard the train I had lots of time. I read a book. I listened to music. I looked out the window. I reveled in the fact that I didn't have to do anything at all.

I wrote.

9.29.08
The sleeping was wretched, but now, in the daylight, I'm glad to be on the train. Like driving to South Carolina it makes me see that in the space between here and there are a million places. Not only the cities that are the big dots on the map: Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, Syracuse. Everyone mostly remembers those exist whether they see them or not.

Flying has turned places into destination or blank space in between: it's "Arrival" or "Departure" or it doesn't exist. The separate identities of all those blanks is lost--small towns with main streets and furniture stores, cornfields, cabbages, scrapyards and graveyards, a woman washing dishes at her kitchen window.

Who knew, for example, that northwestern Pennsylvania is grape country? Fields of vines, straight rows stretching in long lines until they end abruptly at the next field which begins again in perpendicular lines. Wine grapes, I found out later. The vast vineyards of PA.

I see snapshots of the passing cities, little tastes of America. Gary, Indiana, is more eerie than Erie, with foundries and gas flares burning and steaming and smoking in the weird street-lit night glow. Buffalo is grim and resigned under a steely sky. In the Illinois suburbs, lawns are luminous green after new rain. In Angola, PA, there's a store called "Slutz." Lake Erie lies flat and silver as a fish in the early morning light. The leaves are changing color.