Titania Veda |

Whiff of Whimsy: Coast to Coast, With Heavy Baggage

All travelers are running away from something or other. What’s your story?” Carol asked me as the Amtrak train we were on chugged along.

Carol, a middle-aged Australian woman with waist-long auburn hair, had embarked on the train with me in New York. We were on our way to San Francisco, a four-day train ride. I had always preferred to think I was running towards something, but maybe I was kidding myself.

Every one of my fellow passengers was fleeing “something or other.” When they told me their stories, I felt their longing to reveal themselves to a stranger in hopes of shedding some of the pain they carried by sharing it. But for some, the ghosts of their beloved dead were hard to shake off.

As the Lake Shore Ltd. to Chicago pulled out of New York’s Penn Station on Day 1, we rode into the hazy dusk by the Hudson River. The fading light caught the dying leaves and made them burn in torrid yellows, oranges and reds.

It had been six years since Carol lost her 21-year-old son in an automobile accident. Since then, she’s been on the move, leaving the rest of her family in Australia for the majority of the year to find new places and faces. “It soothes the soul,” she said.

Heading west with us until Chicago were three men, recent college graduates from Derbyshire, England. In order to forget their soulless jobs as debt collectors, they planned to stop in every major city on the way to California and drink their way across America.

Morning of Day 2 brought a view of the flat landscape of Illinois, shrouded by a gloomy stretch of rain-laden clouds. A freight train had derailed, causing a two-hour delay to our arrival in Chicago, where we were to change to the California Zephyr, the train that was to be home for the next three days. “My kind of town, Chicago is,” Sinatra sang. But with its autumn chill and dripping rain, it wasn’t mine.

Beyond Chicago, the country opened up: the landscape flatter, the empty stretch of steady roads longer and the music more bluesy. Gary, our cheerful train conductor, had a jovial voice that brought to mind California’s sunshine and surfers. He acted like a radio host, often ending his announcements with, “Don’t touch that dial. Stay tuned to this station for further details!”

Carol befriended a small elderly gent with a bushy white moustache. He had recently lost two sons — one to muscular dystrophy and another to a skiing accident. The pair passed the hours away, bonding over tragedy in the dining car.

The following day, roused by the conductor’s call for Denver, I awoke to the softest of dawns. Heading west with the glow of the sun behind us, the sky was a stormy blue tinged with a pink that slowly diluted over the Colorado plains.

I struck up a conversation with Flo. Hailing from Nebraska, she was born during the Depression in 1930. This grandmother, with warm brown eyes, soft gray curls and a voice like gravelly syrup, shared with me her crackers, grapes and a letter of filial gratitude her retired veterinarian son Stan had slipped into her carry-all.

It had been five years since Flo’s husband, a retired trucker, dropped dead of a heart attack while they were on their annual summer vacation, traveling cross-country in a motor-home. They’d been married for nearly 54 years and had seven children and 26 grandchildren together. The song at his funeral was “Eighteen Wheels and A Dozen Roses,” a song for truckers. “Not a church song,” Flo said, “but it was appropriate for him.”

As we moved west, the local radio stations began to acquire a folksy twang and the gilded foliage of western Colorado’s Aspen trees absorbed the ripeness of the afternoon sun.

In Grand Junction, Colorado, a tall lumbering man with jutting lips boarded. He hijacked our conversation by announcing that he’d been laid off by a shoe-making factory in Salt Lake City two weeks ago.

His lament was long. “I know people say the quiet ones work the hardest and I’m a talker,” he said, “but I was the hardest worker there!”

Day 4, we were greeted by the silver state of Nevada and for the third and final time entered a different time zone — the Pacific. By noon, we had passed through the Sierra Nevadas and were met with the mandarin orange groves and palm trees of the golden state of California.

Flo kept proffering tidbits throughout the day in an attempt to keep me awake so I could lend her my ear. By then, I was so weak from ingesting only nuts, rice crackers and water that all I wanted to do was sleep. I hadn’t eaten a full meal or showered in four days, had been washing in the airplane-sized toilets and my big toe stuck out of a hole in my sock. The sway of the train was my lullaby and I’d had my fill of sorrowful travelers’ tales. The numbness of sleep tempted me.

It was only after I bid my farewells in Fog City that I realized Carol’s question was left unanswered. My own story remained untold.

Titania Veda writes a weekly travel column. She is a former features reporter at the Jakarta Globe.

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