This
adventure began on a snowy night in late April, the
24th of the month. I had to be back at work and also
home to feed the cat. Ms Keogh, my more significant
other, was staying longer. She was keeping the car
and I was taking the train home. We had driven 575
miles to my sister-in-law's house on farmland outside
of Cincinnati. Our drive had taken nine hours. Other
in-laws were flying in from Great Britain, another
from Washington State to gather in Mount Orab, Ohio.
But this is about my trip home.
Four o'clock was too early in the morning to be out
of bed. At that early hour and in the fog of snow the
city skyscrapers were looming shadows and the streets
deserted. From out of the darkness we could see a
distant concrete structure brightly lit and growing
incredibly tall before we knew it to be our
destination. We arrived to the colossal arching
façade of Cincinnati's Union Terminal, built during
the golden age of train travel when the center piece
of every major city was a station of mythical
proportions, were temples honoring transportation.
We parked the car and together entered the imposing
edifice to stand underneath a towering dome. It would
have been a finer experience had they retained the
waiting room in the rotunda, as it must have been in
former years, when the station was new in 1933. At
least the building had been preserved, converted to
hold a museum and theater as well as to serve as a
train station. Also preserved were the large murals,
glass mosaics and frescos, showing the industrious
American at work. Meantime, the new waiting room had
been tucked into a smaller space, the size of a
classroom, hidden in the rear of the station. This
new waiting room was, nevertheless, nicely paneled
with dark wood inlaid into a light wood, creating
scenes of the railroad.
My train was to be late. Since I had a long wait, I
walked Ms Keogh back to the car while the car was yet
warm. Neither of us had brought clothes for this
unexpected return of winter. We kissed good-bye
through the car window with the snow falling about
us. I was not willing for her to wait for that
ridiculously late train.
I had breakfast at the station while waiting for the
train, a Three Musketeers bar and black coffee from a
vending machine being all that was available at that
hour. The day approached and the sky became lighter
in the windows of the little waiting room.
The 5:04 arrived at 6:30. The stationmaster, a
tyrannical little woman, marched up and down the
platform barking orders at us as to where to stand
and how to move. "To the south of the elevators,
people; to the south of the elevators!" I had no
idea which way was south. The sun was not visible
through the grey sky. I thought I was boarding a
train heading east. The train came into the station.
She herded us on.
All aboard the Amtrak Cardinal! The miseries of
traveling by train are unchanged even after twenty
years. I had forgotten about the vibrations that
rattled up through the seat and my legs to prevent me
from writing. I had to wait until station stops to
squeeze a few words out of my pen. During these stops
they gave passengers a chance to step outside and
smoke, with special instructions to stay near the
train and not wander far. Nor were they to throw
their butts on the track, but were advised to carry a
small cup of water in which to extinguish their
cigarettes.
The coach was the same as I rode in twenty years ago
on frequent trips to Boston. They were newer then.
This one was notable in having television monitors
mounted in the overhead luggage racks. Since none of
them were on, I don't know why they were there. The
seats were the same, having only one uncomfortably
short and narrow armrest. There were no armrests
between the seats to protect you from the spreading
hips of your neighbor. There were other differences,
too. Posted on the wall at the front of the car was a
sign that read, "SEE SOMETHING? SAY SOMETHING?
Unattended bags? Suspicious activity? A safety
hazard?" A sign of our times.
Another aspect of the train ride had not been
improved, the cramped restrooms were filthy. One is
jostled too much to stand and aim, and the abuse the
toilet seats had received from unimaginably
discourteous others discouraged any intention of
sitting. I cannot imagine how women persevere.
Still, the whole trip was not miserable. Eventually
the train left the plains where we passed behind the
ugly backsides of industries, the underbelly of
society, and carried us into the mountainous woods of
West Virginia. A mild snow continued falling among
the tracery of trees that had not yet rebounded from
winter. Nothing was green, but interspersed among the
grey and brown trunks were fireworks of white
dogwoods and pink redbuds. The train entered into the
New River Gorge. Even when the ride was beautiful,
edging along the river, yet the river's edge was
often cluttered with trailers, like discarded soup
cans. And then I was startled by the New River Gorge
Bridge.
High above us, lashing the two sides of the gorge
together with slender strands of steel, was a long
web, a fragile-looking bridge. I was not expecting to
see on this trip what was until quite recently the
world's longest steel-arch span. The bridge itself is
3,030 feet long, riding atop a 1,700-foot wide span
that vaults the river at a height of 876 feet. Of
course, I didn't know any of this for what it was
until after the trip, when I did the research. On the
8th February 2003, the Lupu Bridge in Shanghai bested
the New River Gorge Bridge by 105 feet.
It was an hour and a half late before I boarded the
Cardinal at Union Terminal. It was two hours late
before we departed the station. Fortunately, Ms Keogh
called ahead to warn my mother that I would be two
hours late. Unfortunately, the warning went unheeded.
How strange it is that my entire social life has
become dependent on letters and email, meanwhile I
have no local friends nor neighbors I can call on to
fetch me at the station at any hour. Is this not odd?
For most of my life I had the closest friends and,
while many have remained my friends, they have moved
to far off places to follow careers and raise
families. I have made many new friends in the last
decade, but all of them have been cultivated through
the written word and none live nearby.
I was willing to catch the last train out of 30th
Street Station in Philadelphia, although I was at
risk at missing the last local and having to wait
overnight. A cab home from the station was more
expensive then the train fare from Cincinnati. Had I
caught the local, it would have delivered me to
Langhorne Station, about a three mile walk from my
house, which I wouldn't mind, but since there are no
sidewalks, I would have preferred trekking during the
day. It was my mother who kindly insisted she would
fetch me from the 30th Street Station, and her
friend, Ms R, who insisted on keeping her company,
for which my mother was grateful.
My mother is an anxious woman, but Ms R was perhaps
more anxious in this case. These are both ladies in
their eighties, and something happens to women in
this age group wherein they become less sure of
themselves and go to greater lengths to be certain
things are done correctly. Even though my train was
scheduled to arrive at ten o'clock at night, they had
been informed by Ms Keogh that it would be late. Ms R
wanted to leave for the station at six o'clock, a
drive of less than forty-five minutes. Just how bad
did she expect traffic could be? My mother, showing
more sense, made a point of being late to collect Ms
R, and then insisted on first taking her to dinner to
eat some of the excess time. Despite these delaying
tactics, they arrived at the station at nine:thirty
and sat in the car until my train finally arrived at
one o'clock in the morning. I had spent eighteen and
a half hours on that damned train.
The 30th Street Station is another one of those
temples to transportation, a Classical Revival
monolith completed in 1934. The original benches are
in place inside a grand marbled interior. Well-lit
and constantly patrolled by the police, yet my mother
would not wait here due to her Statue Phobia. Within
the immense hall resides a giant angel carrying off
an equally giant corpse. (The statue is misidentified
throughout the internet as a Winged Victory. It is
not. The locals call this angel Saint Michael or
Gabriel when giving directions. It is a bronze to
honor the Pennsylvania Railroad employees, men and
women, who died in World War Two, and its real name
is The Angel of the Resurrection by Walker Hancock.)
I did not find the two ladies waiting for me in the
station. They were waiting in the dark parking lot on
the south side of the station, wide-awake in the
front seat of my mother's Corolla and jabbering with
the vitality of adolescent girls at a pajama party. I
was glad to see them and, to my astonishment, they
were not at all upset about their three and a half
hour wait. |