The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

1 THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED

One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work. You would have known it immediately by the size of his bag. And you can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth — he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble. But why be coy? I had woken in my old bedroom, in the house where I had spent the best part of my life. The snow lay deep around the house, and there were frozen footprints across the yard to the garbage can. A blizzard had just visited, another was expected to blow in soon. I had dressed and tied my shoes with more than usual care, and left the stubble on my upper lip for a moustache I planned to grow. Slapping my pockets to make sure my ballpoint and passport were safe, I went downstairs, past my mother's hiccupping cuckoo clock, and then to Wellington Circle to catch the train. It was a morning of paralyzing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America.

For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at the very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia. Two men using a foreign language spoke in low voices; there were others with lunch-boxes and valises and briefcases, and one lady with the sort of wrinkled department store bag that indicated she was going to return or exchange an unwanted item (the original bag lending veracity to the awkward operation). The freezing weather had altered the faces in the multi-racial car: the whites' cheeks looked rubbed with pink chalk, the Chinese were bloodless, the blacks ashen or yellow-grey. At dawn it had been 12° Fahrenheit, by mid-morning it was 9°, and the temperature was still dropping. The cold wind gusted through the car as the doors opened at Haymarket, and it had the effect of silencing the muttering foreigners. They looked Mediterranean; they winced at the draught. Most of the people sat compactly, with their elbows against their sides and their hands in their laps, squinting and conserving their warmth.

They had affairs to attend to in town — work, shopping, banking, the embarrassing moment at the refund desk. Two had hefty textbooks in their laps, and a spine turned towards me read A General Introduction to Sociology. A man solemnly scanned the headlines in the Globe, another thumb-flicked the papers in his briefcase. A lady told her little girl to stop kicking and sit still. Now they were getting out at the windy platforms- after four stations the car was half-full. They would return that evening, having spent the day speaking of the weather. But they were dressed for it, office clothes under eskimo coats, gloves, mittens, woolly hats; resignation was on their faces and, already, a suggestion of fatigue. Not a trace of excitement; all this was usual and ordinary; the train was their daily chore.

No one looked out of the window. They had seen the harbour, and Bunker Hill, and the billboards before. Nor did they look at each other. Their gazes stopped a few inches from their eyes. Though they paid no attention to them, the signs above their heads spoke to these people. These folks were local, they mattered, the advertising men knew who they were addressing. NEED FEDERAL INCOME TAX FORMS? Beneath it, a youth in a pea-jacket grinned at his newspaper and swallowed. CASH YOUR CHECKS ALL OVER MASSACHUSETTS. A lady with that yellow-grey Hottentot colour hugged her shopping bag. BE A SCHOOL VOLUNTEER IN THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Not a bad idea for the sick-of-it-all briefcase examiner in the Russian hat. MORTGAGE MONEY? WE HAVE PLENTY. No one glanced up. ROOFS AND GUTTERS. GET A COLLEGE DEGREE IN YOUR SPARE TIME. A restaurant. A radio station. A plea to stop smoking.

The signs did not speak to me. These were local matters, but I was leaving this morning. And when you are leaving, the promises in advertisements are ineffectual. Money, school, house, radio: I was putting them behind me, and in the duration of this short trip from Wellington Circle to State Street, the words of the ads had become merely an imploring jabber, like the nonsense of an unknown language. I could shrug; I was being pulled away from home. Apart from the cold, and the blinding light on the fallen snow, there was nothing of great significance in my going, nothing momentous except the fact that as we drew into South Station I was now a mile nearer to Patagonia.

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

What's become of Waring

Since he gave us all the slip?

But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words.

That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start — as so many novels do — in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. 'The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,' the book might begin; or, 'Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its eons' stripes and split by floods.' Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm's reach:

'It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa.' (The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt Col J.H. Patterson)

' "Welcome!" says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness.' (Duty Preserved, by Mollie Panter-Downes)

'From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra, capital of Ghana.' (Which Tribe Do You Belong To? by Alberto Moravia)

My usual question, unanswered by these — by most — travel books, is: How did y ou get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what's the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, 'From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra. .'

Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway labourers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as rivetting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.

The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane's tilted fuselage. The joke-opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go? 'Below us lay the tropical green, the flooded valley, the patchwork quilt of farms, and as we penetrated the cloud I could see dirt roads threading their way into the hills and cars so small they looked like toys. We circled the airport and, as we came in low for the landing, I saw the stately palms, the harvest, the rooftops of the shabby houses, the square fields stitched together with crude fences, the people like ants, the colourful. .'

I have never found this sort of guesswork very convincing. When I am landing in a plane my heart is in my mouth; I wonder — doesn't everyone? — if we are going to crash. My life flashes before me, a brief selection of sordid and pathetic trivialities. Then a voice tells me to stay in my seat until the plane comes to a complete stop; and when we land the loudspeakers break into an orchestral version of Moon River. I suppose if I had the nerve to look around I might see a travel writer scribbling, 'Below us lay the tropical green — '

Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time-zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright — from the moment he departs, his mind is focussed on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above it empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, 'What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.'

But apologies are not necessary. An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston — but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a moustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that aeroplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armour.

This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as the trains run from Medford, Massachusetts; to end my book where travel books begin.

I had nothing better to do. I was at a stage I had grown to recognize in my writing life. I had just finished a novel, two years of indoor activity. Looking for something else to write, I found that instead of hitting nails on the head I was only striking a series of glancing blows. I hated cold weather. I wanted some sunshine. I had no job — what was the problem? I studied maps and there appeared to be a continuous track from my house in Medford to the Great Plateau of Patagonia in southern Argentina. There, in the town of Esquel, one ran out of railways. There was no line to Tierra del Fuego, but between Medford and Esquel rather a lot of them.

In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off — their train-trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.

And at South Station, my skin crinkling into crepe from the dull cold, some friends appeared. Vapour billowed from beneath the train; they were like people materializing from mist, their breath trailing in clouds. We drank champagne out of paper cups and hopped to keep warm. My family burst into view, pumping hands. In his excitement, my father forgot my name; but my brothers were calm, one ironical, the other squinting at a trim young man on the platform and saying, 'A dash of lavender, Paul — watch out, he's getting on!' I boarded, too, and waved goodbye to my well-wishers. As the Lake Shore Limited pulled out of Platform 151 felt as if I was still in a provisional state, as if everyone was going to get off soon, and that only I was riding the train to the end of the line.

It was a nice conceit, but I kept it to myself. If a stranger asked me where I was going, I said Chicago. It was partly superstition — it seemed unlucky, so early in the trip, to give my precise destination. It was also to avoid startling the questioner with a ridiculous place name

(Tapachula, Managua, Bogotá), or arousing his curiosity and setting off an interrogation. Anyway, this was still home, still familiar: the bent backs of city brownstones, the preposterous solemnity of the Boston University spires, and across the frozen Charles River the white steeples of Harvard, each one in its frailty like a failed attempt at an ivory tower. The air was cold and clear, and it carried the cry of the train whistle through Back Bay. American train whistles have a bitter-sweet change in pitch, and the most insignificant train plays this lonesome note perfectly to the dreamers along the tracks. It is what is known in music as a Diminished Third: Hoo-wee! Hoo-wee!

There was some traffic on the salted roads, but no pedestrians. It was too cold to walk anywhere. The outskirts of Boston looked evacuated: no people, every door and window tightly shut, and the dirt-flecked snow piled beside the empty streets and covering the parked cars. We passed a television station bricked up to look like a country mansion, a solid duck pond, an armoury with grey fake battlements that was about as convincingly military as the kind you see stamped on the back of a cornflakes box to be assembled with scissors and glue. I knew the names of these suburbs, I had been here many times, but because I was headed so far away I saw every point we passed as important. It was as if I was leaving home for the first time, and for good.

Realizing how well I understood these places, I clung to what was familiar and was reluctant to surrender it to the distance. That bridge, that church, that field. There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.

Here in Framingham, I had eleven cousins. There were bungalows and tame woods and ice-covered porches on hillsides; cleaner snow than I had seen in Boston. And some humanity. On this winter afternoon, children skidded hunched-over on skates on a frozen rink between derelict buildings. A moment later we crossed a class barrier: big pink, green, yellow and white oblongs of houses, some with swimming pools filled with snow. The Lake Shore Limited stopped traffic on Main Street, where a policeman whose puffy face was chilled the colour of salami, held the cars back with gloves like a bear's paws.

I had not come far. I could have hopped off the train and quite easily found my way back to Medford on a bus. I knew these places well, and yet I saw new things: a different texture in the suburban snow, the pally names on storefronts — 'Wally's', 'Dave's', 'Angle's' — and, repeatedly, American flags, the Stars and Stripes flying over petrol stations and supermarkets and in numerous yards. And a church steeple like a pepperpot. I could not remember having seen it before, but I had never rushed headlong from home like this. The length of the trip I intended allowed me to be attentive to detail. But the flags puzzled me — were these the pious boasts of patriots, or a warning to foreigners, or decorations for a national holiday? And why, in the littered yard of that rundown house, was a pretty little flag flapping loyally from a pole? On the evidence here it seemed an American obsession, a kind of image-worship I associated with the most primitive political minds.

The snow was bronzed by the setting sun and now I saw factories flying the flag, and advertising their products on their tall brick chimneys: SNIDER'S DRESSED BEEF, and on another the single word ENVELOPES. And like the armoury earlier, with its fake battlements, a cathedral with fake buttresses and a bell-less bell-tower, and some houses with columns which offered no support to the roof, purely decorative fakery repeated in a gingerbread villa. There was no pretence that it was not bogus, only an insistence on cuteness so common in American buildings, which have promoted fakery as legitimate in styles of architecture.

And between the small factory towns — now farther and farther apart — the dense woods were darkening, and the trunks of oak trees were black and forbidding, the shape of pulpits. As we neared Springfield night was falling on the bare hills, and in the snowy valleys the phosphorescence of the deep snow slipped towards black brooks, their surfaces roughened by the current. Since leaving Boston, water had been constantly in view: frozen lakes and ponds, half-frozen rivers, or streams with conches of ice at their banks and the moving water turned to ink by the twilight. Then the sun sank and the light which had moved down the sky drained into the hole where the sun had gone, and the window specks showing in the woods seemed to brighten. Far down on the road, a man in mittens stood alone by his gas station pumps, watching us pass.

Not long afterward we were in Springfield. I had clear memories of the place, of getting off the train at that very station on a winter night, and crossing the long bridge over the Connecticut River to Route 91, to hitch-hike the rest of the way to Amherst. There were ice-floes on the river tonight, too, and the dark slopes of woods on the far side, and the same knifing wind. Memories of school are always to me like memories of destitution, of inexperience, the joyless impatience I had suffered like poverty. And I had had some sadnesses there. But the movement of travel is merciful: before I could remember much — before this town and river could toss me a particular memory — it whistled and rushed me into the amnesia of night. We travelled west, the rumble of the train muffled by snowbanks, through the forests of Massachusetts. But even in that darkness I recognized it. It was not the opaque night, the uninterrupted dark, of a foreign country's hinterland. It was the darkness that only baffles strangers. It was an average evening for this time of year in this place; and I knew all the ghosts here. It was the darkness of home.

I was still sitting in my compartment. The champagne at South Station had left me groggy, and though I had a copy of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms in my lap, I had done no more than read three pages. On the back cover I had scribbled, policeman's face like salami and inky water and flags. And the rest of the time I had spent with my face turned to the window. I had not seen any other passengers — I hadn't looked. I had no idea who was travelling on this train, and in my listless state thought there would be plenty of time for socializing further on-if not tonight, then tomorrow in Chicago, or the day after in Texas. Or I could leave it all for Spanish America or another climate — just sit here reading until the weather changed, and then go for a stroll. But I found the Faulkner impenetrable; my curiosity overcame my listlessness.

There was a man in the corridor of the sleeping car (it was the only sleeping car on the train; it had a name, 'The Silver Orchid'). His face and forearms were against the window and he was staring, I suppose, at Pittsfield or the Berkshires — a paper-white birch grove smothered by night and snow, a row of fence posts visible because of the drifts in which they lay half-buried, and the shadowy lantern shapes of small cedars, and a frosting of flakes mimicking a contour of wind that streaked the pane of glass in front of his nose.

'This is like the Trans-Siberian,' he said.

'No, it's not,' I said.

He winced and went on staring. I walked to the end of the car, but felt bad for having snapped at him. I looked back and saw him still there, studying the darkness. He was elderly and what he had said to me was a friendly gesture. I pretended to look out of the window myself, and when he stretched and came towards me — he was doing a sort of tango to keep his balance, the way people walk on the decks of ships in storms — I said, 'Actually, there isn't this much snow in Siberia.'

'You don't say.' He kept moving. I could tell from his gruffness that I had lost him.

There would be no food until Albany, when the New York section, with its diner, was hooked to this train. So I went into the Lounge Car and had a beer. I packed my pipe and set it on fire and savoured the trance-like state of lazy reflection that pipe smoke induces in me. I blew myself a cocoon of it, and it hung in clouds around me, so comforting and thick that the girl who entered the car and sat down opposite seemed wraithlike, a child lost in fog. She put three bulging bags on her table, then tucked her legs under her. She folded her hands in her lap and stared stonily down the car. Her intensity made me alert. At the next table a man was engrossed in a Matt Helm story, and near him, two linesmen — they wore their tools — were playing poker. There was a boy with a short-wave radio, but his racket was drowned by the greater racket of the train. A man in a uniform was stirring coffee — a train man: there was an old greasy lantern at his feet. At the train man's table, but not speaking, a fat woman sneaked bites at a candy bar. She did it guiltily, as if she feared that at any moment someone would shout, Put that thing away!

'You mind not smoking?'

It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze.

I looked for a No Smoking sign. There was none. I said, 'Is it bothering you?'

She said, 'It kills my eyes.'

I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.

She said, 'That stuff is poison.'

Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, 'They say peanuts cause cancer.'

She grinned vengefully at me and said, 'Pumpkin seeds.'

I turned away.

'And these are almonds.'

I considered relighting my pipe.

'And this is cashews.'

Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness, and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at twenty. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round-shouldered.

'What do you study, Wendy?'

'Eastern philosophy? I'm into Zen.'

Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about The Hole, or perhaps The Whole — it still made no sense to me. She hadn't read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did — it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world — that was Buddhism, too.

'Not politics,' I said. 'That's not Buddhism. It's just crooked.'

'That's what everyone says, but they're wrong. I've been reading Marx, Marx is a kind of Buddhist.'

Was she pulling my leg? I said, 'Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It's the opposite of thought — it's selfish, it's narrow, it's dishonest. It's all half truths and short-cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things, but in Burma, where — '

'Take this,' she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. 'I'm a raw-foodist-non-dairy vegetarian. You're probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong — I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!' The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. They're just destroying themselves and they don't even know it. They're smoking themselves to death. Look at the smoke in this car.'

I said, 'Some of that is my smoke.'

'It kills my eyes.'

' "Non-dairy",' I said. 'That means you don't drink milk.'

'Right.'

'What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you've got to have calcium.'

'I get my calcium in cashews,' she said. Was this true? 'Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.'

'I didn't know that.'

'I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.'

'A box. That's quite a lot.'

'It was the milk. It made mucus,' she said. 'My nose used to run like you wouldn't believe.'

'Is that why people's noses run? Because of the milk?'

'Yes!'she cried.

I wondered if she had a point. Milk-drinkers' noses ran. Children were milk-drinkers. Therefore, children's noses ran. And children's noses did run. But it still struck me as arguable. Everyone's nose ran — except hers, apparently.

'Dairy products give you headaches, too.'

'You mean, they give you headaches.'

'Right. Like the other night. My sister knows I'm a vegetarian. So she gives me some eggplant parmyjan. She doesn't know I'm a non-dairy-raw-foodist. I looked at it. As soon as I saw it was cooked and had cheese on it I knew that I was going to feel awful. But she spent all day making it, so what else could I do? The funny thing is that I liked the taste of it. God, was I sick afterwards! And my nose started to run.'

I told her that, in his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi stated that eating meat made people lustful. And yet at thirteen, an age at which most American children were frolicking with the Little League team or concentrating their minds on making spit-balls, Gandhi had got married — and he was a vegetarian.

'But it wasn't a real marriage,' said Wendy. 'It was a kind of Hindu ceremony.'

The betrothal took place when he was seven years old. The marriage sealed the bargain. They were both thirteen, and he started shagging her — though I'm not sure one should use that term for describing the Mahatma's love-making.'

Wendy pondered this. I decided to try again. Had she, I asked, noticed a falling-off of her sexual appetite since her conversion to raw vegetables?

'I used to get insomnia,' she began. 'And sick — I mean, really sick. And I admit I lost my temper. I think meat does cause people to be hostile.'

'But what about sexual desire? Lechery — cravings — I don't know quite how to put it.'

'You mean sex? It's not supposed to be violent. It should be gentle and beautiful. Kind of a quiet thing.'

Maybe if you're a vegetarian, I thought. She was still droning on in her pedantic college student way.

'I understand my body better now. . I've gotten to know my body a whole lot better. . Hey, I can tell when there's just a little difference in my blood sugar level. I can sense it going up and down, my blood sugar level. When I eat certain things.'

I asked her whether she ever got violently ill. She said absolutely not. Did she ever feel a little bit sick?

Her reply was extraordinary: 'I don't believe in germs.'

Amazing. I said, 'You mean, you don't believe that germs exist? They're just an optical illusion under the microscope? Dust, little specks — that sort of thing?'

'I don't think germs cause sickness. Germs are living things — small, living things that don't do any harm.'

'Like cockroaches and fleas,' I said. 'Friendly little critters, right?'

'Germs don't make you sick,' she insisted. 'Food does. If you eat bad food it weakens your organs and you get sick. It's your organs that make you sick. Your heart, your bowels.'

'But what makes your organs sick?'

'Bad food. It makes them weak. If you eat good food — like I do,' she said, gesturing at her pumpkin seeds, 'you don't get sick. Like I never get sick. If I get a runny nose and a sore throat I don't call it a cold.'

'You don't?'

'No, it's because I ate something bad. So I eat something good.'

I decided to shelve my inquiry about sickness being merely a question of a runny nose, and not cancer or the bubonic plague. Let's get down to particulars, I thought. What had she had to eat that day?

'This. Pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds. A banana. An apple. Some raisins. A slice of wholemeal bread — toasted. If you don't toast it you get mucus.'

'You're sort of declaring war on the gourmets, eh?'

'I know I have fairly radical views,' she said.

'I wouldn't call them radical,' I said. 'They're smug views — self-important ones. Egocentric, you might say. The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time, is that it can turn you into a fascist. My diet, my bowels, my self — it's the way right-wing people talk. The next thing you know you'll be raving about the purity of the race.'

'Okay,' she conceded in a somersault, 'I admit some of my views are conservative. But so what?'

'Well, for one thing, apart from your bowels there's a big world out there. The Middle East. The Panama Canal. Political prisoners having their toenails pulled out in Iran. Families starving in India.'

This rant of mine had little effect, though it did get her onto the subject of families — perhaps it was my mention of starving Indians. She hated families, she said. She couldn't help it — she just hated them.

I said, 'What does a family make you think of?'

'A station wagon, a mother, a father. Four or five kids eating hamburgers. They're really awful, and they're everywhere — they're all over the place, driving around.'

'So you think families are a blot on the landscape?'

She said, 'Well, yes.'

She had been at this college in Ohio for three years. She had never in that time taken a literature course. Even more interesting, this was the first time in her life that she had ever been on a train. She liked the train, she said, but didn't elaborate.

I wondered what her ambitions were.

'I think I'd like to get involved in food. Teach people about food. What they should eat. Tell them why they get sick.' It was the voice of a commissar, and yet a moment later she said dreamily, 'Sometimes I look at a piece of cheese. I know it tastes good, I know I'll like it. But I also know that I'm going to feel awful the next day if I eat it.'

I said, 'That's what I think when I see a magnum of champagne, a rabbit pie and a bowl of cream puffs with hot chocolate sauce.'

At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine' in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi's early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalities in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candour of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.

The talk of food must have been inspired by the late hour and my hunger. But now we were at Albany. I excused myself and hurried to the dining car which had just been attached to the train. The miles ahead were historic: trains have been running between Albany and Schenectady for 150 years, starting with the Mohawk and Hudson Railway, the oldest in America. Farther on, the route followed is that of the Erie Canal. It was the railway that put the canals and waterways out of business, although the railway's efficiency was bitterly disputed by the rival companies. But the facts were indisputable: in the 1850s it took 14 | days to reach Chicago from New York by water; by rail it was 67 days.

The Amtrak meal was promptly served by a towel-snapping waiter. The steak sandwich, on which I had poured Tabasco sauce, was my revenge on Wendy and her preference for raw alfalfa. While I ate, a sales manager named Horace Chick (he sold equipment for making photographic driving licenses) sat down and had a hamburger. He was a monologuist, too, but a harmless one. Each time he wished to emphasize a point he whistled through the gap in his front teeth. He munched and yapped.

'All the planes were full. Pfweet. So I took the train. Never took this train before. Simple. Pfweet. Three am and we're in Rochester. I'll take a cab home. My wife would go ape-shit if I phoned her from the station at three am. Next time I'm going to take the kids. Just plop them down. Pfweet. Let them run. It's hot in here. I like it cold. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight. My wife hates the cold. I can't sleep. I go over to the window and, pfweet, open it up. She screams at me. Just wakes up and, pfweet, screams. Most women are like that. They like it four degrees warmer than men. Pfweet. I don't know why. Bodies. Different bodies, different thermostat. Is this better than driving? You bet it is! Driving! Eight hours, fourteen cups of coffee. Pfweet. This hamburger, though. I taste filler. Hey, waiter!'

There was snow and ice outside. Each street-light illuminated its own post and, just in front, a round patch of snow — nothing more. At midnight, watching from my compartment, I saw a white house on a hill. In every window of this house there was a lighted lamp, and these bright windows seemed to enlarge the house and at the same time betray its emptiness.

At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city's name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse's relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Del-more Schwartz, the classroom (it was Peace Corps training, I was learning Chinyanja) in which I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later — though not as a consequence of this — met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.

Buffalo and Erie were behind us, too, which was not a bad thing. I had no idea where we were. I had woken in my compartment, and it had been so hot my lips were cracked and my fingertips felt flayed. But there were curtains of heavy vapour between the cars, where it was very cold, and frost on the windows of the diner. I rubbed the frost away but could see very little except a blue-grey fog that blurred the landscape with a cloudy fluorescence.

The train stopped in this haze. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then, in the fog, a dim tree stump became apparent. It bled a streak of orange and this widened, a splash, increasing and staining the decayed bark like a wound leaking into a grey bandage. And then the whole stump was alight, and the bunches of grass behind it flaming, and sudden trees. Soon the rubious fire of dawn glittered in the fields, and when the landscape was lit — the stump and the trees and the snow — the train moved on.

'Ohio,' said a lady at the next table.

Her husband, looking uncomfortable in a baggy yellow shirt, said, 'It doesn't look like Ohio.'

I knew what he meant.

The waiter said, 'Yep. That's Ohio all right. Be in Cleveland soon. Cleveland, Ohio.'

Just beyond the tracks there was a forest of frozen branches, poplars made out of frost, like ghostly sails and masts in a sea of snow. The elms and beeches had swelled cleanly into icy manifestations of exploded lace. And flat windswept snow, with hair-strands of brown broken grass buried to their tips. So even Ohio, covered in snow, could be dreamland.

The train was sunlit and emptier. I did not see Mr Chick or hear his pfweet; and Wendy, the raw foodist, was gone. It seemed to me here — and I was not very far from home-as if more of the familiar was slipping away. I had not really liked either one of them, but now I missed them. The rest of the people on the train were strangers.

I picked up my book. I had gone to sleep reading it the previous night; it was still The Wild Palms and still opaque. What had put me to sleep? Perhaps this sentence, or rather the tail end of a long straggling sentence: '. . it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat.'

I was not sure what Faulkner was driving at, and yet it seemed a fair description of the sausage I was eating that early morning in Ohio. The remainder of the breakfast was delicious — scrambled eggs, a slab of ham, grapefruit, coffee. Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey-wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: 'a morning pick-me-up,' as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. Amtrak was trying hard. Near my toast there was an Amtrak brochure which said that for the next 133 miles the track was perfectly straight — not a curve in it anywhere. So I copied down that shin-barking Faulkner sentence without any swerve of the train to jog my pen.

By the middle of the morning, the vapour I had seen between the cars had frozen. Each small passageway smoked like a deep freeze, with complicated crusts of frost covering it, and solid bubbles of ice, and new vapour pouring from cracks in the rubber seal. It was pretty, this snow and ice, and no less pretty outside; but it was also a nuisance. It was now past eleven and we had not yet reached Cleveland. Where was Cleveland? And I was not the only one who was perplexed. Up and down the train, passengers were buttonholing conductors and saying, 'Hey, what happened to Cleveland? You said we were supposed to be there by now. What's the story?' And yet Cleveland might have been right outside the window, buried under all that snow.

My conductor was leaning against a frosted window. I wanted to ask him what happened to Cleveland, but before I could speak he said, 'I'm looking for my switchman.'

'Anything wrong?'

'Oh, no. It's just that every time we go by here, he throws a snowball at me.'

'By the way, where's Cleveland?'

'Way off. Didn't you know we're running four hours late? Frozen switch back in Erie held us up.'

'I have to catch a train at four-thirty in Chicago.'

'You'll never make it.'

'Beautiful,' I said, and started away.

'Don't worry. I'll wire ahead in Elkhart. When we get to Chicago we'll just dump the whole thing in Amtrak's lap. They'll put you up at the Holiday Inn. You'll be in good shape.'

'But I won't be in Texas.'

'You leave this to me, sir.' He touched the visor of his cap. 'Ever see snow like this? God, it's terrible.' He looked out of the window again and sighed. 'Can't imagine what happened to that switchman. Probably got frostbite.'

It was hours before we got to Cleveland and, as with most delays, the slowness of our arrival created a sense of anti-climax: I felt I had already given it all the thought it deserved. Now the snow only bored me, and the houses depressed me- they were tiny bungalows not much bigger than the cars parked beside them. The greatest joke was that Cleveland, which had been smothered by the previous week's snowstorm, which had broadcast news items about survival techniques at home (intelligence — welcome, one would have thought, to Arctic explorers — about sleeping bags, body heat, keeping your condominium warm in an emergency, cooking on Sterno stoves and the like) — this city, which was frozen solid under drifts of snow, had to cheer it a long story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the monstrous inefficiency of the Russians in snow removal. The Russians! Under the headline MOSCOW SNOW DIG-OUT CROWN TARNISHED, with its Moscow dateline, the story began, 'This city's once-renowned snow removal capabilities have been drastically diminished this winter by a combination of bureaucratic blunders and unexpectedly heavy snowfalls.' It continued in the same gloating vein: 'The problem is apparently not a lack of special equipment. . Residents are complaining bitterly this winter about the sad state of the streets. . Still, heavy December snows and inadequate parking regulations seem a poor excuse for streets that are still clogged several weeks later.'

It was Mid-West smugness. In order to boast in Ohio you have to mention the Russians. Even better, a mention of Siberia which, as a matter of fact, Ohio in winter greatly resembles. I read that news item in Cleveland. I read the entire Plain Dealer in Cleveland. In Cleveland we were delayed nearly two hours. When I asked the conductor the reason he said it was the snow; and the track had been buckled by ice.

'It's a real bad winter.'

I told him that in Siberia the trains run on time. But it was a cheap crack. I would choose Cleveland over Irkutsk any day, even though — this was obvious — Cleveland was colder.

I went to the Club Car and had a morning pick-me-up and read The Wild Palms. Then I had another pick-me-up, and another. I considered a fourth, ordered it, but decided to nurse it. If I had many more of these pick-me-ups I'd be under the table.

'What are you reading?'

It was a plump freckled-faced fiftyish lady sipping a can of sugar-free tonic.

I showed her the title.

She said, 'I've heard of it. Any good?'

'It has its moments.' Then I laughed. But it wasn't anything to do with Faulkner. Once, on an Amtrak train not far from here, I had had a book which no one had queried; and yet it had aroused considerable interest. It was the biography of the writer of horror tales, H.P. Lovecraft, and the title Lovecraft had led my fellow passengers to believe that throughout a two-day trip I had had my nose in a book about sexual technique.

She was from Flagstaff, she said, and 'Whereabouts you from?'

'Boston.'

'Really?' She was interested. She said, 'Will you say something for me? Say G-o-d.'

'God.'

She clapped her hands delightedly. She was, despite her plumpness, very small, with a broad flat face. Her teeth were crooked, slanting in a uniform way, as if they had been filed. I was baffled by the pleasure I had given her in saying the word.

'Gawd,' she said, mimicking me.

'What do you say?'

'I say gahd.'

'I'm sure He understands.'

'I love to hear you say it. I was on this train a week ago, going east. We were delayed by the snow, but it was fantastic. They put us up at the Holiday Inn!'

'I hope they don't do that to us.'

'Don't say that.'

'I've got nothing against the Holiday Inn,' I said. 'It's just that I have a train to catch.'

'Everybody does. I bet I'm going further than you — Flagstaff, remember?' She took another sip of her tonic and said, 'In the end it took us days — days — to get from Chicago to New York. There was snow everywhere! There was a boy on the train. He was from Boston. He was on the seat beside me.' She smiled — a kind of demure leer: 'We slept together.'

'That was lucky.'

'I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't like that. He was on his side and I was on my side. But' — she went pious — 'we slept together. What a time that was. I don't drink, but he drank enough for the both of us. Did I tell you he was twenty-seven years old? From Boston. And all through the night he said to me, "Gawd, you're beautiful." and he kissed me I don't know how many times, "Gawd, you're beautiful." '

'This was at the Holiday Inn?'

'On the train. One of the nights,' she said. 'The Chair Car. It was very, very important to me.'

I said it sounded like a very sweet experience and tried to imagine it, the drunken youth pawing this plump freckly woman while the Chair Car (smelling, as it always did at night, of old socks and stale sandwiches) snored.

'Not just sweet. It was very important. I needed it just then. That's why I was going East.'

'To meet this fellow?'

'No, no,' she said peevishly. 'My mother died.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I got word of it in Flagstaff and caught the train. Then we got held up in Chicago, if you call the Holiday Inn being held up! I met Jack round about Toledo — right about here, if this is Toledo.' She looked out the window. ' "Gawd, you're beautiful." It really cheered me up. It came between so much.'

'My condolences. It must be very sad to go home for a funeral.'

'Two funerals,' she said.

'Pardon?'

'My father died, too.'

'Recently?'

'Tuesday.'

This was Saturday.

'God,' I said.

She smiled. 'I love to hear you say that.'

'I mean, that's terrible about your father.'

'It was a blow. I thought I was going home for my mother's funeral, but it turned out to be both of them. "You should come home more often, honey," Dad said. I said I would. Flagstaff is pretty far, but I've got my own apartment and I'm making good money. Then he died.'

'A sad trip.'

'And I'll have to go back. They couldn't bury them. I have to go back for the interment.'

'I would have thought that would be done by now.'

She looked at me sharply. 'They cain't bury people in New York City.'

I asked her to repeat this strange sentence. She did, in just the same tones.

'God,' I said.

'You sound like Jack.' She smiled: such odd Eskimo-granny teeth.

'Why can't they bury people in New York?'

'The ground's too hard. It's frozen. They cain't dig — '

In the severe winter of '78, I thought, when the ground was so hard they couldn't bury people, and the mortuaries were stacked to the rafters, I decided to take the train to the sunniest parts of Spanish A merica.

The lady from Flagstaff went away, but over the next eight or nine hours, again and again, in the Club Car and the Chair Car and the Diner, I heard her flat, dry corncrake voice repeating slowly, ' — because they cain't bury people in New York City.'

Twice, when she saw me, she said Gawd! and laughed.

The frozen switch, the buckled track, the snow: we were running very late and my conductor insisted that I did not have a hope of arriving on time or making my connection for Fort Worth. 'You don't have the chance of one of these in Hell,' he said at an Indiana station. He was holding a snowball. And there was a new problem. A wheel was overheating and (I think I have this right) a fuse had blown; there was a frosty stink of gas seeping through the end of the train. To avert an explosion, the speed of the train was brought down to about 15 miles an hour, and we remained at this creeping pace until an opportunity arose to detach the afflicted car from the Lake Shore Limited. At Elkhart we were able to rid ourselves of this damaged car, but the operation took an unconscionably long time.

While we stopped, things were calm in the 'Silver Orchid' sleeping car. Only the conductor fussed. He said the steam was freezing and jamming the brakes. He hurried back and forth importantly with a push-broom and told me that this was much better than his previous job. He had been desk-bound in an electronics firm, 'but I'd rather deal with the public.'

'The trouble with you,' said the ticket collector, who saw the conductor growing anxious, 'is you fret before you stew.'

'Maybe so.' The conductor banged his broom on the ice that had accumulated inside the door.

'Won't be as bad as the last trip, though. That was frozen bananas.'

The conductor said, 'I've got my passengers to think of.'

My passengers. There were three of us in the 'Silver Orchid', the Bunces and me. The first thing Mr Bunce said to me was that his mother's people had been on the Mayflower. Mr Bunce wore a cap with earflaps and was zippered into two sweaters. He wanted to talk about his family and Cape Cod. Mrs Bunce said that Ohio was far uglier than the Cape. Mr Bunce also had a Huguenot pedigree. In one sense, old Bunce was an untypical bore. Characteristically, the American boasts about how desperate and poverty-stricken his immigrant ancestors were; Mr Bunce's were a huge success, right from the start. I listened with as much patience as I could muster. It might, I thought, have been Bunce I had offended that first day ('This is like the Trans-Siberian' 'No, it's not'). After that, I avoided the Bunces.

And still at Elkhart a great panic overtook the Lake Shore Limited. Now, everyone knew he would miss his onward connection in Chicago. A large group of single girls were heading for New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. Some elderly couples had to catch a cruise ship in San Francisco: they were very worried. A young man from Kansas said his wife would think he'd left her for good. A black couple whispered, and I heard the black girl say, 'Oh, shoot.' One of the Mardi Gras girls looked at her watch and said, 'We could be partying by now.'

The lady from Flagstaff, whose parents had just died, caused this mood to become festive and, at last, one of celebration. She explained she had been on the train going east just ten days before. The same thing had happened — delays, snow, missed connections. Amtrak had put everyone up at the Holiday Inn in Chicago and given everyone four dollars for taxi fare, and meal vouchers, and one phone call. Amtrak, she said, would do the same thing this time.

The news spread through the train and, as if proof of Amtrak's good intentions, a free meal was announced in the dining car: soup, fried chicken and vanilla ice cream. This vindicated the no longer bereaved lady from Flagstaff, who said, 'And wait till we get to Chicago!'

Elsewhere, passengers were spending the four dollar taxi fare they had not yet been given.

'Okay, Ralph,' said a greasy-haired boy to the bartender, and put a dollar down, 'let's get drunk.'

'We been setting here eight hours,' said the loudest of three youths, 'we already drunk.'

'I'm working overtime,' said Ralph the bartender, but obediently began cramming ice cubes into plastic cups.

There were other voices.

This: 'Never go home in the spring. It's never the same.'

And this: 'Jesus Christ' (a pause) 'was black. Like a Ethiopian. White features and a colored face.' (pause) 'All them usual descriptions are bullshit.'

And again: ' — because they cain't bury people in New York City.'

They were, all of them, frightfully happy. They were glad about the delay, delighted with the snow (it had begun to fall again) and they rejoiced at the promises made by the lady from Flagstaff about a night — or maybe two — at the Holiday Inn. I did not share their joy or feel very kindly towards any of them, and when I discovered that the car to be detached lay between the 'Silver Orchid' and this mob I told the conductor I was going back to bed: 'Wake me up when we get to Chicago.'

'We may not be there until nine o'clock.'

'Wonderful,' I said. I fell asleep with The Wild Palms over my face.

The conductor woke me at ten to nine. 'Chicago!' I jumped up and grabbed my suitcase. As I hurried down the platform, through the billows of steam from the train's underside, which gave to my arrival that old-movie aura of mystery and glory, ice needles crystalized on the lenses of my glasses and I could hardly see.

The lady from Flagstaff had been dead right. I was given four dollars and a berth in the Holiday Inn and three meal vouchers. Everyone who had missed a connection got exactly the same: the Bunces, the drunken louts from the Club Car, the young man from Kansas, the Mardi Gras girls, the guffawing peckerwoods who had slumbered the trip away on cheap seats in the Chair Car, the elderly people on their way to San Francisco, the lady from Flagstaff. We were met by Amtrak staff and sent on our way.

'See you at the hotel!' cried a lady whose luggage was two shopping bags.

She could not believe her luck.

A lout said, 'This is costing Amtrak a fortune!'

The wild snow, the sudden hotel, Chicago — it seemed unreal. But this unreality was amplified by the other guests at the Holiday Inn. They were blacks in outlandish uniforms, bright green bell-bottoms, white peaked caps and gold braid; or red uniforms, or white with medals, or beige with silver braid looped around the epaulettes. Was it a band, I wondered, or a regiment of pop-art policemen? It was neither. These men (their wives were not in uniform) were members of the Loyal Order of Antlers. Their shoulder badges said so, in small print. The men gave Antler salutes and Antler handshakes and paraded very formally around the lobby in white Antler shoes, looking a trifle annoyed at the class of people the storm had just blown in. There was no confrontation. The Amtrak passengers made for the 'Why Not? Discoteque' and the Bounty Lounge, and the Antlers (some of whom wore swords) stood and saluted each other — stood, I suppose, because sitting would have taken the crease out of their trousers.

The swimming pool was floodlit and filled with snow. Green palm trees were painted on the outside wall. These appeared to be rooted in the snowdrifts. The city was frozen. There were cakes of ice in the river. Last week's snow was piled by the roadsides. There was new snow on the streets. And with this newly falling snow was a sleet storm, tiny pelting grains that made driving treacherous. The Gideon Bible in my room was open at Chronicles (2, 25). Was there a message here for me? 'The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, or the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall die for his own sin.' Amen, I thought. I shut the Bible and unpacked Faulkner.

Coincidentally, Faulkner had a message. 'Now it was winter in Chicago,' I read. '. . the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe. . the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights. .' He went on jeering at their status and then described how they all went south and deserted Chicago's snows. They were 'members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with notebooks and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.'

I was not sure about my tact for exploration, and I had neither a camera nor a sponge bag, but twenty-four hours in the Holiday Inn in wintry Chicago convinced me that the sooner I got to the savage jungle, however dark and bitten, the better.