Train Writing

Western Loneliness

The train rolls along and I’m hungry. For two days we’ve made the sometimes stunning, sometimes lonely trek from Seattle to Chicago.

I know little of the American West. Or at least what that American West used to mean. What it symbolized in people’s feverish minds; hungry for something bigger; more open.

I grew up making yearly visits to the farm, or, farms, where my dad’s family lived. We always left in July and August and perhaps for that reason what I remember are the persistent signs of drought. Corn, burning in its stalks, too yellow and dry for the season. The grass too was yellow, but the mosquitoes were relentless. My brother Erik and I took all of this in from our air-conditioned back seat view, and I asked him, the older and wiser one, about geographical features that seemed strange to me.

“Why do the cows have their own pond in the middle of the pasture? Did they build the farm around that?” I asked.

“No, they made the pond for the cows. So they could cool off in the summer.” He responded, with older brother commonsensical wisdom.

The Middle-West (as my Dad calls it) that Erik and I grew up visiting is nothing like it was when Dad changed from a child to a teenager there. He remembers parades, civic meetings, community construction efforts that reflected a kind of socialist spirit. My grandmother tells stories about wheat-threshing time, pies that bubbled over with fruit, and pans filled with fried chicken.

She describes summers so hot that men would eat salt to avoid the necessity of sporadic hydration. And of course, there are stories about my great-grandmother catching turkeys better than the farmhands, who were really fairly lazy in comparison to her industriousness.

Then there are my favorite stories, told by my Aunt Lois. She and I are similar in that we both have dark hair, and we can both tan in the summer months, unlike most of my family. According to my Aunt, our ancestors, those solid, straightforward farmers, had shadow selves. They chewed tobacco behind the shed, and one man, I think a great- great uncle, had an affair with a Native American woman. The story goes that the two had a clandestine relationship that produced a child. He kept the son and brought him up with his white wife. That son, and subsequent ancestor apparently kept to himself as an adult, and often left for days at a time to be alone in the prairie.

I know that these are hollow stereotypes which my Aunt’s subconscious could easily have filled in, but as a 14 year-old, bored visiting her relatives in Missouri, this was quite a revelation. Aunt Lois claims to have heard these stories in whispers and fragments of whispers told between respectable ladies as a child. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she will say. My dad says that none of it is true, that as much as he loves his Aunt, there’s just no evidence for it. Besides, my Aunt has done many things that repudiate her credibility. She voted for Ross Perot, for example.

All of it though, that richness of tradition, the stories which may or may not be true, the town pride, have dissipated. My grandmother has a steadfast identity: she is a strong woman, born and bred on a farm during the Depression, and she locates herself as from the West.

As a little girl what I remember about that region and my visits there are meals eaten at the Ponderosa, not in farmhouse kitchens. Staunch republicanism and John Wayne types in their eighties. Ghost towns with old people, mainly. At every visit my dad made us visit the cemeteries, endless in their detailing of those who had died in that lonely, dry place.

On the train, somewhere around Nebraska, I decide I need something. Prices are expensive and I still have some cereal, but it’s a treat I need, rather than want. I buy some tea and spot two ladies who I’ve seen before. One seems like a naturalist who is making her way through the country by train. She wears white linen clothes reminiscent of safari wear. A train friend tells me that this woman’s daughter has completed a year working with AmeriCorps, and that we should talk since I, too, would like to join that program.

I recognize the woman. We had both sat in the same viewing car, in seats almost next to each other, for the entirety of North Dakota. The Trails on Rails program volunteers informed us that we are on Native American terrain. As we passed ex-reservation after old battleground, I began to notice the woman near me.

I remember thinking that she was so pale. Her face could best be described as plain, but there was a softness there, hidden under deep resignation. Every now and then, she would apply lotion to her face and hands. Nothing exotic like cocoa butter, she used the cheap, liquid white stuff you can buy at any pharmacy.

I introduce myself and she tells me about her daughter, who works for a community arts program on an island in the Puget Sound. Our conversation is interesting but I sense that there is more I can gain from this contact. I so often want to take things to the next level, to find out what a person is really about.

Her friend joins in the conversation after it is revealed that I spent a month teaching in Spain. She is an aging hippie, short of stature with long curly grey hair. She brought home-made bread and her own tea, which is herbal. We all enter into a conversation and I notice that something about our dynamic is off. Normally when there are two older women and one younger adult, the two eldest begin interviewing the younger. The younger is implicitly viewed as more in touch with the pulse of the world, and so receives more attention.

These women seemed enthused at having found one another. The white-linen clothes lady was actually not a naturalist at all but rather a housewife from the Wisconsin Dells. She told us at length about a historical project she was working on, linking a WWII female veteran to a more famous male counterpart through old photographs and letters she had. Her story intrigued the aging hippie, and I decided to stop talking and just observe.

I noticed that the woman was sad. She had deep, dark bags underneath her eyes and spoke in self-admonishing tones. She spoke of her husband who she said used T.V. as a “plug-in drug”. The hippie nodded in understanding. Her husband, too, had the same problem.

It is soon revealed that the woman was sick. She never specifies, but mentions that in order to treat her illness, she has to walk frequently. Because it gets so cold in Wisconsin, she went to Walmart to roam the aisles in the wintertime in lieu of outdoor exercise. As I child I spent many hours lost and bewildered in various Walmarts around the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia. I could imagine no worse a fate.

Around this point in the conversation, my friend from Western Canada arrives and sits down with the three of us. He is one of those happy, tolerant British Columbians and I feel suddenly awkward about my national identity. About my relationship to the bleak Midwestern landscape we are rumbling through. He tells the two older women about his travels and love of music. They listen on in awe. Now, unlike before, we hold the position of young people, in touch with the world.

At the crack of dawn the next day, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and tried to meditate, to clear my mind, and catch that fleeting opening into sleep. I heard the conductor say that we had reached the Dells, and I knew that the woman had left.

She seemed like a kindred sensitive soul, a little defeated by her situation. Unlike the hippy from Washington state, the woman did not seem to embrace her life. At least not openly.

She left that day and I continued on, all the way east, until I got home. We stopped in Chicago and I said goodbye to my Canadian friend, who I think was secretly hoping we’d end up lovers. We didn’t, and in part because the trip through the West was not a trip to be taken lightly in my mind. It was a time to reconnect with my country, to meet its people, and reflect on what I had seen. What I came away with was a deep sense of loss, something I had felt as soon as I became conscious during our trips to the farm.

Behind that sadness was a sense of possibility. I had watched as two women spoke through their loneliness and reached out to each other on a snack car in Nebraska. I had felt the all enveloping sunlight of a North Dakota afternoon. I met a man with a heart defibrillator who had no fear of death. For the first time I experienced something I had never felt before; connection with this country. This place, with its tragic and amazing history, is where I am from and who I am.