All Gone to Look for America (15 page)

IT’S NEARLY
4:00 p.m. on a blustery, squally afternoon at the beginning of October when the Empire Builder bound for the west coast pulls into
Milwaukee
station and I catch my first glimpse of the Superliner rolling stock that is to be the new version of my home on wheels once we cross the Mississippi.

It’s hard not to be impressed, at first glance. The main difference between American and European stations is that I am at ground level here. Instead of standing on a platform next to the train doors with the undercarriage on sunken tracks I am at ground level with the whole massive machinery of the locomotive rolling towards me. In consequence, and given that the trains out west are all double-decker, the vast piece of engineering shunting towards me appears intimidatingly massive. The great silver and blue stunted snout,
splattered
with the gory wreckage of a million flying insects, rears above my head as the engine rumbles past.

The lowest-level carriage doors open a foot or more off the ground to reveal steep steps up to the two-storey interior. This division between single and double-deckers is itself the result of American railroad history: the east coast lines had to fit into an existing infrastructure of eighteenth-and early
nineteenth
-century roads and bridges, none of which were built to accommodate a two-storey train passing underneath them. The land west of the Mississippi, in contrast, was conquered by the train, and the tarmac that followed had to fit in with the railroad, rather than vice versa. The tarmac may have won in the end but the railway carriages have been allowed to keep their stature.

Downstairs is primarily reserved for luggage, with special compartments for crew, the disabled and, underneath the viewing car, a bar that advertises cold beers and cocktails! I have the feeling I could be nipping downstairs quite often. Up above has attractions of a different sort: the same wide, comfortable reclining seats with a small pillow and blanket in Amtrak livery blue laid out
on each one. The whole passenger area being at first-floor level means there is a surreal floating feel to the experience as we roll out of the urban landscape towards the prairies. Floating that is, until we hit the first stretch of seriously wonky track and get thrown physically from side to side and it becomes
painfully
obvious why Amtrak trains never go faster than 79 mph, even when they have a continent to cross. Hard to credit that in the 1930s the Hiawatha service between Chicago and Milwaukee was the fastest in the world with trains running regularly at over 100 mph. But keeping the right speed for track
conditions
is another of those vital jobs that is the priority of the conductor, in constant liaison with the engineer upfront in the cab. He also has another job: deciding where and when we’re far enough ahead of schedule, he can declare the next stop to be a cigarette break, to the relief of both those crew and
passengers
starved of nicotine.

In a landscape like this driving a train must be as monotonous as ploughing a straight furrow down an endless empty motorway. The further west we go the more there is of nothing. Whole great achingly empty expanses of nothing but flat fields as we head across Wisconsin and into Minnesota as darkness falls and I decide it is time to explore the delights of the restaurant car. On first inspection it looks good news, with proper tablecloths, silverware and napkins, a far cry from the naff eat-at-your-seat airline-style, that most
European
trains, even the prestigious cross-channel Eurostar, have come to prefer. This is what I had hoped for: if you’re going to cross a continent at the leisurely speed of 79 mph, then you might as well take the time to dine in style. Even the menu looks promising: seared catfish (with the option of ‘blackened
Cajun-style
’), braised lamb shanks, roast chicken or an ‘Angus’ burger, not exactly Michelin-star but sound hearty old-fashioned railroad food. About an hour before the dining car opens the attendant comes through the coaches asking for reservations at time slots 15 minutes apart, telling us the dining car operates a strict ‘social seating’ policy, which means you get seated next to a fellow
passenger
. A stranger. In Britain trains are so overcrowded we each do everything we can to exclude our fellow passengers from our own little bubble. But then we are rarely cooped up with them for days at a time: it just feels like that.

My ‘social seat’ is opposite a middle–aged married couple called Ray and Chantal going home to Portland, Oregon from a visit to their daughter in Chicago. They’ll be on this train for a full two days. They have four other kids, ‘all over the place – Massachusetts, Idaho, Virginia’. Ray rolls back the sleeves on his red-and-black checked shirt and tells me they’re planning to retire soon and buy a Dodge Durango and/or maybe a motor home (which might be what
we call a caravan or possibly used to call a dormobile – we probably call it a motor home too these days) and go stay with them all in turn. I’m about to ask why they don’t just stick to the train, when the spare seat next to me is taken by a man the size of two John Waynes, only skinny. He shakes hands all round with one of those wiry grips that you just know can bend branding irons and introduces himself as a rancher called Mike from somewhere in the midst of Dakota which we’ll be getting to in the early hours of the morning.

Mike’s arrival turns the conversation from kids and motor homes to more manly topics such as elk-skinning – he’s cut up a few in his time – and the price of hay: he’s just been down to Kansas to buy some. I ask him how big his ranch is and he reckons, ‘I dunno for sure, ’bout 12,000 acres, I guess. You need at least 10,000 out here to scratch a living with a cattle herd.’ These are figures beyond my imagination. I’d been thinking of maybe 1,000 or so at most. Twelve thousand seems about the size of Wales. (This of course is a British cliché, or rather an English one: when we want to suggest something is huge – but not really the size of a proper country. I have since found a website –
www.sizeofwales.co.uk
– which actually works it out, and 12,000 acres is just 0.002 per cent of the area of Wales which means Wales is really quite big after all; then again, the same website incidentally told me Montana in total is more than 18 times the size of Wales)

What I am really comparing with, of course, is the size of the average English farm which in my experience is something under 200 acres. This, however, is the cue for Mike to tell me a joke: ‘There’s these three ranchers sittin’ in a bar in LA braggin’ to each other and one says: “I got me a piece of land back in Texas, she’s about 25,000 acres. And I call her Big Sky.” The second rancher pushes back his hat and says, “I got me a piece of land back in Texas too. She’s about 120,000 acres. I call her Enormous Sky.” This third rancher, he’s lookin’ kind of smug. The other two look at him an’ he says, “Well I got me a little piece o’ land that I reckons better’n both o’ them. She’s about 40 acres.” The first rancher looks at him and says with a look on his face, and what do you call that. The guy smiles back and says, “Downtown Houston”.’

Actually the joke’s as old as the hills – even I’ve heard it before – but we all three of us laugh as we’re expected to, which makes Mike happy. Which is probably a good thing. Just then the waiter comes to take our order. Mike orders the catfish – unblackened. I opt for the lamb shank on the simple grounds that it is a dish that can easily be prepared in advance, prepackaged and quickly microwaved, which bitter experience has taught me is probably a safe option given the limited resources of a railway galley. The couple opposite
both go for the chicken. When it comes to drinks I’m pleased to see there’s a decentish selection of half-bottles of both red and white wine, even if I am mildly surprised to find they come from Chile rather than California (or even upstate New York), but a half-bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon should see off my lamb quite nicely. My choice gets a nod and a smile from the attendant, and from the couple opposite, and even a bit of a look from Mike, and then they order theirs:

‘I’d like a glass of cold milk please,’ says the woman opposite with a look on her face as if she’d just been awarded the best girl in Sunday school prize. Her husband nods and says, ‘That’ll do it for me too.’ And then Mike puts his menu down on the table with a definitive thunk and says, ‘Cold milk sounds real good to me too’, and I’m left there feeling like I’ve just brought a half-gallon of whisky into a toddlers’ birthday party. Milk? Milk! These are adults, for
goodness
sake, at dinnertime. And they’re ordering up chilled bovine mammary fluid? With food!

When my little screw-top bottle arrives, for a nanosecond I feel a wave of semi-disapproving mock sympathy for the incorrigible alcoholic from my fellow diners, and then I pour a glass and take a sip and feel only deep
satisfaction
as I watch them wipe the smear of cold cow juice off their upper lips.

Only the arrival of the food mars my minor buzz of self-satisfaction: far from having been heated up in a microwave, my lamb shank looks as if it’s been cooked in a proper oven – for about two and half weeks. Dry, hard, the meat leathern and stuck to the bone rather than succulent and falling from it. The chicken looks dull and dry, and the catfish alone – a long golden fillet – has the appearance of being approximately edible. Mike by now has been telling us all about cattle-keeping and deer-hunting and is just detailing the last time he skinned a stag – I have this vision of him ripping its belly open with his Bowie knife and then reaching back for a quick slug of semi-skimmed – when he
suddenly
looks at my plate and says:

‘Say, just what part of the animal is that?’

‘Uh, the lower leg,’ I find it odd to be explaining to someone in the animal husbandry business.

‘That right?’ he says, still looking at it uncertainly enough to make me have second thoughts myself. It only gradually dawns on me that to Mike, the piece of meat on my plate is far too small to be part of a leg. He’s a big animal man. Lamb in America is not exactly rare, but it’s not real men’s food. At least
obviously
not in the Dakotas. Right now, looking at the hard dry piece of carcass on my plate, I’m tempted to agree with him. But it’s hot – or at least warm – and
the baked potato with sour cream is good, and the wine is fine – or at any rate better than milk!

And some time in the last hour we’ve passed into the badlands of Dakota and somewhere out there, there are coyotes howling at the moon. And I order up a second small bottle of wine and head back to my seat, pull the blanket over my head and dream about joining them.

Morning brings breakfast downstairs in the bar, rather than the formality of the dining car. A bagel with cream cheese – for homesick New Yorkers – and damn near a pint of half-decent coffee which I take upstairs to the
observation
car to watch the early morning pink glow spreading across the
ochretufted
emptiness of western Dakota. This is not, however, quite as easy as it sounds, especially first thing in the morning after a night spent sleeping in even a relatively ample reclining armchair. The state of tracks maintained by companies who use them only to transport cargo is dire enough to cause sudden wobbles and even the occasional out and out lurch. You have to put this together with the fact that a substantial number of Amtrak’s passengers are that proportion of the population everywhere in America euphemistically referred to as ‘seniors’. This is almost certainly because they are the only ones who can afford the time it takes to get anywhere by train. But given that most Americans aren’t exactly masters of the art of bipedal locomotion at the best of times, the result is that moving around the train can be a slow process of
following
people in check trousers or jogging pants with their names written on their baseball caps – this applies to both sexes – going ‘Whoopsie’ or ‘Steady on, girl’ and then flirting dangerously with suicide when it comes to
negotiating
the interconnection between carriages. The conductor – or one of his understudies – takes pains to issue frequent reminders to his charges to ‘wear shoes at all times when moving about the train’; ‘these carriages can go up and down a bit and we’ve had people lose toes between those steel plates’. He’s not kidding, either.

The observation car is busy. Despite badly scuffed perspex windows that make photography difficult our height off the ground makes for splendid viewing, if you can call viewing nothing splendid, which – when there’s enough of it – surprisingly you can. Gentle low hills of barren scrubland stretch as far as a horizon that seems impossibly distant and without the advent of the railroad might have remained all but uninhabited for another century. It’s not exactly
overpopulated now. My fellow travellers’ attitudes towards the spectacularly empty landscape they are hurtling through varies between the obsessive – the few determined to have every second on their two-day voyage captured on video – and the dismissive. One group of Midwest matrons occupying a line of window seats all but ignores the dramatic landscape passing before them and sits there gossiping over their knitting: ‘I only just learned to purl.’ ‘Really, I find it such a useful stitch. But plain knit’s neat too.’