Soul Train

A 'Town Square' on Rails

May 04, 2024

There's an art to sleeping in Coach — especially if you're six-foot-one. On a single seat, there are only so many permutations of the limbs allowed by the constraints of one's ticketed space, and each exacts its painful toll quickly. The fetal position leads to a sore knee or a numb shoulder; the erect, upward position is easy on knees and shoulders but leaves the neck wandering east to west as the deeper waves of sleep lap up against the half-conscious mind. Amtrak sleep isn't really sleep in the truest sense of the word, not in Coach. It's a zombie state, never wakeful, never restful — the sleeper's equivalent of filling up on saltines instead of having a meal. After a night or two of sleeping in Coach on Amtrak, one discovers the incredible value of laying down flat to get a night's rest.

And at two-in-the-morning, the train is a gallery of delirious snores and gurgles — a living museum of hapazardly parked legs and elbows and limp, occasionally drooling faces. Each seat is like a bucket for a wriggling, somnambulant corpse, each one dead-legging along the aisles and armrests in a hundred different, freakish poses. Humidity rises over the whole scene — the vapor of so many respirating passengers. The whole scene is lit by the heavenly glow of the train's blue nightlights.

Fascinating as all of this is to me, I don't stick around for the smells and sore legs. Being something of an Amtrak veteran, I've learned a few tricks — the most important of which is to abscond to the observation car as soon as the conductor delivers his bedtime address on the intercom and cuts the lights. By the light of day, the observation car is bustling with life on virtually any Amtrak line, but by night, it's more reminiscent of the dimly-lit corridors of a Vegas hotel. Stragglers and night owls lounge easily, letting traveler's fatigue mix with a few nips of vodka or tea, staring dark-eyed out the dome-shaped windows.

The blue nightlights glow on the pleather seats; the observation car's nighttime aura is both subdued and festive, like the wee hours of morning in a cheap 70's-era nightclub. Conversation is conducted with wry abandon among strangers, and the conviviality is amplified by a mix of beverages ranging from $6.75 Michelob Ultras from the cafe car to bootleg vodka bottles tucked into grannies' purses. Elderly couples tousle each others' hair and speak wistfully; tired-looking cousins sit and shoot the shit over beer — a thirtysomething farmboy drinks alone and stares into the black void of the Illinois plains. I sit, shirt half-buttoned, leaning back and sipping the vodka I'd thought to pack, utterly idle as the last dregs of the car's social happenings begin to dissipate.

One by one, pairs of passengers slip back toward their seats and cabins, until all that remains is an old man in the throes of deep sleep, mouth agape and eyes covered by a hat bearing the words 'VIETNAM VETERAN'. This is my cue — I slink down below the bench I've been sitting on and lay flat. This isn't permitted or encouraged, but, like the more-or-less universally tolerated scofflawry regarding 'BYOB' — I find that Amtrak crews virtually never care if I bed down on the flat surface of the empty observation car.

That flat surface is heavenly to me — I practically melt into a deep sleep the second I hit the floor. The night before, I'd had the misfortune of attempting sleep aboard Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited — a rail line I count among the hardest forms of public transporation to sleep on. There, the yellow-white lights glare with hospital-like intensity — no gentle blue nightlights — the train is always packed, the conductor always stern, and the Lake Shore's lack of an observation car leaves one no choice but to attempt sleep in their seat. Exhausted as I was, the observation car of the southbound City of New Orleans train was the perfect haven as we sailed gulfward over the eerie plains of Southern Illinois.

The track under the City of New Orleans train is as gnarled as the roots of a live oak tree. Like errant braids of steel, these rails send the twelve-car train and its passengers on what might be the roughest train ride in the country. Before I departed on my monthlong railroad adventure, my cousin — who is a track foreman on a small railroad — told me "it's only a millimeter of steel that really keeps a train on the track, that's all." As the 'bounce' of the traincars began to resemble that of a ship in heavy seas, I began to wonder about that millimeter of steel — and what a supreme workout it must be getting.

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But before I could formulate any genuinely disconcerting mechanical reflections or even form the word derailment in my mind, the train's passengers demonstrated with supreme and stylish aplomb how fitting it would be that a train bound for New Orleans of all cities should ride on some of the roughest passenger train track in the US. As the cars bounced and rolled, throwing passengers side-to-side at random, the distinct rhythm and musicality of the Crescent City's people took it full-force and rolled with it. To walk anywhere on the train was really to dance — it was to bump into people in a busy club, to flash a genteel smile at anyone who might bump into you, to do the shoulder lean a little. Walking down the aisle and 'rolling' with the train's irregular movements became akin to making wild, dancelike flourishes down a runway, through a gaunlet of enthusiastic onlookers shouting "heyyyy" and "alright!"

Continuing this walk and stumbling into the observation car, the music was almost deafening. The scene was hardly different from what one would see in a Ninth Ward "second line" parade or at a barbecue on Saint Claude Avenue in New Orleans, what with boomboxes and coolers full of snacks and beer. I sat down to a cup of coffee as Mississippi rolled by in a heavy rain, listening to the tracklist which ranged from Dirty South rap to soul classics to the repetitive call-and-response 'bounce' music that New Orleans made famous. An old man sat in a purple velvet sweater, fedora on at a tilt, sunglasses lowered to the edge of his nose. His wife was a stocky Haitian with a yellow-dyed crew cut and a bottle of Jameson in a plastic bag. A man in a big blue sweater furtively sipped liquor from an Amtrak cafe car cup. He blustered as he spoke in his thick patois, with volume and emotion:

"Them boys said we finna have a SMOKE BREAK in Yazoo City... mhmm, them 'ol boys finna be comin' back up on 'dis train smellin' like KUSH and BIRTHDAY CAKE!!"

And he was right. The observation car did indeed smell like birthday cake and strong marijuana — a pleasant aroma reminiscent of the city toward which the train was speedily swinging.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm even required to pay for a seat on the train — I never use it. I go straight to the observation car every time I can, and I stay there. It becomes my office, my front porch stoop, my village square — and though not strictly permitted or encouraged, it becomes my bedroom as well. To me, the observation car is a living organism, a moment in social time, an entirely unique and extemporaneous common space where the last tendrils of "front porch America" are still consistently on display.

For in this domed-glass railcar, the social rules that passengers might obey in their arrival and departure cities are suspended. One has no need to "look busy;" and on most of Amtrak's long-distance routes, one cannot vegetate before a WiFi-connected screen in lieu of meeting and conversing with the neighbors. Often, cell service is spotty enough that even the most dedicated "smart telephone" addicts throw up their hands, rise from their seat, and look to quench their boredom by visiting the observation car.

Such people often enter the car awkwardly and with tentative, chilly apprehension. They frigidly seat themselves with tightly-crossed legs, regally gazing out the window as if bored. They act as if they are nobody at all, an anonymous face in an anonymous place — until one of the lively cast of characters perpetually stationed in the car breaks the ice. "Pink shirt man, yeah, you — brother, where are you headed? You look like you could use a DRINK!"

I watch each one of these interactions take place in the car — which now smells a bit more like birthday cake and a bit less like marijuana — and the same thing happens over and over. The ice on the person's face melts; a glint in their eye seems to say "this place must be different," and quickly, they adjust to being in a social environment where strangers talk to each other. Nothing bad happens; nothing embarrassing or awkward — and those who approached the space with any apprehension seem relieved or even startled by how pleasant it all ends up being. Of any smile one can observe, the sprout and flourish of these ones is the best; it is like watching blood flow back into a long-numb limb.

In a nation that has seen its actual 'village squares' torn down, paved over, corporatized, covered in highway interchanges, and litigated out of existence — it seems the last bastion of the original 'village anthropology' that once characterized all of human life has retreated into the liminal world that glides above this nation's continental circulatory system of steel rails. The train careens through the forest, from shuttered town to shuttered town; it blasts by an emptied Carbondale, a desolate Greenwood, a lifeless Yazoo City. Once we de-train, we'll be 'out there' again, walking in a world of empty porches, Ubering to AirBnB's, wandering in a world of self-checkouts and awkward glares. But for now, we're together, all of us.

For now, we're in America.

One woman I spoke with looked anemic. A quizative, vaguely petrified flexion of the eyebrow was pasted to her visage — she was an academic, an articulate and aging hippie with an anxiety disorder, and a frequent Amtrak passenger.

"When I get onto the train, I don't want to get off," she told me, suckling at her Prosecco as if it were the source of her life-force. "It's like when I'm here, I'm home. Things make more sense. I'm not so fucking.... alone." She told me she uses 100% of her vacation time on Amtrak, taking the longest lines — like the Texas Eagle and the California Zephyr — back-to-back. She rents a sleeper car every time, shielding herself from the need to contort her bones into a Coach seat or to sneak naps in the observation car. But she's never in her room — she's here, with the people.

An elderly black woman looked over at us from a seat two benches over. As if whispering a secret, she looked us both in the eyes and said — "I've noticed the same thing. I do agree very much. This is how our country used to be. Some people hate trains, but I do almost prefer it here. I'm always sad to get off!"

She was smartly dressed in a shoulder-padded seersucker coat, crossing her pearly-white sneakers below the bench. She was from Baton Rouge, an active Methodist, and had married a Louisiana dock worker in 1977. Her eyes were lively, though her body limply 'rolled' with the train's rattling shifts above the track as we snaked around Lake Ponchartrain. "I meet all types of people here. Every type. It's like we're all family — it's a lot how Baton Rouge was when I was a girl."

She rose to get her things together as we neared the station.

"New Orleans better look out — grandma's takin' the town!" one man said as she walked on by, and she beamed at him. He was obviously no grandson — he was white. "I'm too young to be your grandmother, and I think you must know that!" she said, and a tide of chuckles rose throughout the car, even from the conductor.

The city appeared, and the train rolled to a stop. Humidity hung low over the rusted platform roofs; a few of the observation car passengers were exchanging numbers. Some were planning to meet for drinks, to tailgate together, to share tickets to concerts. Our 'village square' had boiled out onto the side of the platform at the station as the engines cooled down and squealed — we all seemed to cling on, to linger, not a one of us rushing out to the street.

And two of the passengers were holding hands, now for the first time.

"Y'all better have the wedding on the damn train!" one of the elderly gents shouted. His wife chimed in as well, saying "and invite us too, you lovebirds!"

They only smiled and kissed, walking out toward the streets of the City of New Orleans.

Hickman's Hinterlands

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