Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  At night, we stop in Flagstaff and have dinner at the Crown Railroad Cafe, where an electric train runs tirelessly around the dining room over the heads of the diners. Route 66 runs through here, and the tourism offerings are all in the nostalgia vein: music and images of an America that no longer exists, intended for foreign tourists and Americans of a certain age. After dinner we go to the Museum Club, which isn’t far away. The name worries Antonio: museum? Don’t worry, I reassure him. The Web site summarizes for me: “The Museum Club is a historic landmark built in 1931. . . . It was at one time the largest log cabin in Arizona.” Every night, it offers live music. Seven dollars at the door, neon lights behind the counter, barstools and pool tables. A heavyset guy about my age is teaching a young woman about Antonio’s age how to play. She bends over the table, angling her cue for a difficult shot, and he rubs her back: that’s not his daughter. The manager gestures in my direction: “Is the boy twenty-one? No? Then he can’t come near the bar, and he has to leave the club by ten p.m.” Why? I ask. “Rules. Arizona State Liquor Board,” he replies. So a twenty-year-old in the U.S. can vote, drive, and fight a war, but he can’t drink a beer with his father? “That’s it,” he says, delighted that the foreigner got the point so quickly.

  The twenty-year-old can also buy himself a firearm, we discover the following morning. Gary and Coleen Reeder run a gun shop, the Pistol Parlour. Inside I count a bear, a buffalo, and two coyotes, all preserved by the taxidermist’s art; also, seven terrier puppies (these are alive). The mass-produced handguns are made by Glock, Ruger, and Colt. The personalized handguns have livelier names: Judge & Jury, Widowmaker, Vampyre Slayer. The Reeders very courteously explain Arizona law to me: after a few quick background checks, at age eighteen a young man can buy a long rifle, and at twenty-one, a handgun or an assault weapon. Interested? No, thanks: my son is normal.

  * * *

  We head south toward Phoenix on the I-17. The radio informs us that today is both Cyndi Lauper’s and Dan Brown’s birthday. Then we head west. For the first time, the GPS navigator is willing to utter the name “San Diego.” We get on 85 South: a deserted landing strip, basically, but the speed limit is still sixty-five. Antonio drives, champing at the bit, while I keep an eye on the speedometer.

  In Gila Bend, the heat turns surreal. We walk into the only McDonald’s as if it were an oasis. We greet the Wi-Fi like a cool breeze. We fill up the tank at a Love’s gas station, and then head for Yuma through a range of black mountains. Theba, Sentinel, Aztec, Dateland, Tacna, Ligurta. You get the impression that the way they chose the names of places, in America, is that someone grabbed a dictionary and a globe and jabbed a finger down at random. Then you find out that, in many cases, that’s exactly what happened.

  As we enter the city, Antonio informs me that Yuma is the sunniest place on earth, according to the Guinness World Records. Out of 4,456 hours of daylight each year, the sun shines there for 4,019 hours. In other words, if you step out onto the street, you know that nine times out of ten, you’re at risk of being broiled. Today is well within the statistical median.

  There’s no change in the landscape as we cross the border into California. America starts to clean up and repopulate only as you approach the Pacific coastline. At the Jaime Obeso Sunbeam Rest Area, the restrooms are impeccable, the drinking water is plentiful, the maps are informative, and the palm trees are luxuriant. The fleeing Mexicans, when they arrive here, no doubt think it’s a mirage. At Descanso—San Diego is drawing nearer—we start to see more units of the U.S. Border Patrol, and then we run into a roadblock. Spike strips in the roadway, police dogs in cages, spotlights. At that point, the Mexicans won’t have any doubts: they’ve come to the right place. The ocean and the money are both in that direction.

  In San Diego, home of the margarita and the Caesar salad, destination of conformist conference-goers and a haven for sun-caramelized matrons, a hotel room awaits us with a view of the sunset: the direction we’ve been facing ever since we left. We’ve crossed America, but we can’t stop for long. There’s a train to catch, heading north.

  The Coast Starlight

  On a summer morning in the lobby of a twenty-eight-story hotel next to the ocean, there’s no telling what will emerge from the elevators next. Overperfumed young women, noisy children and exhausted mothers, salesmen with their array of samples, Snooki look-alikes, and sculptural Hillary Clinton–style pantsuits. Athletic parents hard at work, in their phosphorescent exercise outfits, and motorcyclists ready to peel out, helmets in hand. Babies crying. Democrats and Republicans, identifiable by their T-shirts: “California for Obama.” “Keep Calm and Return Fire!”

  Antonio points out a young blonde in flip-flops, wet hair, eyes downcast, carrying three huge Bloody Marys: a busy night, we have to guess. A woman with a laptop under her arm announces her intention to Skype her hundred-year-old mother who lives in the desert in Arizona and wants to see the ocean. Frank, a builder, tells us that he’s a cousin of the boxer Rocky Marciano and asks us to give his regards to Italy.

  It’s as if America were tilted west and everyone rolled down to San Diego for the weekend. A national assortment of practicality and sloppiness, naïveté and entitlement, bags under eyes and silence, nudity and modesty, excess and repentance. It would be nice to stay here, sitting across from the elevators, and study it. Or else leave the hotel and go back to Mission Bay with a Segway. Antonio, who’d never driven one in his life, took five minutes to learn how, while I, who had experience with the contraption, wound up in a flower bed. Or go back to Petco Park to watch a baseball game, like we did last night: the Padres versus the Phillies. Or perhaps I should say, to watch a ballpark full of Americans eating, drinking, chomping, sucking, rending, gnawing, and swallowing as they watch a baseball game. Coca-Cola $9.99! Buy One and Refill All Game! Churro! Jumbo Size! Cracker Jack! Soft Cone! At any given moment, there are dozens of people getting up, sitting back down, walking in all directions. The rhythmic working of jaw and epiglottis marks the passage of time in American sports.

  But we can’t do any of these things again, nor can we try any new things. Today we have to return our car, and tomorrow morning we have to hit the (rail)road.

  * * *

  Pacific Surfliner: the Americans seem to have a certain gift for naming trains. It departs San Diego at 6:05; we’re at Union Station at 5:30 a.m. Antonio is resigned, but not sad. It’s a good time of day to play Ruzzle against his friends back in Italy and at this time of the morning, even Papà won’t try to start a conversation.

  Track 10A, on-time departure. We roll along behind the houses, heading north. We discover California as it wakes up, sleepy-eyed in underwear, coffee on the table. Volunteer flowers, palm trees, bougainvilleas, warehouses, parking lots, courtyards, large storage facilities, where Americans, between moves, wait for the recent past to become the distant past. And then there are the trailer parks full of campers, trailers, and motor homes, where the border between traveler and vagrant grows thinner and thinner.

  Signs stream by, and I take note of the words. It’s a summary of America, with nothing missing. Bruce Springsteen, without needing to add a single verb, could turn it into a song.

  Now Leasing

  For Rent

  Rio Vista

  Bed Bubbles

  Capital Group

  Think Taco Bell!

  Qualcomm Stadium

  Café Socrates

  The Home Depot

  Cash Back

  Alvarado Med Center

  Joel Tires

  Goodwill Donation

  Bob Stall Chevrolet

  Pick Up Stick

  Babies R Us

  99c Only Store

  Smooth FM 98.1

  Liquor Mart

  American Weddings

  $4.99 Combos!

  Food 4 Less

  Boat World

&nb
sp; Atlas Electric Co.

  A business litany that turns into a mantra. A predictability that conjures up usage, custom, routine: the new arrivals are immediately captured by the lexicon. A lowest common denominator that is hard to describe—I explain to Antonio, who’s baffled by my early-morning flights of philosophy—but it’s a challenge that needs to be faced, if we want to understand where it is we’ve wound up. Nations consist of repetitions more than exceptions.

  * * *

  The train personnel remind me, in their speech and manners, of summer camp counselors trying to manage crowds of inept children. The train attendant is called Delores. I ask her how to raise the top bunk. Step back! Stand by the door! Do it again! She seems impatient, and I can understand that. In fact, there are travelers who seem to defy logic and patience. The young woman with black hair, for instance, looks worried: she doesn’t know how to move her enormous suitcase. I whisper, in Italian: “Why not try pushing it? Or are the wheels strictly decorative?” With Antonio, by this point, all it takes is a glance to communicate. The glance he shoots me says: “Can you mind your own business, even just once?”

  We pass Solana Beach, Oceanside, San Juan Capistrano, Irvine, Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Fullerton. In Los Angeles—after an hour and twenty minutes spent waiting in an imperially proportioned train station waiting room, practically Soviet in dimensions—we board the Coast Starlight for Seattle, where it is scheduled to arrive tomorrow night at 8:37. A sheet of paper informs us that this is the only train in the entire Amtrak system equipped with a Parlour Car, a panoramic lounge car reserved for sleeping car travelers. “That’s us!” I say contentedly.

  Between Ventura and Santa Barbara the Coast Starlight, true to its name, hugs the coastline. The marine layer, the early-morning California fog, burns away, to be replaced by blue sky. We meet Reginald and his wife, Gloria. They live in San Diego, and that’s where they boarded the train this morning. They’re going to Idaho for a conference on electric motors; he’s an enthusiastic inventor of same. It’ll take them three days to get there.

  Gloria wants to chat with us. She loves Marcello Mastroianni and she’s curious.

  “Have you ever seen a UFO?”

  “Maybe I have, but no one told me it was a UFO.”

  “I have, in my backyard. Did you know they can control our minds?”

  “Ah.”

  “They travel through time. They’ve been watching us for centuries. A friend of ours was taken aboard by one.”

  “I see.”

  “NASA is well aware that Apollo 11 was followed every second of the way by a UFO.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “They told us so at a convention in Vegas.”

  The California we see from the train is an unusual one. The train runs along the ocean, past sand and rocks covered with white foamy waves, dirt roads. South of San Luis Obispo, we see farmworkers harvesting vegetables and strawberries, their pickup trucks parked beside the fields. At the station, a short no-smoking stop: you can get out, but you can’t smoke a cigarette.

  A young Chinese couple is traveling with their child, his face concealed underneath an immense trapper’s hat. Elisa is methodically tossing back glasses of zinfandel: she’s an artist, she tells us, and she lives in Kansas. Chelsea, on the other hand, comes from a small town near Dallas. This is the first time she’s set foot on a train, and she likes it. Devin, who is traveling with her, agrees. He’s a mechanic who works on diesel engines. There’s a tattoo on his arm: No Hatred. He loves Italian poetry, he tells me. I smile, but I don’t listen. I am too busy watching as the sun sinks into the ocean, bidding farewell to this last strip of continent.

  In my eyes [the berth] is the perfect thing, perfect in conception and execution, this small green hole in the dark moving night, this soft warren in a hard world.

  This opinion of E. B. White’s strikes me as excessively enthusiastic, especially after I came frighteningly close to crushing my fingers in the foldaway sleeper bunk during the so-called room transformation (from sleeping compartment to sitting compartment, and back again). The process is illustrated in the pamphlet issued to every passenger (Coast Starlight® Welcome Aboard). The Americans aren’t shy about showing how things work. If anything, they find such illustrations to be admirable, verging on the poetic: they are a demonstration of how the world operates.

  In any case, it’s true. There’s something old-fashioned and reassuring about falling asleep while in movement. It’s fascinating to look out the window while lying down. A train is neither a plane nor a ship: what’s going past out there is other people’s lives, not just clouds and waves.

  It’s the last night of our trip. Antonio is fast asleep in the bottom bunk. I watch America go past in the darkness as we pull out of Oakland, where we stopped to say hello to some friends. The train heads east until Sacramento; then it turns north. Chico, Redding, the Oregon state line. First stop in Oregon: Klamath Falls, scheduled arrival at 8:17 a.m.

  * * *

  How nice to wake up in the forest, with the blue sky peeking down from between the green trees, with the mountains in the distance. Every so often a lake zips past, between the trees. Beauty in motion, but glimpsing it from cubicle 12 in car 1431 is no easy matter, during the day.

  The upper bunk, in fact, is a gurney smashed up against the ceiling: it’s impossible to sit up. To get your clothing, you have to slither like a contortionist and extract it from the netting screwed to the wall. Trains, I find myself thinking, are useful: they prepare you for life and beyond. Anyone who has tried Amtrak is ready to deal with prison, a field hospital, or a submarine, or perhaps even being buried. I lean over to say good morning to Antonio: “If you want to know what fatherly love means, just consider the fact that I gave you the lower bunk.” He replies with a grunt. Good: he knows it.

  When we get up—my son is never in a hurry, in these cases—I note a frantic whir of activity. Invitations to make reservations for breakfast and a great quantity of other information explode out of the loudspeakers positioned just inches from our ears. There’s a sort of sadistic euphoria in the voices of announcers aboard trains and ships. It must be simply electrifying, the knowledge that you’re addressing a large number of people who are forced to listen. Come to think of it, that must be the feeling experienced by managing directors at corporate retreats and heads of household at Thanksgiving dinners.

  A train isn’t a vehicle: it’s a place. A place where people don’t like to shut up. Talkativeness, I think as the Coast Starlight cuts across the Winema National Forest, is inversely proportional to velocity. On the Frecciarossa express from Rome to Milan, everyone’s busy and silent; on the Amtrak Coast Starlight, massive and slow, they’re quiet only when they’re asleep. In the Parlour Car—the name a foreshadowing—the same thing happens: we find ourselves talking with perfect strangers. In America—I catch myself thinking—railway conversation is also a way of saving money. People use their traveling companions as free psychoanalysts. They sit there listening, every once in a while they have something to say, and if you want, you never have to see them again.

  * * *

  The Wi-Fi appears, like an oasis in the telecommunications desert, and then vanishes just as suddenly. Two travelers are talking about sports, two others are talking about Obama, and a little girl is playing with her blond hair. Behind us monumental pine forests go streaming past. A married couple talks about whether it’s appropriate to use a cane on the train; then they move on to a discussion of the pointlessness of having restaurant staff learn languages. (“They’re all Mexicans or Italians, and they know a little English. What more do they need?”) A French teacher, who studied at Berkeley, breaks into the conversation. A man in his early thirties with a red beard that you’d expect to see on a prophet pulls out a deck of cards and asks the young woman sitting across from him if she’d care for a game. I realize that, hidden behind her hand of ca
rds, there is a tiny baby in a Snugli, completely uninterested in the game of poker.

  I look for my own baby boy. Two seats down, there he is, playing Plants vs. Zombies. I walk over, waving a copy of the Klamath Falls Herald and News. An extraterrestrial landing in America who wants to know how people live, I say, ought to just buy a local daily. Not for the news—it’s the same everywhere—but for the ads. Since it’s summer, there’s a lot of attention to lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, coolers, and grills (starting at $149.99). There’s even a tiny swimming pool ($289.99) someone managed to cram ten people into. The names of the products being touted are invariably epic. A can of exterior paint ($21.99) is called Dirt Fighter. The cheapest sleeping bag ($14.99) is Glacier’s Edge. A girl’s bike ($99.99) is the Carolina Cruiser; the boy’s equivalent, at the same price, is a Cliff Runner (exactly the place where a boy in Oregon should NOT be riding his bike).

  Antonio looks at me: Can’t you just read a newspaper like everyone else? Or maybe not read one, like me?

  * * *

  We arrive in Eugene, Oregon, around noon. Vickie, the Amtrak attendant, announces: anyone who gets out does so at their own risk. “People get out for a cigarette,” she explains, “they lose track of time, and then they have to spend a hundred ten dollars for a taxi, the only way to catch up with the Coast Starlight in Portland.”