*
Penn Station was the pits of the earth. Entombed beneath Madison Square Garden, the railway hub was a subterranean maze of misery. Serving more than 600,000 passengers every day, it was North America’s busiest station. Lit by the sullen glow of neon lights, the station’s three levels were connected by broken escalators and dirty stairs. Its metal and concrete reeked of damp and despair. Never had I encountered such a joyless vacuum of a station. Even the chairs in the waiting area seemed designed to provide the greatest discomfort: narrow with immovable metal arms preventing passengers from reclining, sleeping – or waiting. Happier on our feet, we strolled around the concourse, staring at the glaze on the sugary rounds at Dunkin’ Donuts, and inhaling the smell of burnt coffee in the hope it would mask the pungency of urine.
Penn Station hadn’t always looked this way. Built in the early twentieth century, it had once been as imposing and glorious as its older sister, Grand Central. But in 1963, owing to the decline in passenger numbers, the Beaux Arts station, its dome and its columns, were brought to their knees and interred. Pleased to leave it behind us, we boarded the regional train to Washington DC at around 11.30 in the morning and arrived just after 3 p.m. The journey was about as interesting as a South Western train to Surbiton, so I used the time to finish an obscure book by the great travel writer Eric Newby that I’d found in a homely old bookshop in the West Village. An obligatory trail around the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Smithsonian, filled two days in the capital, before we boarded the overnight Crescent to New Orleans where we had arranged to meet my parents. Offering them the choice to join us anywhere along our journey, I wasn’t surprised that they had chosen the Big Easy, lured by Creole cooking, jolly people and jazz.
Arriving at Washington Union Station at six o’clock in the evening, we stood before its majestic facade, this time with a big bag of food from Trader Joe’s. A monument to rail travel, the sight of the station puffed me up with excitement as we geared up for our first overnight journey with Amtrak. Excitement, but excitement soaked in fear, owing to a recent derailment of a train in Philadelphia that had killed eight people and injured around 200 others, after a driver had become distracted by radio transmissions from another train and accelerated to almost twice the speed limit.
‘It was an isolated incident,’ Jem said, looking around for our seats.
While that might have been the case, that sort of reasoning was never enough to soothe my nerves. All it took was for us to be on that isolated train, and with the number of journeys we were undertaking, the probability rose every day.
‘Google it,’ he said, ‘you’ll probably find the last derailment before that was some time in the nineties.’
Taking his dreadful advice, I did a swift search for ‘Amtrak derailments’ as we unpacked our bags, and pulled up a Washington Post article that detailed how Amtrak had an average of thirty-one derailments per year. Thirty-one. Derailments. Per. Year. At the time the article had gone to press, there had been only nine, which meant that there were a potential twenty-two looming. Longing for the good old days when a lack of smartphones kept everyone ignorant but happy, I switched off my phone and went in search of the dining car for a half-bottle of Pinot Grigio that I drank straight from the bottle.
‘It’s me. Yeah, I’m on. I think I left my maps in the car. Did you find them? I think I left my maps … If you do find them, can you let me know? And did you find my comb? I lost my comb. I can’t find my comb … Comb. For my hair. C-O-M-B. I think I dropped it in the car. Well, I can’t remember, that was almost ten days ago. If you find my comb and my maps can you call me? You take care now.’
The passenger directly in front of me stood up and began to search the area around her seat. She looked up and saw me watching. ‘I’ve lost my comb,’ she said. ‘If you see it, could you let me know?’ My first thought was that if I found the comb I would stab her with it. Wriggling an arm out of my sleeper sheet, I peered at my watch and saw that it was almost 3 a.m. and we had just departed Charlotte, where the woman had boarded. I’d spent almost two hours trying to sleep in the blast of the air conditioning, before layering on socks, sweaters and scarves in an effort to get warm, which, when travelling with a backpack, meant wearing most of its contents. I now understood why our fellow passengers had turned up with carrier bags of duvets and pillows. Exhausted from attempting to fall asleep, I had eventually fallen asleep, then woken to the sound of a woman making a phone call while the rest of the carriage struggled to sleep with eye masks, noise-cancelling headphones and alcohol. In England, it was easy to make tutting noises, give a loaded sigh or shift a couple of times with annoyance before the message was conveyed, but passive-aggression didn’t work in these parts as I soon discovered.
‘Bitch, you sit yo’ass down, people tryin’ to sleep!’
Unsure where the voice came from, I stifled a giggle inside my sheet as the woman muttered to herself, but continued to look around on the floor and rummage through her bags. In as little as nine hours on board, I was beginning to understand why few Americans used the long-distance services: at night, the trains were as uncomfortable and cold as aeroplanes, with interrogation-style lighting, and consistent provocations from the kind of people I was too scared to look at, let alone admonish. But for many Americans, they had no other choice but to board a train at quarter to three in the morning, or board no train at all.
In the glare of morning light, I awoke to see Jem smiling at me or, more precisely, at the line of drool down my chin. Drenched in sweat, I peeled off my layers and saw that we were pulling in to Atlanta. Overnight we had travelled through Virginia, the Carolinas, and half of Georgia, but most importantly we hadn’t derailed in the dark, and I was reassured and more relaxed, ready for one of those obtrusive American breakfasts that stood proud, like an homage to type 2 diabetes: pancakes stacked like tower blocks, straddled by bacon, and zigzagged with maple syrup. One wonderful aspect about the Amtrak dining cars was how they presented a sense of occasion. Coming through with dinner tickets, the attendant allotted each passenger with a time for their sitting, and assigned us to communal tables at random – much like speed-dating on wheels.
A friendly buzz greeted us as we arrived for breakfast. Pots of filter coffee spluttered and glugged, the car warmed by frying eggs and sausage patties. From the opposite end the attendant beckoned us towards a table where two women in matching fleeces were already seated, one wearing an eye mask with frills on her head, and ‘DREAM’ embroidered in pink. Both were playing Candy Crush on their phones. Tiffany and Michelle were from Baltimore, travelling down to ‘Norleans’ for the weekend.
‘I don’t do flying,’ said Michelle.
‘And because she don’t do flying, I have to accompany her,’ said Tiffany, with an exaggerated eye roll. ‘I don’t mind flying. You from London?’ she asked.
‘We are, yes, we’re spending a few days in New Orleans with my parents.’
‘Your parents live in Norleans?’
‘No, they’ve flown out to meet us.’
‘So, you just here on vacation?’
‘Sort of.’
‘That’s cool,’ Tiffany said, pouring out water for the table.
‘I’m curious,’ Jem said. ‘How much has New Orleans changed since the hurricane? Has it completely recovered or are there parts that are still in a mess?’
‘Oh, that’s a big question,’ said Michelle, pushing up her eye mask. ‘Depends who you asking for. For a lot of black people, they worse than ever. White people? They doin’ fine.’
At the next table sat a pedicab driver named Jonah, picking at a bowl of miserable-looking fruit. I could see he was dying to join the conversation.
‘It’s true, some people really prospered through the crisis,’ he said, pushing aside the berries. ‘For example, there was this one restaurant that bought up all the fillet steak from one provider, and for two months it became the only place in town doing steak, and the queue was round the corner
– the mayor was eating there once a week.’
‘While others had lost their homes?’
‘Right. You wouldn’t believe it now, but at one time the Ritz-Carlton used to be the only fancy hotel in town, and now there are at least fourteen others.’ Jonah sipped his coffee as Tiffany and Michelle watched him intently. ‘All the grads who came to help, and who wanted to make a difference, ended up staying. And now local people can’t afford to live there. It’s been gentrified.’
‘Gentrification?’ said Michelle. ‘Oh, I like that word. Turfing people out of their homes. That’s what that is. It’s the same thing happening where we are in Baltimore.’
Jonah signalled for more coffee. ‘A lot of the black culture disappeared with the hurricane. It was so bad. Black culture is where New Orleans gets its soul. I mean, Creole cooking? That was ration food. Black culture percolates upwards there and gives everyone the benchmark of how to live – instead of everywhere else in the country where everybody looks upwards to the upper classes for the example. People in the Lower Ninth, they were hit the hardest and had to find a life elsewhere. Around 100,000 of the black community left.’
‘What’s happened to them since?’ I asked.
‘A lot of people didn’t come back. For the ones who were relocated to places like Colorado, where the standard of living is so high, they have better jobs, a better lifestyle, and I mean, you’re not going to give that up for sentimentality.’
Michelle sat up. ‘But then on the other hand? The government just flew people out of there, without tellin’ ’em where they goin’. They take off? They’re on board? And then they announce: “This plane is bound for … wherever’, and then they drop ’em off and no one’s there to greet ’em. And they’re, like, “Bye!” ’ She waved a hand in my face.
‘So, what happened to them?’
‘I have a girl who’s part of the NGO that I work with, and she and her family have just received permanent housing,’ Tiffany said. ‘Ten years later.’
Michelle put an elbow on the table and pointed at me. ‘And you know what they callin’ people? Refugees. Yeah, that’s right, they’re American, and they callin’ ’em re-fu-gees. In their own country. They’re just droppin’ ’em into towns with a “See ya later”, so people are waiting at airports and they have no place to go.’
Images of residents clinging to their rooftops and waving for help had stuck with me for weeks after Hurricane Katrina had submerged more than 80 per cent of the city. They weren’t images befitting a so-called developed country, but one of gross negligence and government disregard, and it was miserable to hear Tiffany and Michelle’s experiences confirm it.
Expecting (and hoping) to find breakfast options that would leave my insides crying, I was surprised (and disappointed) to find the menu listed modest items ranging from three-egg omelettes and ‘steel-cut’ oatmeal, to buttermilk pancakes and cheese quesadillas – with the calorific values listed alongside. We’d ordered quesadillas with a portion of apple and maple chicken sausages on the side that arrived just as Tiffany and Michelle got up to go back to their seats.
‘You don’t have to look hard to see what the hurricane did. But you both have a fun time, now,’ Michelle said. ‘And do not drink that coffee,’ she added, her eyes widening at the pot on our table.
Considering the obsession with coffee in their TV shows and movies, and for all the thousands of Starbucks and artisanal brewers across the country, Americans have no idea how to make coffee. As I took a sip, I could smell the sourness, and the only two qualities that identified it as coffee were the colour and the temperature. It tasted like someone had poured boiling water through an ashtray. Edging the cup to one side, I noticed a pile of dollar bills on the table that Tiffany and Michelle had left as a tip, and broke out into immediate panic, unsure what the protocol was on a train trip. Given that we were likely to eat here again at lunch, did we tip at the end of the trip? Or at each meal? Amtrak meals weren’t cheap, and there was something thoroughly irksome about leaving a tip for an attendant who hadn’t so much as looked at us since she put down our plates. It wasn’t particularly busy in the car and she had spent a significant portion of time flirting with another member of staff. But for fear of being singled-out as cheapskates, we left our share and wandered through to the lounge car as the train crossed in to Alabama.
The lounge car wasn’t fitted with panoramic windows like the viewing cars on the Superliner services, so we were denied the full peripheral reach of Birmingham station’s ugliness. Growing up in another Birmingham that was not known for its aesthetic appeal, I felt obliged to step out onto the platform with the smokers to pose for a photo in front of the station sign. Framed by dereliction, we looked like we’d been holidaying on a building site, with broken windows, steel bars, and hanging wires creating the backdrop to our increasingly odd holiday snaps. As we queued to get back on the train, a little man with glasses gestured towards me.
‘Ladies first, always,’ he said, standing aside to let me on. He then looked at Jem. ‘You a dude,’ he said, and boarded behind me as the smokers rasped and wheezed with laughter.
By a stroke of luck our bag of Trader Joe’s groceries still smelt edible, so Jem and I stayed put in the lounge car for the rest of the day, filling up on limp sandwiches and Cheetos, chatting to passengers, and watching Alabama roll by at a pleasant pace. Since Birmingham, the scenery had transformed into unremarkable but inoffensive neighbourhoods laid with lawns and white wooden mailboxes spiked with tiny red flags. From Alabama the train dropped down through Mississippi where the ground reddened, and there was little to see but farmland and freight. Hundreds of cars of coal clattered by while we waited, waited, and waited some more. It transpired that there was a simple reason for the delays: of the 22,000 miles of track over which Amtrak operated, only 3 per cent was owned by Amtrak. The company essentially paid rent to private railroads to use the rest, and was supposed to be given precedence to proceed over freight, but in practice it didn’t happen, and passenger trains were usually shunted to one side and delayed for hours – another reason for their unpopularity. Now, as the third freight drummed past the windows, I rummaged through my bag for company. We were in the right part of the world for my recent purchase, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. Matching Mississippi’s autumnal shades, the cover was uncreased and perfect. Opening up the book, I stretched the spine and read the first line with disbelief: ‘Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical.’
Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout, was, at that very moment, riding the Crescent. The previous time she had gone home she’d been scared after flying through a tornado, and had decided this time to take the train from New York to Maycomb Junction. From that point on, Jean Louise and I merged into one. I was, in equal measure, reassured that she had shared the same fears – ‘lest the swaying train plunge down the riverbank and drown them all’ – and appalled that she had drunk four cups of the train’s coffee.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had finished a book in one sitting. Our pseudo-busy, social media-driven lives had shortened our attention spans and tricked us into thinking we had no time for slowness and deliberation. Like babies, we were distracted by the slightest triggers, which were mostly trivial. For the first time in months, reading had become meditation again, almost medicinal in its healing. With a last look at the jacket, I left the book on the table for someone else to enjoy, and made my way back to my seat to pack up our belongings. In the final hour, what had been a less than visually arresting journey climaxed with a spectacular sweep across Lake Pontchartrain. After crossing the border into Louisiana, the train barrelled into a wilderness of water, chasing a sunset that teased and taunted from the edges. Bisecting the lake, nothing but a fine thread of track pulled us for more than twenty-four miles before we thumped onto dry ground past Metairie Cemetery, rolling in the darkness, deep into the heart of the Big Easy.
It rained for five days. Not co
ntinuously, but enough for us to spend most of the day darting from one restaurant to the next, as miniature rapids gushed through the gutters and mud pools swelled in the roads. Cats watched from the windows as cars sloshed by, and Jem and I sat in the warmth of dark bars with my parents, drinking mint juleps and listening to old black men in suits play trombone. New Orleans was as I had imagined it – at least the French Quarter was – flashing with more neon than a Wham! video, the air layered with jazz and sweetened by weed. Coloured beads were tangled in the trees and crunched underfoot, as crowds stumbled from bar to bar, lured in by girls selling shots for a dollar. A morning stroll to ‘Le Croissant d’Or’ was like wading through the aftermath of the best house party, past hustlers and hardcores coming down on the kerbs, and kids wearing shades playing mouth organ. As Tiffany and Michelle had described it, the rest of the city was a patchwork of old white wealth, new white wealth, and black poverty – with pockets of Hispanics who had arrived as post-Katrina labourers and put down their roots. Areas like Esplanade Avenue housed regal nineteenth-century mansions with filigreed wrought-iron balconies, rocking chairs on the porch, and wind chimes shivering in the breeze. While across town, in the Lower Ninth, the carcasses of homes creaked with emptiness, covered by creepers, chipboard and graffiti. Stairs that had once led to porches and platforms stood alone, their houses swept away. It was easy to forget that this was America, so entrenched was the city in culture and history. With the exception of New York, it was also the first time I had wandered around an American city without worrying about my colour. When travelling in the US, race and segregation sat at the forefront of my mind in a way they never did at home. Here, in New Orleans, waiters called me ‘baby’ and my dad ‘big daddy’. Each day we swapped numbers and made new friends with cab drivers, barmen, or other guests at our bed and breakfast, a grand old property on Esplanade owned by Patrick and Karma Ashton, whose spirit was as huge as their sugar-coated, butter-soaked breakfasts.
Around the World in 80 Trains Page 16
