I bought my first ever cross-country train ticket. Two twenty-four-hour trips across the desert, Rockies, and plains await. Arrivals so late they’re early, and so early they’re late.
My first airline flight was with my grandmother, Ruth. We flew to Milwaukee Wisconsin for my cousin’s eight-grade graduation. Not having such ceremony at the conclusion of my middle school years I guess I was curious about the whole affair, but I don’t remember ever wanting to go. It was just, one day, I was going to fly on an airplane.
These were the days when anyone could walk with you up the gate. Terminals were more crowded because loved ones, unticketed, could navigate through security and you would wait with your family until they boarded the plane. And my dad was there as Grandma and I got on the United airlines flight. We flew to Chicago and played cards with some United airlines playing cards and I got some United airlines plastic flying wings.
I remember the lights in the tunnel at O’Hare and Grandma’s voice as we boarded the second flight. She says, “This just goes up and down” referring to the short flight from Chicago to Milwaukee. Indeed. One could take a train just as fast, really.
I worked the Fremont Dinner Train melodramas one summer. That may have been my first real experience with rail transit. We took rail in Montreal and Paris. Do the rail lines that connect airport terminals count? Okay then, a few of those Orlando, Dallas …. I’ve taken streetcars in New Orleans and SLC and subways in NYC and Chicago. But I guess it all started in Fremont, not with the dinner train, but that little plastic toy set with the little engine powered by one little battery. And the sound of the train passing by both there and in Missouri Valley.
That comfortable and unmistakable Americana rhythm of steel on steel.