DINING CAR AHEAD... reads the scrolling red-LED marquis at the front of the Coachclass car.
The northbound Carolinian, Amtrak's train 80, follows a corridor of sweet gum, pine, and mimosa between Durham and Washington, DC. Views from the diesel-driven iron horse alternate between lush greenery grown right up to the tracks and wide landscapes of irrigated fields nurturing unnaturally straight rows of commodity corn. Queen Anne's Lace and honeysuckle flower over rusted barrels and tired sheds, at times competing with wild raspberry.
"Alexander, turn that down," the man beside me admonishes a pre-teen sitting in the row behind.
I have the aisle seat, and in the window seat is a man who started talking to me even before I finished stowing my backpack in the overhead compartment. He sees in suburban sprawl a Babylon of limitless greed and growth, of world-class furniture and more colleges per population than anywhere else in the world.
He complains of alligators swimming the streets of New Orleans while the NAACP met in Tampa, then somehow makes the connection to his theory that Ronald Reagan enlisted the Pope to help bring down the Soviet Union. Although he desires my full attention, I catch glimpses through the window of backyard camping and front porch good-byes.
"Dad, how do they turn the train around?," Alexander asks.
"Three-point turn," the man laughs hard at his own joke.
When the landscape levels and lily pads appear outside the window, he resumes theorizing.
"It's not politically correct to call them swamps anymore, you know." He doesn't wait for me to answer. You know' is just something he says to be polite, to acknowledge that I am sitting next to him even if he will not let me talk. "They're wetlands. You know, we call em wetlands to show respect for all the life out there. But really we don't care about nature if tree farms are acceptable replacements for forests. As if deer and raccoons and squirrels wanted to live with trees all lined up in straight, pretty rows. If we still had a real sense of community, not one focused on consumerism, then we might..."
"Dad, Dad," Alexander interrupts, "this is where we get off."
"Oh," the theorist quickly unplugs his cell phone, climbs over me, and charges down the aisle. I slide over to the window seat.
EXIT
Between the wetlands and the tree farms are post-industrial towns, variously preserving or ignoring turn of the century architecture. In the front yard of a brick ranch style house in eastern North Carolina, an elderly woman push-mows her lawn. In a few of the towns, the ranches face the railroad, with driveways crossing the tracks. In the smallest of towns, the ones at which our train neither stops for new passengers nor even slows, ornate Victorian houses, owned by someone who has forgotten how to paint (if owned by anyone at all) deteriorate before our eyes. They look as though they may not be standing the next time the train rolls by, yet they have been standing for more than a hundred years.
The smooth, always horizontal rails defy the uneven dipping and climbing topography. Walking paths worn in the grass wrap around the "No Trespassing" signs that separate town from railway-owned fishing holes. Rivers are not the blue ribbons of childhood geography class but spectrums of dull shades from light brown banks to deep green channels of lethargic water.
The Carolinian passes corn and soybean fields whose products grow more precious with every foot that the Mississippi River climbs and exponentially so with every levee it breaks through.
To hear Lyle Estill tell the story of our future, it won't be long before the corn grown along these tracks will be used to make biodiesel to power the Carolinian along with Volkswagen turbo-diesels and John Deere tractors. British polemicist George Monbiot demurs, "the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve."
RESTROOMS IN REAR OF CAR...
"I was getting $14.40 an hour, last time I got paid. Yes ma'am. I'm moving back home, back in with my parents, so that someone will be around when I fall and need help getting up."
The con artist who now sits next to me uses one of her cell phones to file a claim for disability. She offers up the details of a cancer-and-lupus diagnosis to the bureaucrat on the other end of the phone, detailing hair loss and her doctor's proclamation that she will no longer be able to work.
"Whassup brah. Did I get you out of bed? Yeah, I'm on my way back from North Carolina. Listen, do you think we can be out of there tomorrow? Like, did you clean yet? You know I'm not cleaning up Andrea's shit."
With the other phone, she firms up plans with a roommate to move into a new apartment in Alexandria, Virginia and finish her summer job loading boxes for Fed Ex.
PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE OF FELLOW PASSENGERS WHEN USING CELL PHONES...
She's enrolled at NC State, Howard University, or George Washington, depending on who is on the other end of the phone. Her ailments are being cared for by doctors in Alexandria and Raleigh and the prayer list at her mother's church's. By the end of her conversations, my fellow Amtrak passengers and I know more more about her than we should know about any stranger, and yet really we don't know anything at all. I imagine that I see, just a glint in their eyes, that they feel as complicit in something awry as I do.
PLEASE DON'T INVOLVE FELLOW PASSENGERS IN SCHEMES TO EXTORT DISABILITY FUNDS...