The Coast Starlight

"I sought trains; I found passengers."  - Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

 The Coast Starlight is a superliner Amtrak passenger train running from Los Angeles to Seattle.  It is 1,377 miles and was formerly known as the Southern Pacific Coast Daylight and you had to transfer to Union Pacific to get all the way up.  When Amtrak took over it merged the lines.  I took it from Emeryville, CA to Portland, OR overnight.  

The Coast Starlight out of Emervyille.  Departing 10:07 pm

       Paulo was tall and Canadian, and he didn't believe in bordeom.  "It's a first-world disease" he said.  He had homes in San Francisco and Vancouver and travels back and forth often, mostly by train.  He ate cheetohs, but calls them "cheesies."  He offered me some.  I ate them and offered him scotch.  It was 10:30 pm and the rest of our car was sleeping including an Amish family of twelve men, women, and babies.  Paulo went to find cups and ice and I headed to the observation car, the place people who can't sleep go at night. 

        The observation car, or lounge car, is adjacent to the dining car but above the snack car.  The observation car has wider windows and a second row of windows that curves into a dome-like extension of the ceiling, so that passengers can admire the Pacific sky.  The car is divided in half, with a section of containing a single row of seats facing the window like in a movie theatre, and lined with shallow window-side countertops.  The other section had dining tables and booths, not unlike a diner.   Something like it can be found on most trains, but it's more refined on the Coast Starlight, a 1,389 mile trip rail ride from Los Angeles to Seattle, and a model for commercial classism.  Passengers in sleeping cars have their lounge car with lacy drapes along the windows and flowers in the bathrooms.  They have wine and champagne tasting in the afternoon.  They were more peaceful and civil and that half of the train and if you tried to cross to the other side you'd have to show your ticket or turn around.  Our side was louder and nearly classless There were half a dozen men already drinking at the tables.   No man sat together.   The loudest were charming but vulgar.

         "If you sit together, you're gay!"  Paulo left my table.  They were all older than 30.  Everyone seemed to have their own liquor or beer.

         A young, stocky white guy with a white baseball cap and glasses leaned against the window with his feet out in the aisle.  He held a beer from the snack car in his hand. 

         "Alcohol is illegal on the reservation.  That's where I lived all my life.  I'm 29 years old now."  He sipped his beer like it was his first time drinking, his first time away from the reservation.  He sat in the booth next to Andrew.   Andrew was half-Egyptian, wore a blue cap, and was louder than anyone else at that hour.  He made fun of everyone in succession sitting in the car, but when asked about his racial identity he became more serious.

        "When I went to Egypt, I looked around, and realized, holy shit!  I'm not white!  It was one of the two most profound realizations, turning points really, in my life."  He didn't tell us the other one.  In his bag he had a bottle of 2 buck chuck wine which he poured into plastic cups of ice to make "wine spritzers."  He had four cups of ice.  

         Everyone on the lounge car was male and offensive.   They talked about the lack of women in the observation car constantly.  When Kenny, another white male in a baseball cap, arrived he asked, "Where all the women at, yo?"

        "What are you talking about?" Andrew said, "I'm getting my dick sucked by a hot-ass ghost right now.  Can't you see?"  

        All the most inveterate train travelers bring their own liquor.  They also realize the futility in learning the real names of each other, knowing we would likely never see each other again.  Mark became Paco because he was Mexican.  Billy became Sam Elliot because he dressed like a cowboy and looked like Sam Eliot from The Big Lebowski.  I became Klaus because I looked like an Austrian accountant, or a German internet mogul; they couldn't decide which.  Of all the travelers, Sam Eliot was the most veteran, the most wily.  He looks older than 60 maybe 70, and he spoke slowly and cryptically, sometimes with the intention of adding to his aura of old-man mystery and wisdom.  He was vulgar, charming, and without manners.   He had a wild grey beard and mustache, but shaved his sideburns, and wore a brown suede vest over a worn and faded blue linen shirt.  He wore boots and although he didn't have spurs, something metal on his body always jingled when he walked.  He carried a cowboy hat with a single white feather tucked into a rope around the inner-brim, but he only wore it when he got up to leave the car.  A knife stuck out of his back pocket.

       "So what are you?"  Andrew asked, pouring another wine spritzer, "a cowboy or an artist?"  

      "Well," he said with a drawl, "I'm a moonshiner.  Moonshiner by day, female escort by night."  Everyone laughed.  

      "How's business?" 

      "Lousy."  

      Somewhere before Davis, CA, James, a young black man going to see a girl in Sacramento, pulls out a napkin with marijuana in it.  The whole car smells.   He offers to sell it.   We tell him he should stay on the train, forget about the girl. 

      "Naw, man, I never leave California."   When he left the car Kenny put down his beer and pulled out a large bag of his own marijuana, more than an ounce, and offered to get everyone high at the next stop.  

     At Sacremento the train stopped for thirty minutes for what Amtrak unofficially calls a "smoke stop."  Everyone filed out behind Kenny.  I stayed behind in the observation car and poured another drink.  Andrew doubles back and shows me he has his own stash.  The two of us leave out a different car and smoke between the tracks, behind a truck, a couple grown men acting like teenagers in a state where it's practically legal.  An Amtrak employee filling the train's tank with gas spotted us.  He told us it is safer on the other side of the train.  

     By two in the morning Kenny was asleep and James had left us for his girl.  Frank, another stocky white man in a baseball cap, joined us.  He said he had some new property and a home in Washington.  

    "Where is it?" asks Paco.

    "I don't know.  All I know I get off the train and there's a bitch waiting for me in a car."  Paco explains that there is always a better woman out there then the one you have and talks about the pros and cons of sleeping with 19 year old's.  When he is out of rum he puts a banana and a condom on the table in front of me in exchange for my scotch.  I take the banana.  He has two more bananas which, after a couple more drinks, he starts to fondle and handle obscenely.  The more he drinks the louder he gets.  A pair of Amtrak employees come through and ask us to be quieter.  Sam Eliot puts his hat on and leaves.  He comes back with a guitar.

      "Now it's over," he says.  He sings folk songs about Paulo and Canada and Checkpoint Charlie's in New Orleans.  He sings about Egyptians and whiskey and marijuana and trains.  He sings about murder and betrayal and horses.   By two in the morning they herd around me because I'm the only one with alcohol left and the snack car is closed.  Sam Eliot is throwing money at me for my whiskey, which I don't accept.  I pass the bottle around until it's empty.  By three in the morning Andrew has gotten off the train, and Paulo, Kenny, and Frank are asleep.  Sam Eliot is still playing guitar and Paco is shouting amicably at some new fellows who joined us because there were too many crying babies in their car.  

Klaus, Paco, and Sam Eliot (not the real Sam Eliot)

        My bottle was empty and I was finally tired.  I left and fell asleep at my seat by the window.  

       When I woke up we were in Oregon and there was a wide rainbow sprouting from Upper Klamath Lake, the largest lake in Oregon  The rainbow climbed across the mountains and vanished behind a blanket of stratus clouds.  The Amish family was now awake and moving around the car, feeding babies, and eating hot noodle cups for breakfast.  There were twelve of them.  They had taken the train from Wisconsin to Tijuana where they went white water rafting, surfing, and rode jetskis across the Pacific shore.  They were headed back to their farm, where they are completely self-sufficient by growing all their own food.  For money they sell timber and chickens.  

      I went to the lounge car to drink coffee and write down some notes.  Two men with microphones narrated the sights outside the window:  "root beer falls," the longest covered bridge in Oregon, visual histories of landslides and their ability to disrupt and halt train service, Crater Lake National Park, lakes, mountains, rivers, falls, until it all seemed mundanely beautiful and green.  

        Sam Eliot was sitting at a table in the corner gambling with two older men and a young college student wearing University of Oregon swag.  By 10:15 Sam Eliot opened his first beer.   Paulo joined me after eating breakfast with the Amish.  He explained his theory in boredom, which is to say, he doesn't believe in it, unless he's in captivity.  The Amish sat next to us and spoke quietly in German, looking out the window and listening to the commentary.  Sam Eliot talked about them from the corner, "They're so quiet and dull.  Like sheep."  He felt they were his antithesis, the very opposite of himself and what he believes in, quiet people who could't enjoy life because they were square.  He hadn't talked to them yet; didn't know they had been on jet skis and rafts in Mexico. 

        When the commentators stopped their presentation at 11:30, Sam Eliot was on his third beer.  He picked up his guitar and howled.  This startled the Amish.  He began to sing a country bluegrass song about murder. 

        I got my bags ready as we headed into Portland.  The college kid was trying to sell a new iPhone 4 for $100 because he lost all his money in the morning poker game and didn't have enough to buy his next train ticket home.  Sam Eliot was irritated because he couldn't find liquor in Eugene and he is tired of beer.  He cornered the Amish men at the stop before to talk to them.  When they get back on the train they break from their English to make fun of him, "He says he is going to have a good time, and, try to stop him."  They laughed.  "He say nobody can stop him, nobody can stop him from having fun."  

       They all changed their appearance as they prepared to leave the Coast Starlight for the Empire Builder.  The men wore wide-brimmed tan hats and black vests and black shoes.  The women wore black dresses and a second black bonnet to cover their white one.  They even wrap their babies in black blankets that look like sacks that look like shrouds.  It looks disturbing at first until I see the baby that was just crying and is now silent and sleepy, so cozy in its layers that for a moment I have the infantile desire to go back twenty-six years in my life, to be that Amish baby, traveling by train from Tijuana up the green, watery Pacific coast, wrapped warmly in a series of black and white blankets.         

        They got off the train in front of me to wait inside Union Station.  Their next train headed East.  I helped them with their bags and waved goodbye.  I had two days in Portland.  Then another train North.   

        

In Portland. The Amish families on the right.