The Empire Builder Pt. 1

Eastern Washington

The Empire Builder

            My train was scheduled to leave Seattle at 4:40 pm, but we were all stuck at the Canadian border waiting to be let into the States.  Our bus driver, Jack, was Canadian-Asian, a small happy man that shuffled while he talked and laughed, which was often.  He spoke pidgin English and loved to make grand gestures and jokes.  When I had boarded the train, all my tickets for my trip were stapled together.  Jack tore off the ticket for Seattle then investigated the rest, as if preparing to interrogate me.  His face was serious. He stopped shuffling to look at them.

            “Wes Glacier,” he said.  “Where is that?” 

            “Montana,” I said. 

            “Ahhh,” he leafed through the other stops, Minneapolis, Chicago, Pittsburgh. He lip-read each quietly.

            “An adventure,” he said then smiled at me and handed me the tickets. 

            At the border we waited behind four other buses that were deboarding to have their passports and luggage scrutinized.  While we waited Jack mock-interrogated the passengers that didn’t have U.S. passports.  He held their customs forms high in the air against the light; he stopped shuffling, put his neck back and stood very stiffly.  His face was intensely, cartoonishly serious.  He was pretending to be American.

            “And what you doing in the States?” he asked a fellow Chinese passenger.  He interrogated three Asian passengers with Chinese passports and encouraged each of them.  “You are good.  They will let you in.”  Then he’d throw back his head, shuffle and laugh.

            After we were ordered off the bus, Jack stood with us in line at customs.  The line was long and my train would leave in less than two hours.  A couple reassured me that we might still make it.  

            “I hear we are only an hour and a half from Seattle,” I said to Jack.

            “By plane.”

            “How far by bus?”

            “Two and a half hours.”

            “We won’t make it,” I said.  I was resigned and calm about this fate.  After my last border crossing I could no longer be ruffled. 

            Jack shrugged, shuffled, smiled, “Anything can happen.”  He said this twice more before we boarded the bus.  Then he announced he would make an unscheduled stop in Everett, Washington to drop off the five passengers trying to board the Empire Builder due west.  The train was heading north and we were headed south.  By stopping in Everett, we would head it off before it turned west. 

            A good or bad driver determines the fate of your experience.  Aside from your safety, their job is to get you to your destination, but some drivers are strict about their company policy, and they adhere to every rule, regardless of passengers’ circumstances.  Some drivers are more concerned about staying on schedule then who gets where.  I am not the only one to be left behind for marginal miscalculations, or because of the strictness of the driver. 

            Jack was a good driver.   He balanced flexibility, personal judgment, and policy, and took it upon himself to make sure we got where we wanted to go.  He asked if there were any objections on the bus to his change of schedule, and while I am sure a few riders wanted to protest, nobody did, because nobody wanted to cross Jack’s good humor and generosity, or because they didn’t speak English. 

Everett Train Station

            “You’re the best driver I’ve had,” I told him when I got off.  He shrugged and smiled and shuffled back onto the bus.  He stood at the front and faced his remaining passengers, told an unintelligible joke in pidgin English then threw his head back and laughed wildly to himself.  Then he drove away.

            The Empire Builder runs 2,206 miles to Chicago from either Portland or Seattle.  I had thought the grand name was due to the location and length of the track, a set of rails that originates in the hub of the Midwest and squirms across frontiers of North America that often still remain unpopulated.  Instead, the train was named after James Hill, the ambitious owner of Great Northern Railway who first laid the track and operated the line.  It takes 45 hours, not only because of the length, but because of the geography, which is formidable in Washington and Montana.  The train can reach speeds of 79 miles per hour, but because of frequent stops and mountains, it only averages 50 mph during the trip.  I broke it up into three segments to enjoy my time on the line, with my first stop scheduled the next morning in West Glacier, a railroad depot just outside Glacier National Park..    

            When I boarded the train, the clouds dissipated and the sun came out, the first time I’d seen it since I left California. 

            The woman in front of me covered her eyes.  “What is that great big globe of light in the sky,” she cried, “It’s blinding!”  Later, double rainbows appeared over the lakes of Eastern Washington, one of the most beautiful stretches of earth I had seen out a window. 

            A representative from the National Parks Service narrated the sights out, the flora and fauna, the waterfalls, and the industrial histories that once flourished at the peak of railroad travel, but are now empty and small. In some cases, the depot was abandoned, now just a sight out the window, a footnote, and not worth the minute needed to stop and start again.

            The natural history was beautiful.  Man’s part in it was violent.   To make a railroad you have to thread rock, carve a line through the earth so that you can pass you can pass through it quickly and safely.  It required a lot of sweat equity, a lot of men paid very little hacking away at the land and rock and guiding crude machines.  It required a lot of dynamite. 

            We passed through North Cascades Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel of its type at 7.8 miles.  It is just narrow enough to fit a train, so narrow that as we entered it, it looked like would crash into its walls.  A guide shined a flashlight out the window.  The tunnel wall was only inches away.  It took Northern Railroad three years, from 1926-1928, to build it.  They used dynamite often.  Even back then, they didn’t just lay the explosives against the rock and light a fuse as I might have imagined.  They used complex machinery to drill pressurized holes then line the holes with explosives. Each detonation gained them eight feet of space.  They used five million pounds of dynamite.  It was not common to document fatalities back then, but it’s hard to imagine the operation was conducted without injury, especially because the tunnel often flooded during construction.  The result was that freight and passenger trains cut 12 miles of zig-zagging from their route and the tracks and trains were less vulnerable to avalanche damage. 

           

             We emerged on the other side of the tunnel and the views resumed.  Great tall ponderosas and lodgepole pines fenced the track.  Firs and cedars lined class-five rapids a few shades greener than the evergreens around them. Wildflowers dot the ferns like periods under the pines. 

            In the Northwest it stays light until almost 10 pm.  I watched the woods out the window instead of reading, writing, drinking, talking.  It looked the way I imagined North America looked centuries ago, before we settled it with cities and towns, paved roads and laid track, blew holes into mountains.  I watched until it was finally night, and it was just like the tunnel, a plunge into darkness.  Except there was no wall inches from the window, but the open range of the Rockies and evergreen forests, the waters still running fast over rocks and fallen pines, all of it there but invisible, and only the imagination capable of predicating the possibilities to see how green it really was, even in the dark. 

            I imagined it until I fell asleep.  When I woke up it was light again and we were entering Glacier National Park, where the peaks were higher and snow-capped,  the lakes bigger and more clear, and I packed my bags and prepared to get off the train again.  

The Cascades

         

           Decision fatigue is real.  It has to do with how many decisions you make in a day, when you make them, and most importantly, your glucose level while you’re deciding.

            Traveling is a fluid thing and a go-with-the-flow attitude is often advantageous, but when traveling by train your direction is linear.  There are timetables and predetermined routes.  With or without you, the train comes and the train goes.   Decisions have to be made, namely when and where you get on the train, and when and where you get off the train, and what you bring with you for each.  Eating at critical junctions can make and break your travel experience because of this.

            I was hungry when I switched my tickets at King Street Station in Seattle.  I had been aware of decision fatigue and had vanished the remains of a 1-pound bag of beef jerky prior to rearranging my arrangements.  But I hadn't eaten all day and needed more than that.  The agent at the window was confused and slow.  It took half an hour to switch two tickets.  Or maybe it was me; maybe I was confused and unclear.  I don’t know.  My glucose levels were very low. 

            I had originally planned to take a through-way bus into Canada and return by train at six in the morning three days later. Instead I switched them.  I decided the bus was unromantic and classless; I was a train traveler now.  I arranged to cross the border by train then went off in search of food with my extra waiting time.  

            The Cascades train travels from Eugene to Vancouver.  Its history is less than fluid, with decades of different operators, discontinued service, and an identity crisis in namesake, before Amtrak contracted the Spanish railcar manufacturer Tralgo to design a fake vintage look and special design for the newly named Cascades service between Seattle and Vancouver in 1994, the company's most popular passenger service outside of the Northeast and California. 

The Cascades lacks the classism of the Coast Starlight or Empire Builder and contains no observation car.  It is a single-liner, but has a certain fanciness to it, with transluecent glass doors that open by finger-tip touch and a “Bistro” car with an adjoining lounge car with window-side tables.  All of it designed to give its passengers some elevated feeling of class and grandeur, but in actuality, there is little different about its services, or the quality of the food served at the “Bistro.” 

I settled into my seat and waited for the conductor to collect my ticket.  A man and woman discussed business next to me.  The woman was an aspiring entrepreneur and the man had already made his success.  They both look unkempt, like they had not showered or changed out of their faded north face jackets in days.  The man was harboring some chaotic stubble for a beard.  He wore a knitted cap and looked tired, like he had just come back from a business meeting on a mountain top.

“I just want to know, since I'm really just starting out now with my own ideas..How long did it take you to get where you are?” the woman asked.  She spoke softly and with reverence.

“Oh, years,” he said, “just years of grinding and grinding.”  They continued to talk business in vagaries, speaking of their ideas and successes in such a way that after ten minutes I still had no idea what either person really did.  They talked the way hippies sometimes talk in grand generalizations about positive energy and life. 

            “You just have to have an idea.  And It’s there,” the man said.  “I feel like, it’s like,” he pauses, “it’s there, so it's up to me to, just, well, go and get it.” 

            I left my hiking bag above my seat and took my day pack to the tables where I spread my notebooks, books, and postcards across the table.  I read Junot Diaz’s “Monstro” from The New Yorker, a ghetto sci-fi story that ends with a team of Dominican hotshots riding toward the Haitian border to take pictures of man-eating zombies. They were excited to cross the border into the unknown, embracing the uncertainty they were transitioning towards and across, even though disaster, maybe death, awaited them.  

            I filled out all my postcards when the train stopped in Mt. Vernon, WA, the second-to-last stop in the U.S. before Vancouver.  I got off to put the cards in a mailbox at the corner of the station house. 

            Then the train left me.  I had seen the conductor look both ways before boarding the train.  Watched the only open door close.   Heard the whistle blow. 

I ran towards that door  and slammed the windows with the palm of my right hand.  I jumped up and down trying to get the attention of the conductor.   The iron wheels began to turn, slow at first but gaining speed.  I kept running and slapping the windows. 

            “Hey! Hey! Wait!  I’m not on the train! I’m not on the train!”  I wasn’t sure if I was yelling for a conductor or at the train.  You can’t reason with a train.  It’s a machine.  And once it starts moving, the engineer will not stop it.  But still I jumped and hollered.  I caught the assistant conductor’s eyes through the window.  She waved at me.  Smiled.  And shrugged. 

            I watched the train coast away, the locomotive disappearing around the bend and the tail following, a fast wiggle into the Northern Cascade Mountains then gone.   My heart sank.

            I found the station manager, Carl, and explained my issue between breaths.  I was tired and exasperated from chasing the train.  He called me a cab to take me to Bellingham, WA, where the train stopped next.

            “How long will the train take to get there?” I asked. 

            “If a freight train gets in front, the Amtrak has to stop.  Then maybe 35, 45 minutes.”

            “How long will the cab take?”

            “45 minutes.”

            “How much will it cost?:

            “80 bucks.”

            “What do you think my chances are?”

            “Slim,” he said.   I canceled the cab.

            I was unlucky because I got off the train foolishly.  But I was lucky for a few reasons also. I had take my phone off the charger before getting off.  And I had my document folder in my left hand with my passport and rail pass in it.  Passports are required to get into Canada.    

            I arranged for Amtrak to pick up my luggage and drop it off in customs in Vancouver, where they would search it prior to my arrival.  Carol told me I could catch the last coach bus of the night at 10:10 pm at the station.  I used the bathroom and then Carl locked the station behind me as I left.  I spent the next hour in Mt. Vernon, a logging town that was inaccesible by anything but boat until the railroad boom first reached them in 1893.  That year, with a small resulting economic surge, the county built the Skagit County Court House next to the station.  I marveled at it, then scattered my small-time contraband underneath its shrubs in front to reduce any further trouble crossing the border later.  Then I walked across the train tracks and went to the local grocery store for an hour to get my glucose levels back up.  I figured I might need them.    

            At 10:00 pm the bus pulled into the station.  I explained my situation to the driver.  He was heavy-set, with an olive tone and short black hair.  He unloaded and loaded bags in the compartments below and listened at the same time. 

            “Do you have a ticket?” he asked.

            “No,” I said.

            “I can’t let you on without a ticket.”

            “But,” I said.  Like the conductor, he shrugged.  I tried to express my desperation while appearing sane. 

            “I have to get on this bus. I’m stuck here.  My bags are in Canada.   I don’t have anything; I don’t know anybody in this town.  I don’t have anywhere to stay.  I’m in a real pickle.”  I was upset because of the situation I had put upon myself, and because I used the word pickle.   But I was not ready to forfeit.  There is no reasoning with a train, several thousand tons of steel being pulled by a 4000+ hp locomotive, but a bus driver is different because his machine is different: it lacks the complications of a large service and operating crew, it’s less formidable, less stubborn once it gets going.  The bus driver is the conductor and the engineer.  He is in charge of the passengers and the engine. He alone decides when the wheels roll and who gets on board.  As long as I could keep him in front of me, I would not accept the idea of being left again. 

            “I can’t let you on without a ticket,” he repeated.

            “There must be something, some way I can get on this bus.  I have to.  I’m in a real pickle.”  Again, pickle. 

            He thought about it.  Scratched his head, gathered the mail and wrapped it together with a rubber band and placed it on the dashboard then climbed back down the stairs to talk to me more.

            “If you had the cash value of the ticket, I could let you on.”

            “I have cash,” I said. 

            “But I don’t know how much it costs is the thing.  I just drive the bus.”

            “I’ll find out,” I said.  I called my girlfriend and asked her to look up the price of a bus ticket from Mount Vernon to Vancouver.

            “27,” she said.  I looked in my wallet.  I had twenty-four.

            “24?” I asked.

            “No, it’s 27…”

            “24, awesome!”  The driver accepted my money and let me on the bus. 

           

            The late night coach bus is a significantly different experience than the train or airplane. It is, even as city transportation, the ultimate equalizer in class status.  There are no sleeper cars or differences in leg room, no hot towels or attendants.  No one asks you how you’re doing and if you’d like a pillow, which even coach class passengers receive on a train.  On a bus, everyone is coach, and the only advantage of the bus over other forms of transportation is that it’s usually cheaper.  I sat in the back by the bathroom.  Not even closing the door could stop the smell from coming out.  Next to me a couple wearing hooded sweatshirts giggled and drank beer.     

            At the border stop we got off and the Canadian border police asked us questions.  They wanted to know where my bags were.  I explained and the border guard didn’t blink. 

            “Are you carrying any food?” 

            “Well, yes, cheese and some whiskey, but that was in my other bag.”

            “With you?”

            “No, nothing.”  They let me pass. 

            I arrived at the station five minutes before it closed.  Customs asked me a few questions about my bags and then gave them to me, rearranged after a thorough search, but everything still there, including my bottle of whiskey.  They locked the door behind me when I left.

            I took a cab to my friend’s apartment at the University of British Columbia.  The driver had never heard of the address and he admitted he could not see well without his glasses.  It was difficult for him to read the city atlas he pulled out of his glove compartment.  I sat up front with him and we huddled together under his overhead light and ran our fingers across the map until we figured out where we were going.  I had never been in Canada before but I tried to navigate for him.  He was from Bangladesh and he missed his home and family very much, but he liked how open Canada was.  Twice more we stopped to look at the map together.  6 hours after the train left me, we arrived at the University.  He refused to drop me at the corner.  “I want to make sure you get there safe,” he said and took me to the exact address, where I got out at two in the morning, safely with all my things.   

               The view of Washington seaside from the train.