What we talk about at 12:23 AM on the Amtrak train.
The train at night is unsettling, but there are plenty of strangers to talk to.
Second night ever on an Amtrak train and—wonderfully—I am no longer violently, gobsmackingly ill.
What I am is: Wondering whether I can sleep.
Where I am in time is: Late. Probably after midnight.
Where I am in space is: Stuck in the observation car, avoiding my assigned seat.
(Need the sonic backdrop? Play this in the background.)
I like the observation car during the day. In it, you are almost completely surrounded by windows—glass on both the sides as well as the roof—with sunlight pounding on the corners, lighting up the booths and the observation chairs and the hats of the Amish people. It’s a communal space, a whole enclosed terrarium of people—every seat is taken during the pretty parts of the trip! You can eavesdrop with abandon. Sitting in the observation car during the daytime makes me think of the part of that Arlo Guthrie song The City of New Orleans where he describes the people hanging out in the club car:
… the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steel
At night, though, the situation changes. The light draws in around the train and disappears from the outside world and the experience of riding on the train fundamentally changes. The windows, which are so darn cheerful during the day, so full of vast and distant and benign landscapes, grow ominous as the dark thickens, as reflective and unknowable as the eyes of wild animals.
It’s an eerie and unsettling thing, sitting between them, hurtling through unseeable scenery in your little pod of abrasive light. It’s like being on a spaceship, or in the Edward Hopper diner, if the Edward Hopper diner was going 80 miles per hour across Arizona.
I guess an easier way to say this is that the train is a little bit scary at night, which is probably why the few of us who are left in the observation car start talking.
“I actually feel like I’m high on some drug,” Patrick tells me. He’s a music producer who has been steadily tapping away at a laptop in the adjacent booth. He’s taken off a massive pair of headphones to talk to me, and now he shakes his head at the windows.
“It was fine before. But this,” he says, “This is fucking weird. We're just so separate from the dark on the other side. Isolated from the landscape by the glass. It’s like a very spiritual experience with none of the profundity.”
He’d wanted to visit some pals in LA and had decided to take the train for the experience. His home base is Philly. He definitely (“definitely!”) plans to fly home.
Noah got on the train in Albuquerque and is heading to Los Angeles for a wedding. He’s a few booths away and soft-spoken, hard to hear above the sound of the engine. He’d moved from LA to ABQ a few years ago for a litany of reasons he seemed not to fully understand himself.
“I just felt it was time to move — Albuquerque seemed interesting — I needed — I don’t know — some kind of change —”
He trails off. He talks as if he is reluctant to talk, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s because he wishes to be alone or because his small talk has gotten as rusty as mine.
“It’s been hard to meet people,” he admits, finally, “COVID. I’ve gotten kind of used to not talking.” He will, eventually, be the first to leave the conversation.
Before that, Patrick asks me what I think of being on the train, and why I think it feels so strange, and I tell him I’m not sure yet. I think it has something to do with time, and the lack of escape. There’s so much darkness out here that we normally just fly over. Now we have to acknowledge it—really feel that it’s there—
We talk until one of us asks a question no one feels like answering. It’s 2 AM and makes no more sense to talk.
I can’t bring myself to climb over my seatmate, so I move myself and my possessions from the dining booth to one of the little two-seater couches, where I curl up in the fetal position and try to rest. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s very bright. I sleep in fits and spurts all night long, and whenever I open my eyes the blackness of the windows stares back at me. The constant din of the train, the hum of it like the hum of deep space—the constant invasive light—the constant unknown—
This is the experience of nothing, I think, suddenly, waking up during the night, It’s almost as if I am nothing! That’s why it’s wonderful!
Though when I wake at 6:12 AM with an ache in the middle of my neck, the thought does not feel like an epiphany so much as an experience that’s neither spiritual nor profound.
