Feathered

In the mornings I drank my tea and stared at the toaster, hoping something new would pop up. Late August, my freelance checks rolling in as reliably as the fog, the days shortening. Summer almost lost. I phoned my brother in Seattle. On a warm September night the Coast Starlight's doors shut. Something in me opened, as San Jose drifted by.

There were other, better trips to take. But I'd been thinking about this one...since the last one. On the way to the dining car, I knew enough to hustle while the train was moving slowly, to make tracks. In the empty Parlour Car, this "making tracks" thought exploded in my mind with such irony that, while my gaze fixed on a compelling lumber pile in the Santa Clara twilight, a rail tsunami knocked me onto a bench. I rolled here, crutch rolled there, but we were soon up and moving. Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.

The dining car was bright, the fish of the day was coated in nuts, and most passengers sported badges from a tour group. Hello, I'm Margene. Hello, I'm Frank. Hello, I'm badgeless and something is missing in my life...aside from part of my spinal cord...which I miss the way Germans probably miss the Alsace-Lorraine...once thought to be vital, but now gone. I was gone too, as soon as we slowed for Oakland.

Back in my compartment, the car attendant had folded down the sheet and placed a chocolate on my pillow. I stretched out on the bed. Oakland's station slid into view. People stood on the platform, their faces expectant, their eyes open to those of us hidden behind dark, sealed windows. A young man appeared from the train, a portly woman threw her arms around him, tears streaming. Baggage carts passed unheard. Now the silent scene began to move, then accelerate, south. Downtown Oakland had streets, and stop lights and people eating sushi at a jazz club. One could see it all, and it had to be seen, right now, by me. And brick apartments. Lights out, but people could still inside, behind the blank windows. A leisurely rhythm to the red circles of warning flash from the crossing gates that held the cars in place, their bored cow bell chiming. Only one car waited, a lonely wait, the train so full. And goodbye and goodbye. Apartments and houses fell away, for Oakland was falling away, or giving up, a dark no man's land taking over. Rails and rails and boxcars, and even an empty train like ours, the waterfront in the distance, its cranes bent over ships like giant insect arms. The Starlight slipped along smooth, new rails. Overhead lighted lemmings processed along a freeway. We began slowing for the stores, the parking and then the station of Emeryville.

Wasting time. For the plan, the sensible thing was to sleep early, wake early. The scenery and the sights would come at dawn with the Upper Sacramento River rushing its trout down the rocky slalom. A good night's sleep. This was compulsive madness, this obsessive viewing of trackside mundanities. There was nothing out there but Emeryville, then Richmond, one ramshackle, postindustrial scene after the next, interrupted by glimpses of suburbia and, briefly, the Bay...which I'd seen a million times. Obsessive staring through a train window at absolutely nothing. Emeryville. What a surprise that people milled, then waved and hugged. Another baggage cart. Get a life. Get some sleep. Hopeless, me being as charged as my wheelchair's batteries. Stunning to see the interior of the Emeryville station revealed by fluorescent lights. I knew I would be up for hours. It was maddening and pathetic and must emanate from some deep anxiety.

Methamphetamine, possibly slipped into my baked potato in the diner, that would explain this. Nothing else did. There was nothing thrilling about a kid on the platform adjusting his backpack, signs glistening in the Amtrak parking lot. Mental compulsion and fear of sleep and bad mothering brought one here to obsessive hours wasted on trackside trivia.

Or life's book turned a page, and there was this. Everything charged. I had come to Berkeley as a student, young and fresh, when San Francisco was Oz...and everything was young and fresh, though now I was old, which didn't matter. What mattered was matter, and in the enclosing warmth of a room that moved with its window, that matter was what it was, compelling and new with each moment. Life's losses were also a mystery, how they narrowed and pointed one down a chute. Which was destiny, and if one stayed angry too long and judged to the point of exclusion, one missed what the narrowing brought. It brought one to the narrows, the place where the canyon walls closed in. Which some would find oppressive, but also squeezed the current, and pinched the river into rapids. The waters churned, and foam rose, and things spun round in eddies. And it all happened invisibly, this intensification. Just as the tracks pointed one way. North, with deviations possible, but tracks work tracks. They did the steering. They only did it so long, so many times, so many trips. Only so many times to see the ordinary come alive.

And I wouldn't sleep. And for Christ's fucking sake, for once in my life, who cared? If the railside world was burning with life, I was burning with envy for its continuance...burning my candle at both ends. And now, propping the pillows against the wall and arranging my back so I could sit and watch the approach of Berkeley, Crockett, Martinez, I tried to accept that this was the sleepless adventure, and tomorrow I would be tired...and so what?

Doors began to slam along the train. Some slammed distant, others close. One could tell the difference. Such portent and breaking free, even a wrenching, as the wrought iron fence along the platform began to shift its posts, then shoot them by, then blur them into a grayness. For the Coast Starlight was leaving. San Francisco made itself known here, a beacon light on the Bay Bridge poking above Borders Books. This was goodbye. Soon the cities would recede, waving their distant lights as the train swung around the bay waters toward the dark inland...wheels running true as a watch on the 80 mph straightaway...halting at the provincial capital for fuel and water...then beyond Sacramento, blackness flying with barely a town...lurching toward snowy ridges and northern rivers.

Emeryville's wrought iron fence came out of its blur, slowing to a stop. The P.A. system scratched into life. Ahem. The conductor. We had a problem. Or the Union Pacific had a problem with a tunnel fire in Oregon. Our way was blocked. We would wait here, the conductor said. He was talking to U.P. headquarters in Omaha. But for the time being....

Time being what it was, I stretched out to get a better view of the ceiling. In the slanted place above, an entire berth had tucked itself away. There was room for another person in here. Always had been. I checked my watch, or watched my watch, watched the great silver liner becoming late and getting later, not to mention older, more pathetic. And because I was slipping, I knew enough to slip without transition, into waiting...a suspended state, fluid and passive...its antecedents present as warm ghosts...scenes of waiting for the bedpan to arrive, the limbs to move, the hospital months to end...the next thing to start. That next thing was starting now, two hours later, 11:30 p.m., when we inexplicably rolled out of Emeryville. Hoping for sleep, resigned to wakefulness, I half saw, half heard, the familiar stages...crossing the rickety bridge at Martinez, the Starlight sounding like a fleet of shopping carts with broken windows. The 80 mph flats near Davis. At Sacramento the doors opened and Amtrak guys noisily wandered the platform with hoses and carts. We slipped out of the station at 2 a.m., then stopped again. Distant floodlights, the thunks, scrapings and crashes of Sacramento's railyard. Now it was 2:15 a.m.

My God, we were going to park here and wait. By morning, this trip would have consumed itself. The train, its silverness, streamlinerness scraped off down to the rusting metal. Never mind the lateness. Watch the darkness swallow prime parts of the journey still unseen, Oregon's Willamette Valley lowlands, the vast Columbia River. I sat up and peered out the window. Blocking the view, a rail car on the next track.

It was a passenger car, single-story, with the grooved, curvilinear stainless steel of the 1950s. Lights were on inside. Now a man stepped into the night air. He lingered on one of those small end platforms where politicians once campaigned. This must be his private rail car. Inside it, I could see the corner of a desk, a blue sofa, wood paneled walls, a portable computer. The man seemed about my age, shirt sleeves rolled up, lost in thought. He descended a couple of steps and gazed up at the vast Starlight in front of him, then turned and looked up at the sky. Even in floodlit railyards one could see stars in the blackness overhead. The man strolled, hands in pockets, staring at the rocky ground. I decided to throw on my clothes and join him in the Sacramento rail night.

A preposterous impulse, the sort an amputee feels about his phantom leg. It would take me 20 minutes to dress, the doors were shut, there was a three-foot drop to the ground, and walking the trackside gravel was unthinkable. Yet we had things to discuss. Like me, this man wandered restless in the rail lands. He picked his way among the tracks and boxcars, dwarfed by acres of steel and imponderable mechanisms, where humans were half forgotten and safe. I wanted to know the private thoughts of those with private rail cars, people who lived on sidings. Actually, I wanted to live in a rolling rail home like that one, with tasseled lamps, Oriental carpets and a cook. And a woman? No, there was something inescapably bachelor about that railway office-cum-living room. It was a shrine to rich loners. People with their own rail cars lived content and unapologetic for everything that had gone wrong in life. I watched as the man returned, lowered his shades and, within minutes, turned out the lights.

Daylight and the train jerked into movement as tinny announcements for the diner prodded me awake, if not exactly alert.  I was dressing by the edge of the Sacramento suburbs. By the time I'd finally maneuvered into my leg brace, the Starlight was well up the Valley, beyond the housing tracts, through the chaparral and into the crisp, flammable grasslands. Odd to see the train climbing.  The next stop was Chico, scheduled for 2 a.m.  Odd to be nudging the foothills instead of hurtling up the flat Sacramento Valley floor.  Any moment, we would turn north, steered without a steering wheel, the road itself guide and master, descending to the farms-and-Wal-Marts flatland.  Except we kept climbing, the engine laboring.

Limping through the sleeping cars, I caught glimpses of a parked dump truck, a rural convenience store, a gas station...the passing scenes charged, their ordinariness shot full of methamphetamine.  I speed crutched into the Parlour Car, now roaring with Southern accents and ablaze with plastic tour group badges.  A bald guy gave me a seat and a woman handed me a pre-breakfast sweet roll.  This happened before I could brace myself in the usual I'm-not-really-a-cripple way, sunny and open.  Quite unnecessary, such was the kindness of southern strangers.  Around me voices sonorous, hitting words and syllables at odd angles in the way of Faulkner.  Now I was less a cripple than a Californian amid non-Californians in California.  The lounge bounced and swayed, Southern voices slid and slurred.  We were headed somewhere, together, and not in the way of tourists but of pilgrims.

Waiting my turn for breakfast, the brown hills rose, the tall train snaking improbably up the lone track.  Massive oaks began their march across grassy slopes, dragging branches like apes' knuckles. The Starlight crossed the shoreless edge of a reservoir. Lake Oroville, according to a sign. Across the water, Sierra peaks loomed. Up and up, hills steepening into walls, a gap opening with an exhausted California summer river visible at the bottom. An announcement from the conductor.  The Feather River Canyon.

In my college days, the Feather River Route...Chicago...Western Pacific...was the stuff of billboards.  Visible from the F bus crossing the Bay Bridge, a red neon feather glowing atop the Western Pacific's waterfront office building.  Now the Western Pacific no longer existed and the red feather was long gone.  But I was still here, along with the rails and Amtrak.  Unless the crew had jumped off, quietly slipping away while the train slowed through the mountains.  Which would leave the Starlight sailing on like the Mary Celeste.  The locomotive driver would have clamped a wrench to the throttle before he leapt into the chaparral.  Leaving the train to slide driverless atop the cliffs.

The bartender reappeared with a tray of coffee cups.  The engineer was probably still on the job too, although in my mind he was easily distractible.  Probably staring too intently at the intricacies underpinning the tracks.  Revealed in turns, these railway structures of beams and trusses.  Look at this, marvelous as clockwork.  The rails flew up the mountain, and where the land stopped, the man-made spans took over.  Pillars and girders hung off the canyon sides, composing themselves into a viaduct.  The parts reached and crisscrossed, holding the train the way a ballet dancer holds a ballerina.  A little scary being held by the Union Pacific, what with its rails splitting, tunnels burning.  The tracks straightened, canyon walls falling vertically.  Hard to say what supported the train now, trestle or rock.  We made our oblivious way eastward at cliff's edge.

In the dining car, menu-dropping moments as the gorge deepened.  I peered past my omelette, over the tops of trees, into the airy depths. Occasional rail outposts, sheds and maintenance cars, clung to the mountainside. I clung to them myself, reassured to see a wooden hut, elfin in a forest service sort of way, standing among the trees.  Big mistake to look spectacularly down the cliffs.  Too easy to imagine the Starlight toppling leftwards, bouncing and tumbling, roof over wheels, to the river rocks.

The Starlight drew itself on, its engines and cars and half eaten omelettes.  The canyon turned, the train's ledge narrowed.  But a thin ledge was enough.  The irony of the street-pummeled, paralyzed survivor fearing a train ride...my body ever riding on fear.  I could feel how the end would come, stumbling too hard, head slamming, neck cracking, bloody ribs splintering.  The irony of a cripple choosing to ride a train that bucked like a bronco...yet was oddly reassuring.  For the moment-to-moment fear of falling, steadying myself here, bracing myself there, functioned like a Tibetan mantra.  It physically occupied me, forcing the deeper fear, the cellular panic of abandonment, to fall away.  Nameless historic dread of parents missing in action...no one driving the train...the uncaring chasm...well, never mind all that.  As for my railcar-smashing death on the boulders, well, let it happen.  Enjoy the view on the way down.  And just in case it continued, this steady rolling at cliff's edge, creation turning and progressing, what was one to make of this?  Except to be grateful for survival and the mystery of forces that crushed you while others conveyed you...over mountains, through time and into the now of things.  Like here, this moment in a Sierra foothill valley like many others...with its scary railroad...which wasn't scary unless you looked.

I was looking now as the canyon narrowed and the river disappeared.  A tributary descended into a granite chute, twisting and frothing.  We were nearing the top of the gorge, where the water tumbled into a cataract and under a bridge.  The Coast Starlight slipped out of the canyon and into the safety of a flat, dark forest.  We drew to a stop beside a highway.  On the P.A. system, the conductor began going on about changing crews.

With the train stopped, I hustled into the Parlour Car.  A sparkling day on display, highway adjacent, piney woods beyond.  Guys, doubtless railroad guys, sauntered in the sun.  New crew or old, it was impossible to say.  They weren't in any particular hurry.  They weren't in any particular schedule.  By now, we should be well into southern Oregon, not eastern California, near Lake Tahoe.  A disaster that did not look like one.  It looked like the morning of all mornings, with a small rusty pickup now stopping on the highway.  A woman stepped out, reached in and now stood with a baby, gazing at the silver superliner.  A man approached from the far side of the pickup.  The two of them said something, nodding.  She hiked the baby up her blue-jeaned hip.  Utterly instinctive, this baby-on-hip posture, known to women worldwide.  She waved.  The man stuck his hands in his pockets.  She waved again and jiggled the baby.  And I couldn't help standing, crutching to the window, waving back.  Invisible behind the tinted glass, I gave up.  She waved again.  The baby had to see this, the big train in the forest.  The man beamed.  A young couple with a battered truck, a squirming baby, taking a sunny moment to admire the two-story train with the unseen man admiring them.  They had everything, knew everything...and the Starlight began to move.  Rumbling over a switch, then another, a set of tracks peeling off...directional choices having been made.  Regret and loss rolling into the valleys and slopes of the forested Northern Sierra.