March 2005 Archives

The person who wrote this was a sitting in a wheelchair, before a screen, wearing a telephonist-type headset. Thus, voice recognition technology, which itself deserves recognition for enabling me to do a few things like blog and work and not starve to death. Though there is a catch attached. More exactly, a wire, which dangles from the earpiece, sagging into a loop that ultimately leads to my computer and invariably leads to a small crisis every time I turn on my wheelchair and hit reverse, typically en route to the bathroom. The dangling cord catches on various wheelchair protrusions, and I'm always afraid that in backing up, I'll pull it out of its socket, shred it, break it. Breaking would be bad. Breaking would essentially cut the communication link between brain and screen. Yes, I can sort of type with one hand. But then one can sort of do many things with one hand. And, take it from me, you don't "sort of" write. But where were we?

Actually, we were sort of on the way to Seattle. But we began to come to grips with the dangling cord and the fact that it has been snaring itself on my wheelchair for, oh, between four and five years. That's a lot of cursing at my own stupidity. That's a lot of alarmist anger at the possibility of having the plug literally pulled on my creative life. Where would I find another cord? Where would I even find someone to fix this one? That is, fix it quickly, because without it I am without livelihood, among other things. Without life, one might say. At least, creative life. So, I continue backing away from my desk, snagging the headset cord in the process and berating myself for the professional disaster that would ensue if the cord snapped, the microphone went silent, and my writing ceased. One would think that a practical solution would appear in the form of something like a cord holder. But one would think too much. This ritual is part of my life.

The Seattle ritual is another. I go there every few months. My mother is declining. So I head for her nursing home south of Seattle. Naturally, I head there on the train. Flying is much less expensive and infinitely faster, but there is no ordeal involved. And ordeals and struggles seem to be what keep me going. I've been thinking about it for weeks, this particular trip. I've written about it, too. That this time I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I've gone from being badly disabled to very badly disabled, and traveling alone on a bouncing, lurching train may be, to use the medical lingo, contraindicated. I've thought it through. My wife will put me aboard a train at our suburban commuter station. In arriving at San Jose, I will throw myself on the mercy of Amtrak. If the commuter train conductors can't or won't help push me into the station, I will snag a passerby. If no one is passing by, I will grip the handrail lining the ramp that leads under the tracks, make my way down, then work my way up on the other side. Once in the station, I'll make myself known to the ticket guy, and he or someone somewhere will push me to the door of my sleeper car. When the time comes. And the time may come very late. The Coast Starlight isn't known for its on-time performance.

On board, God only knows what I will do. I suppose, if the car attendant tells me the diner is still open, I will board at San Jose and make a mad dash for supper. It would be unthinkable to set out alone through the moving train. My balance is so shaky, my sense of where I am in space so poor, that I'd get knocked down within minutes of pulling out of the station. If the dining car is shut, I will actually feel relieved. I will sit down in my compartment, open up whatever food I've brought, and munch alone, musing on the utterly invigorating sense of beginning a journey, of bouncing through familiar Bay Area towns in one's own little room, America made visible, while I remain invisible. That sort of thing.

The problem -- and I really have thought all this through -- is that the car attendant probably won't know if the diner is or isn't open. "I'll see if they are still serving," he'll say. Which won't work for me. Because by the time he wanders down to the diner to see what's happening, I could be halfway up the stairs and making my way through the narrow sleeper corridors while the train is still in the station, and not moving. So, unless he says closed, kaput, I'll probably have a go at getting to the dining car. If it proves to be shut, I'll sit in the Parlour Car. Nothing to see outside the domed windows, not at night, but I'll sit there anyway and try to spot the few landmarks that reveal our progress in the dark. There's the old clapboard restaurant at Alviso, a sign that the train is about to hurtle onto the Bay, crossing the waters on a causeway, grassy marshes and evaporating salt ponds invisible in the black. I know the hairpin turn at Fremont. I also know when there is no hairpin turn, and the train takes the west track along the bay. Whichever route we take, I'll know enough to be on my feet when we slow down for Oakland. It's all important that I hightail it back to the safety of my sleeper while we stop there.

Of course, If the Coast Starlight arrives on time in San Jose, and the dining car is miraculously open, I'll eat entirely too much food, bouncing through San Leandro. If I'm lucky, I will be seated with another passenger. I am open to people on the train. I'm more closed to them off the train. But slipping through the industrial suburbs of the East Bay in a sealed, two-story train, eating on a white tablecloth with carnations in the bud vase, all this turns the mundane into the extraordinary. How amazing that such a conveyance should roll down the center of an Oakland street, with people in Amtrak bedrooms watching other people stand in line for Yoshi's jazz club.

I know the real terror will come the next morning when I awaken in the Sacramento River Canyon, the train snaking its way uphill, swinging and tilting around the curves. That's when breakfast will become the life goal. Of course, I will be battle-hardened by then. Taking off my brace, getting myself arranged in bed, not sleeping for hours as the train jolts and thumps its way northward. But in the morning by the time I've got my brace back on, and I'm up on my feet, there will still be the unknown. How will I make my way through the open Parlour Car, the domed lounge where the only thing to grab is a swivel seat, and there's plenty of room to fall? I don't know. I will probably grab someone's arm. I'll be careful. I'll be very careful.

And there's something about leaving, about pulling away and saying goodbye, even for a few days, that puts everything in mortal perspective. Absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, it makes the heart grow. A departure brings with it the sobering possibility of asking what I've been doing with myself over these last fixed, nontraveling months. And since it really does pull at my heart to separate from my wife, where has the heart been all these months? And what am I doing with the microphone cord? Why haven't I found a simple solution to something so chronic, something so vitally connected with me and my self expression and my ego? And why can't I really understand the Amtrak ordeal once it begins? I guess the answer to the last part is simple. I'm in it, the 24-hour battle to stay upright. I deal with the trip much the way I deal with the microphone cord. I watch, I wait, I seek help. But unlike the microphone cord, I don't berate myself for any failings aboard Amtrak. I know it's a massive undertaking, a barely ambulatory quadriplegic fighting his way toward Puget Sound. And unlike the microphone cord, there's nothing to fix. The trip is its own reward. At least I'm still on my feet. Just barely. Just like Amtrak.

My wife is abandoning me, walking out the door at the worst possible time to indulge in her selfish pleasures with some friend or other...spending the day birdwatching, ostensibly, while I am at home, left to my own quadriplegic devices. This came to me in a hot, emotional flash while having a routine conversation with a friend who asked about my wife. How was she? And suddenly she was this, selfish abandoner of those for whom she should care. Like me.

This blast from the psyche contains nothing of what I believe or intend. Actually, my wife hasn't been getting out much recently, and I have encouraged birdwatching, art studying, friend visiting or anything to get her beyond our apartment walls and among people more interesting than me. It's good for a couple to have their own lives. To go out in the world and experience, then return home and report. It makes for dinner table conversation. It makes for balance in a relationship. It makes for sanity.

But forget sanity. This is quadriplegic emotional life. Which is like any other emotional life, except that feelings of dependency aren't just feelings. And anger seems to be a constant. My sense of being ignored, abandoned and forgotten, well that's all about my mother, isn't it? So, what isn't about someone's mother? What is life but the constant unraveling of a childhood yarn? No one grows into a tree without being a bent twig, psychologists will tell us. The problem is that when your spinal cord is already bent out of functioning shape, your psyche can't be. It mustn't be. It's too much.

I remember a fellow quadriplegic from one of my hospitalizations...over the last four decades they have all blended together. I can't remember his name, but I recall his wrists, bent into the permanently deformed shape of those who cannot lift their hands. He had given up on the endless bending and straightening physical therapists always recommend for such limbs. He was bent. Bent and talking about life. When you're quadriplegic, he said, you either grow or die. By "die," I suppose he meant death of the spirit, defeat rather than mortality. Or, being a veteran of abnormal neurology, catheters, orderlies, job counselors, bedsores and bedpans, maybe he meant what he said. Die. In any event, I knew more or less what he meant. When you're disabled, you've got to fix what can be fixed. Otherwise, the burden is too much.

In my ward in a Los Angeles hospital where I spent the first six months after my injury, one guy seemed to face quadriplegia with equanimity and lightheartedness. He mused about being hurled through the windshield of his pickup truck during a freeway head-on. His fiancée arrived daily to sit on his bed, comb his hair into the semblance of a ducktail and hold his unfeeling hands in hers. She had a quality of purposefulness, even destiny, as she rubbed lotion into his arms, smoothed his sheets and prepared for their life together. In her absence, he occasionally chatted to his paralyzed roommates about their altered sex life. I can't recall if anyone said much of anything in response. He had a sex life, and his companions didn't, that was for sure. He probably found more common ground in discussing custom cars, and could discourse for hours about various kinds of metallic paint. He seemed so adjusted, so blithe and accepting in the face of such a diminished life, that I've always wondered about him. I wonder how he has fared in the American competitive landscape. Surely, while others were dancing, he had to be struggling to stay in place. Pretty soon, he could only be falling behind. Losing the race for education, status, making money. Wouldn't that have made him angry? Could he have avoided taking all this out on his wife? Was he still married? And quadriplegia being what it is, was he still alive?

At 12 years old I was shipped off to an aunt and uncle while my parents divorced. I couldn't have been a very happy kid in upstate New York, thousands of miles from home. My aunt took me to see a psychiatrist. Dr. Sullivan sat across from me listening to my account of our battling family. I related to him what my father had told me, that my mother was an incompetent. And a dangerous incompetent at that. Dr. Sullivan nodded. You love your mother very much, don't you? Tears erupted from my face. They burst from my eye sockets like geysers, turning my lap into an alluvial plain. He regarded me evenly. I'd like to see you again, he said. I never returned.

I've always wondered what might have been, had I had another few sessions with Dr. Sullivan at that pivotal preadolescent moment. I've probably wondered too much. But my wondering has kept me alert. It's hard to face what's inside us. But life is harder when we hide. Which brings me back to the wife. I've been obsessing about politics this week and biting my tongue in her presence. I've been biting it too hard. I've bitten off more than I can chew, angerwise. So we finally had our talk. It was a tense exchange. It was also an exchange of tenses. It put the present into the past. I learned something about her, and more about me. I learned that it's more of a fight not fighting. I learned what I wish I'd learned long ago, but keep learning and relearning. I wish I'd gone back to Dr. Sullivan. I wish I didn't regret so much. I'm glad I've had enough of a life to have regrets.

It's fair to say that in 1968 I emerged from six months in a Los Angeles rehabilitation hospital triumphant. I had rolled in totally paralyzed and walked out partially ambulatory. Still, weeks later, I returned to complete my senior year at Berkeley utterly defeated. I crutched from class to class, my steel leg brace clanging like a prisoner's chains. Students would stop me and ask what had happened. I barely knew what had happened myself. I told horrified listeners about being mugged and shot in the neck. In 1968, getting shot was still something of a novelty.

My midterm graduation was less an event than a mailing. I opened the envelope with my diploma, stored the thing in a drawer and wondered what to do with my life. While I was wondering, I ran into old friends who put me in their car and drove me into the Berkeley Hills. It was great to get out of the campus flatlands in a time of protest demonstrations. I was recovering from a major injury to body and soul, still getting used to being out in public, and still afraid of being on the streets at night. Darryl drove his old car up and up into the hills, cares falling away, the sparkling bay spreading itself out like a watery tablecloth. We drove off a residential street, down a bumpy gravel driveway, crunching over rocks, and stopping under the porte cochere of an enormous house. It seemed truly a mansion, albeit crumbling -- a large, white neoclassical monolith sticking out of a hillside in the Berkeley Hills. In truth it was a ruined school, a ghost campus. Williams College had been a functioning girls institution at one point. Now Darryl rented a cottage, probably once used by gardeners, at the fringe of the estate. The main house was occupied by a father and son, aged about 90 and 70 years old, respectively. They were Midwesterners, successful practitioners of the sporting goods business, and they had taken their money here to California and acquired this crumbling, white neoclassical building and its sloping, grassy grounds. They needed the space for their organization. Today, I can't remotely recall what the group was named. But many people of my generation recall the organization's bumper sticker: Flying Saucers Are Real, The Air Force Doesn't Exist.

The elderly father-son held occasional meetings in the former classrooms of the rambling structure. The rest of the place held little interest for them. Fortunately, there were plenty of people in Berkeley looking for rooms. In the spring of 1969, when I first arrived at Williams College, the hippie culture and what was left of the 1960s was heading for the high ground. And Williams College was perfect high ground. The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company had moved into the College's former dance studio. To call this assemblage a company was overstating the case. Actually, it consisted of two guys and various associates who spent their days developing, rehearsing and sometimes even performing ritualistic opera-like works of their own invention. To witness one of these performances was almost unthinkable. They were unmatched in tedium, humorless, endless. But the pre-rehearsals were an entirely different matter, with the members of the company lying about the grounds of Williams College without clothes. The father-son landlords either approved of this, or because they rarely ventured outside, never saw their resident nudists. Occupied with the ceaseless task of preventing the takeover of planet Earth by "the watchers," people in sleeper cells transported from Mars, they didn't have much time to worry about was happening on the grounds.

As for the grounds, they were incomparable. From the rear of the mansion, vast wide steps marched down the hillside, flanked by huge concrete Grecian-urn planters. Each level of patio, and there were several hanging off the back of the mansion, was framed with thick arching concrete balustrades, with neoclassical benches molded into the design at regular intervals. The Golden Gate, the Bay, San Francisco, all of it shimmered in the distance. The members of the Lotus company spent most of the day lounging. Rehearsals, which involved lots of arguing over spiritual matters, took place in the warm evenings. In the warm, even hot, days, the lawns and crumbling concrete expanses of Williams College were dotted with immobile members of the troupe. Gazing up from the sparkling bay at the top of the Williams College hillside, the eye met shrubs, then sloping lawns, then the cracked and peeling neoclassical terraces, then the skin of distant human forms with dots of pubic hair.

All the rented spaces at Williams College were odd, but the oddest was a semi-basement with a large institutional-type kitchen in one corner, a small bathroom in another, and acres of concrete flooring rolling into the hillside. This underground bunker was the home of David. He didn't exactly live alone, not with members of the Lotus company traipsing in and out to use his bathroom. He also had animals. David was a Berkeley graduate student, endlessly struggling to complete his Ph.D. thesis in genetics. He had a Jewish motherly sweetness about him, mixed with rabbinical detachment. He also had a menagerie of animals. When disappointed in love, he could count on the latter. Moreover, they gave him beings to care for and living creatures who counterbalanced his benign persona. David advocated all liberal causes and cared about all lost souls. David wouldn't hurt a fly. That's why he had a snarling malamute, all fangs and massive paws, who in subsequent years was finally put down when he went for the neck of David's eventual wife. For the present, this dog roamed David's underground lair, along with an assortment of cats, as well as the largest rabbit I had ever seen. David's rabbit hung out on one of the College hillsides, rarely moving, for it was far too big to hop. It must have been in some state of pituitary distress. Meanwhile, it was one of those blighted beings David took care of. I was another.

Now each morning David, Darryl or some newfound Williams College friend would pick me up and drive me from my rented room to the sunny campus in the hills. Soon the place lost its feeling of Tennessee Williams ruin and became just another house. Actually, it became a home. Increasingly, I spent the nights there. There was a little too much teargas wafting around Telegraph Avenue where I lived, and it was nice to be among people who cared about me. And cared for me. A traumatic injury brings out the child in everyone. And I was now a fully fledged, certified infant, as far as I was concerned. The nude girls around the campus left me continuously feverish and continuously hungry. I couldn't open up to anyone. So I stared. As for David, he was the Jewish mother I'd never had. He cooked. He talked. We drove places and did things. I kept inviting my friends up to meet him in his extraordinary domicile. In the spring of 1969, it seemed this would go on and on, David in his basement, the Lotus company learning the art of Balinese toe bells on the terraces outside. It was my Shire, Williams College, where nothing really wicked seemed possible.

Bad things had happened. The previous winter, water had come flooding under the concrete wall behind David's bed, coursing across his unfinished cement floors and, obediently, out the door. There was talk of people in the neighborhood complaining about Tibetan music and nudists on the lawns. Some said that the City of Berkeley was going to condemn the place. Regular earthquakes had left enormous cracks in the cement verandas. But there was a tension about Williams College, one that seemed to hold things together like a nuclear force. There was the very look of the place, more than a look, almost an attitude, Belle Epoque American. Years later, when I saw the film version of "The Music Man," I recognized the turn-of-the-century Iowa ladies in their toga-clad dancing. I'd seen their ghosts at Williams College. The sunbathing nudes and aspiring Tibetans, they were something else, a force from the other end of the same century. It all fit together. I fit in with it. I was a newly crippled person, the last thing I'd ever expected to be. I had a home, and even a pseudo-parent in David. It went on and on for all of two months. In June, 1969, I made a quick trip to England. I didn't come back for four years. When I did, the rabbit had died, the Lotus company had been enlisted in the making of a Pepsi commercial, then disbanded. And David had enticed a woman to not only marry him, but live in his dank subterranean lair. I visited him several times, although it was already hard to walk down the muddy slopes of the old campus hill. I know that the very strangeness of his home beneath the earth offered an instructive example. Sometimes, you had to go underground.

I had completed and dispatched a major report, scheduled the week's appointments and lined up tasks like obedient telephone poles and slept four hours the night before, being caught up in the frenzy of deadlines and production. But I had exercised that morning, taking care to put my body through its neuromuscular paces, just in time for my physical therapy assistant to turn up at my home and extend my limbs into the requisite angles. In short, it was a high-productivity, all-go, all-American kind of day. Things were going splendidly, right up until the moment that I rolled out of my 6 p.m. psychotherapy appointment, onto my wheelchair lift, and into my van for a brisk ride to the next stop: chorus practice. En route, I was doing my scales and beginning to have slight twinges of anxiety. At my destination, the suburban recreation center that the Menlo Park Chorus calls home, I began to feel my underpinnings getting shaky. I started to feel weak. I was, to use the technical term, scared.

Silly me, I thought, checking my watch. What's to be scared about here at the close of an effective day, near the start of a new century, the New American Century, according to our current leaders? Hard to say. But not hard to feel. By the time I was parked and out of my van, music notebook on my lap, I had become emotionally incapacitated. I sat in the rosy California dusk, feeling the last cool of the Bay Area winter and the first warmth of spring, the meteorological difference being admittedly slim. I sat and sat. In my weakened state, there was no way I was going to roll into the chorus rehearsal room and belt out Hayden. Time passed. The goings-on in the adjacent City Council chambers, beamed outside on loudspeakers, made little sense to my deactivated ear. I was listening more to my own breathing, shallow, panicked. I knew all this would pass. I'd experienced this before, a transient panic attack, triggered by nothing in particular, and guaranteed to subside within the hour. Feeling confident of my imminent recovery, I switched on my wheelchair and rolled through the doors of the recreation center. I could hear the chorus going through its vocal shaping down the hall. It's a chronically tenor-free zone, our chorus. At least I would shore up the basses. Once inside, confronted with the effort of punching out notes, I fell stupidly silent. I was late for rehearsal, and break time soon saved me. I snacked and chatted. People asked me if I was okay.

Which isn't exactly my favorite question. Extremely functional, highly-integrated, fully socialized and career-hardened quadriplegics just don't worry about being okay. We radiate okay. We are the living example of okay. We wrote the book on okay, then edited it and published the sucker. When it comes to okay, we've been there and done that. Okay?

One of the biggest problems with living a disabled life in an able-bodied world is that it's hard to maintain perspective. Healthy, physically fit people in America regularly grind their souls down to a corporate nub. Disabled people like me who avidly follow in their footsteps, determined to prove their worth and equality, end up making exactly the same mistakes. Except that we make them worse and earlier. The latter part may not be such a bad thing. I have run up against the physical limitations of my neurology and midlife stamina earlier than most people. I'm just have little trouble getting the message.

The message is that there are only so many hours in the day, so many days in our lives, and so many neurons in the spinal cord. There's probably some highly complex real-time algorithm that an ambitious graduate student could devise to run against my life clock, giving me an up-to-the-minute printout of quality versus quantity of living. But who has the time? The next time I push myself to the break of quadriplegic folly, trying to live up to someone else's expectations of how much activity I can cram into a single day, I hope I can remember the essential question here. Who has the life?

Good Person,

Or, perhaps, one should say "Good Persona." I'm not very good at handling the ethereal or omnipotent. God (sorry) this is embarrassing. I'm trying to get through with a certain point. Which is this: I want to stop worrying. The case in point.

I woke at 4 a.m., recycling desperate thoughts about my impending trip to Seattle. Why? Because I am traveling alone. By train. It's not as though I haven't done this before. I've done it plenty. The difference this time is that I'm doing it with an older, less steady, less confident body. No wife or friends or relatives accompanying. The first question obviously is "why do it?" It's not as though the 24-hour overland trip bouncing over what's left of America's freight railway infrastructure isn't grueling. And, yes, it's scenic, but so are lots of places that can be visited by road, my wife's hands on the steering wheel. But the Union Pacific freight line over the Cascades doesn't happen to be one of them.

No, I'm making this trip because it would be a crushing defeat not to make it. A "crushing defeat" vis-à-vis age and physical decline. Of course, there is a point at which a wise semi-ambulatory, mostly quadriplegic person should throw in the neuromuscular towel. That point is going to come. Maybe it has already come, and I simply don't know it. Which would mean that I am planning to board a train without the neurological wherewithal to handle the experience. Which would be foolish. Which would be hard to admit. Which may result in some form of traveler's disaster. As for the latter, let me count the ways.

First, there is the following-down-the-stairs scenario. This has to do with crutching my way through the train's vestibule, upstairs, just when a mighty sideways whomp from the rails, two stories below, knocks me sideways and down the stairwell. Down I go, tumbling to my orthopedic doom. More likely, I am crutching my way through the open, railingless lounge car, all dome views and low seats, when a similar track event sends me tripping over a chair or crashing against a window. Or I stumble climbing into the dining car. Or, more mundane but distinctly embarrassing, I can't stand up from one of the low seats in the diner. Not to mention the prospect of being knocked on my butt in my own cubicle. Well, it's not really a cubicle, is it, more a train compartment. With a door that shuts, even locks. And in the morning, exhausted from a night of bouncing over the wobbly rails, I can just see myself making my cautious way from bed to toilet, when the pitching floor proves too much and I fall. With the door locked, it could take hours for the car attendant to figure out something was wrong. No one might figure out anything was wrong until I got to Seattle, a limb or two broken, and dehydrated from hours lying on the Amtrak floor.

Thus my 4 a.m. contemplations of the train trip north. And what I'm asking for is peace and perspective, I guess. We're all going to die, and decline. At some point I won't be able to make these trips. And what if that point is now? What if I should know better than to embark on this trip alone, pushing 60 years of age, having managed to break at least one arm and one hip in the last decade?

No, with a trip like this, peace and perspective would make all the difference. And I see these energies as coming from a higher power. My own power isn't enough. When I imagine standing up in the morning aboard the Coast Starlight, making my way out the door hyper-vigilant, crutching cautiously through the sleeping cars toward breakfast, what I really feel is some energy drain in my solar plexus. It's like the drive isn't there, or the physical drive isn't there, but the mental drive is. Of course, for me, recently remarried, working for a high school, and generally more connected to people that I ever have been, I am more than ever able to ask those around me for help. My motto aboard the Coast Starlight: you'll never walk alone.

So, Good Person, Good Persona, Good Guide, Good God, why scoff at the old Rodgers and Hammerstein song? I won't be walking alone. I won't even be rolling alone. From the moment my wife sends me off aboard the commuter train to San Jose to catch the overnight Amtrak north, I will be relying upon people. Maybe that's the first step in believing in something bigger than oneself. Meanwhile, I think about the rest of it. The hold your head up high part. And the don't be afraid of the dark, that part too.

I had grown used to delays aboard the Coast Starlight, the Amtrak train from Los Angeles to Seattle. In the mid-1990s I found myself taking the thing, repeatedly, to visit my brother and mother. What made it a "thing," rather than, say, a train, was hard to say. But for a partial quadriplegic whose one-legged and one-armed driving required the concentration of a fighter pilot, and rarely motored more than 100 miles from the Bay Area, the experience added up to adventure. One saw the sights. There were people to meet. And physical challenges to master and endure. The ceaseless pitching and bouncing over the Union Pacific tracks was only part of it. The other part was that the tracks themselves had a way of going out of operation. Tunnel fires, derailments, even a choking backup of freight trains could delay the Coast Starlight for hours.

I'd made five or six train trips to Seattle when, arriving in Klamath Falls one morning, I decided to stay. Actually, I didn't decide. Amtrak decided for me. One of the timber-lined tunnels in the mountains to the north had burst into flame. And when the Coast Starlight arrived in Klamath Falls for its 10 minutes stop, the stop stretched on to 20 minutes, then four hours. I sat in the dining car, staring down at the roof of Klamath Falls Station, having lunch with Esther. She was pushing 70, and I was pushing the salad around on my plate. I wasn't hungry. Esther was talking about the Bronx, her home. Eating in the parked dining car reminded me of certain novelty roadside restaurants. Mixed with boyhood memories of pretending to drive my father's car in our garage. I was tired of these silly Amtrak trips. People with real lives to not take slow trains to nowhere. And this one was going to be 12 hours late.

Esther was convinced she had the low down. They're bringing on a pilot, she told me. Esther had been eavesdropping inside the Klamath Falls Station, pretending to read an Amtrak brochure while listening to the conductor on the phone to Union Pacific headquarters in Omaha. Why do they want a pilot? She gave me a knowing look. I liked Esther. She absorbed facts with a tough skepticism. She believed in conspiracies. You didn't talk about pilots unless you were talking about airplanes. Never mind Amtrak's announcement about busing passengers to Portland to catch the eastbound train to Chicago. Something was brewing about pilots. I told her she had it wrong. I'd been rerouted before and knew about railroad pilots, special drivers brought in to guide the train over decrepit freight track. We had a long, slow trip ahead of us.

Esther took this in, nodding evenly. They're going to run out of food, she said. This with another knowing look. I didn't care about the food or believe Amtrak would run out of it. I wanted to know why Esther made such an assertion. She looked at me as though I were an idiot. They didn't plan for this, she said. I could have made the obvious point that this train was late almost all the time and had to be stocked for many extra meals. But this wasn't about information, Esther's assertion. This was about defiance. And perseverance. As lunch unfolded, Esther told me more about herself. She was married, happily so, and her husband had stayed home in the Bronx. Walks with two canes, Esther said of her husband, not one, like you. He had arthritis. The two canes made as much sense as the running out of food story, and my body was a neurological joke, as far as I was concerned. But never mind. Esther quantified things. Two canes, no food, it all added up to trouble. I asked her if she thought, having seen me get around the train, her husband could manage the Starlight. She made an equivocal wiggle with her hand.

So, you left him behind, I asked? She said he had pushed her out the door. He was home, watching television, playing poker with his buddies, going to the senior center. They talked on the phone almost every day. She had never been to California or Oregon. And aboard the train we had naturally gravitated to each other. I'd been thinking that I was ready to give up on the Starlight and let my world shrink. Moving around the train had become difficult and painful. The ceaseless jostling and the mental energy it took to stay vigilant against falling, it was all seeming like too much. But then I'd heard this about Esther, that she was far from home, traveling alone. People are not meant to be alone. Even when they are alone.

After lunch, the Starlight began a long, slow trip through the dull Eastern Oregon flatlands. I dozed in the dome car. Passengers gave up on the views and emptied the lounge. I woke in the late afternoon. The train was creeping through a black volcanic wilderness, the gorge of the Deschutes River. Lava formations projected inches from the windows of the two-story train. The river rushed over black sand. It went on and on, the train revealing everything in slow motion. This wasn't a national park, but should have been. It wasn't even on the AAA map. For a travel-hungry disabled person who couldn't drive very far, this slow detour was a wild-country gift. An armchair view of scenery that no one could see from the road, because there wasn't one. Ride the rails, I thought, and keep riding and talking. Amtrak, my off-road vehicle.