My first railroad (not subway) trip was in 1945 -- a New York Central train from NYC to Glens Falls, New York. I was dazzled but queasy; it was a coal-burning engine and the smoke was both visible and smellable. I spent my infant time looking out the window and studying the adjacent set of tracks as they combined and separated -- a most vivid memory. I was born into a sedentary family and have no further recollection of being in a train again until 1952 when Aunt Mollie took me to Washington. We ate dinner on the train, a marvelous luxury. in 1956, testing my adolescent independence, I voyaged to Ithaca on the old Lehigh Valley R. R. (the "Leaky V.), then in its dotage and quite seedy. During the late 1950s, I occasionally rode up to Utica NY on the NY Central. The round-trip fare was an astonishingly steep $20.50, or half a week's work. But afterwards it was almost all automobiles. I don't know that I was on a train again until 1975-76, when I commuted weekly from Canterbury (second class with the accompaniment of Cadbury chocolates) to Charing Cross station. Calais to Paris, 1976. I can remember also Lugano to Florence to Rome, c. 1990, and Stockholm to Copenhagen a decade later. NYC to DC, on Amtrak, many times around the turn of the new millenium. Not a great deal of train travel, but then, as we all know, the railroads are a glorious but dying institution, at least in the US. Nor adventuresome either: no Orient Express or Trans-Siberian. Planes? My first trip was from NYC to Ithaca, on a 12 seat Mohawk -- perhaps to this day my smallest plane and bumpiest flight. Many, many trips from Boston to NYC (Eastern Airlines), from Logan to LaGuardia and back. A dozen or so jumps across the water to Europe, all of them accompanied with headaches and disorientation. My longest so far: Denver to Port Elizabeth, South Africa. To Hawaii and back. To San Jose, Costa Rica. Innumerable, far too many, domestic flights from Denver to NYC, Denver to Oakland, Denver to DC -- all highly routinized. At first, decades ago, flying was romantic; dinner was served; people dressed up for the experience. Now it's being sardined into a grudging Greyhound in the sky, with bodyscans and shoe checks to boot. And waste: all that time and money thrown into the sea looking for plastic explosives secreted in my retired-teacher/ grandpa orifices.
The word Greyhound reminds me those horrible 1950s trips (midnight to 8am) from the Port Authority on 34th and 8th to Ithaca with "rest stops" in East Stroudsburg and Scranton at 3am, with no food available except rancid sandwiches from the slot machines. I cannot shake the memory of the awful smell of spoiled tuna, gas fumes, eructations and flatulence on those filthy cramped buses. Nor of the degenerate displaying his private parts in the men's room in Hackettstown, New Jersey one slushy night.
But put me in a car on a two-lane anywhere west of the Mississippi, with no particular place to go, and I'm one happy guy.
Cherry pie in Hannibal, Missouri or breakfast at the Jesse James Cafe in Casey, Iowa. Bliss!
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