Detroit Lakes, MN

Amtrak stopped at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota at 2:36 am. Half awake and freezing, I watched seven people scuttle across the empty parking lot in the 37 degree night, warm enough, I guess, for Minnesota in mid-April. The ex-passengers had just started to open their trunks and car doors and shove suitcases in the back seats before the train lightly lurched and began to pull away. I imagined them driving home and crawling into bed around 3:15, sleeping until 8:31 and then waking up, glad it was Saturday. They would be in their own houses, surrounded by their own blankets, warm with each other. Their travel clothes would be on the floor, ready for the laundry the next day, when the microscopic travel grime and smell would be washed off.

The train smelled like air conditioning, Clorox wipes, and exhaled Chicago – Union Station air, now stale from twelve hours of exhales. I was so cold I figured would never fall asleep and kept wondering if she was awake and what would happen if my back touched her back. The evangelical in me said it was wrong, but the engineer only saw a solution my current state of frigidity. I tried to distract myself by listening to the Mennonites in front of us speak Pennsylvania Dutch. They promised, in accented English, to mail the stewardess a handmade bonnet and gently reminded the smallest boy to stop peering over the edge of the seat at who I assumed was his grandmother, but could have been, for all I knew, his aunt or second cousin. All ultra-conservative women looked old to me. They smelled old, too, but not like my grandmother who smelled like newspapers and house plants. Instead, they smelled like Menno Simon drew their last bath.

I fell in and out of sleep for the next two hours. The tighter I pulled my towel and rain jacket around me, the colder I became. I wanted to scream. This trip seemed ridiculous. I don’t know what I expected to find, or why I felt compelled to ride the train from Chicago to Minot, for no other purpose than to purposely look at grass and a replicated church. I knew, deep down, that going west wouldn’t stop the screaming, and later I knew, in the same place, the screaming would never stop. There were no places for the words that would cut it off.

That was why I took the train. And maybe, that was why I wanted the iron rails. Sell your freedom for money and rules. Run trains, make money, the railroad exists to make money. Run trains on tracks and tracks run on, between where people and products need to be. The road crosses tracks, not, the tracks cross the road. Highway departments get permits from the railroad. Look, here, the train cannot leave the rails. Locked autonomy. A freight train on the high plains, unstoppable. A freight train in the mountains, shuttled streamlined industry in a paradise. A freight train in the desert, civilization, plastic water bottles for the crew.

A west bound passenger train, at night, in Minnesota, cold and carrying me.