FLOATING AROUND AMERICA
It seemed so simple three months ago. Amtrak offered a discount on their 30 day, 10 segment, ticket, down from $500 to $400. So I bought the ticket before going to Paris. The ticket was only good for 120 days but was refundable if I didn’t use the first segment. There was no risk. I wasn’t sure I would use it but was sucked in by a dream. But what entranced me was the lure of sitting in the train in a wide, comfortable seat beside a huge window watching the United States go by as I typed on my iPad as I am doing now as I look out over the Swannanoa valley, except that instead of sitting here stationary I would be sitting in the train, stationary, look out the window as all of America slid by. It was a feeling of sitting still and looking effortlessly out the window, like watching a movie, that made me buy the ticket. And I would be able to step out of the train every once in a while and visit friends along the way. It seemed to be a quiet and peaceful way to spend a month at little cost. I would be moving, but essentially I was imagining a stationary trip, just sitting peacefully, typing and taking a nap whenever I felt like it.
I leave two weeks from today at 2:30 a.m. from Greenville, SC, the closest Amtrak stop, and then (if everything works out which it is starting not to) I will make a giant loop, east through Charlottesville, then west through Chicago and along the northern border to Glacier National Park and up to the very farthest corner of the United States, Bellingham, and after six days there glide down to San Francisco for another five days and then down to Los Angeles followed by 67 hours on the train along the southern border to New Orleans and finally back to Greenville, SC, at 2:30 in the morning. Greenville to Greenville with all of America in between.
But it no longer feels like a stationary trip with America floating past. It now seems complicated and full of uncertainty and likely disruptions of one kind or another, a strenuous trip for an 85 year old with one intense moment after another and one problem after another along the way. I am worn out already and all I have done is changed my intinerary again and again as people were reluctant to have me visit or were no longer where I thought they were.
Instead of anticipating a quiet stationary ride I wake up at 2 in the morning in a panic as I imagine what could go wrong from being stuck on a country road at night with no way to get around to being knocked out by Covid and wheezing in some distant hotel. Covid hangs over the whole trip as it hangs over everyone. But the biggest dislocation is that I am now no longer floating in the stationary way I imagined, I am climbing over one hurdle after another when asleep and when awake with no end in sight.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 