Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan through Ohio and Indiana, not far from the route my ancestors David and Martha Ann Powell traveled 150 years ago with a milk cow tied to a wagonload of babies, including my great-grandpa James Wesley. David was infected with the westward urge.
I have no such urge myself and never did. It’s been an accidental life, a twig floating in the stream of life, like the driverless car that Google is developing but one programmed to be directed by gusts of wind.
I love trains. The food was bad but the conversation was good. Something about motion stimulates talk. I come from people of few words; they should’ve gotten on bicycles, it would’ve loosened them up. The train stopped for maintenance problems, then hit top speed to make up the time, so it was a rough ride, a lot of bucketa-bucketa, which stimulated a wild night of interesting dreams: I was in Reykjavik singing in Icelandic, I spoke with my mother who said she loved me, I was in a dinghy with a sail heading up the river to meet my love, I won the Nobel Prize in literature, I fell into a pit of manure but kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in a city room of a newspaper typing on a Royal typewriter and using carbon paper.
A happy summer clears the air