Traveling Outside of Time
Originally published in
the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine
Feb. 1, 2004
If long-distance train travel has a future,
this is it.
Joseph, a burly, ex-Special Forces Marine is sitting next to me munching peanuts and gazing out the big, domed windows of the Pacific Parlour Car. We are traveling on the Coast Starlight, the daily train that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, a 1,389- mile trek that is arguably the most beautiful stretch of railroad in the country. I met Joseph only a few hours ago, but already I know more about him than I do about some of my closest friends. I know about his dying mother, his sister’s disappearing husbands, the writing contest he once won, the six months he spent living out of his truck and his nonexistent sperm count. It’s part of the odd and completely wonderful dynamic that happens on long- distance trains, the way people who would never even meet in “real life” – like Joseph and me — form brief but intense connections when they are in limbo, when they have relaxed into that long, timeless stretch of time between here and there.
It is after dinner on the second night of the trip. The train sidles along the Columbia River passing through the rich, river-bottom farmland north of Portland and makes its way north to hug Puget Sound.