i don’t want to grow up.

the more people i talk to on this trip, the more i realise i don’t want to grow up, because grown-ups are boring. in fact, the most fun and exciting people to talk to are the very young and the very old; the former because kids still have their sense of wonder intact, and the latter because of their stories.

if nothing more, train travel is great for watching sunsets and sunrises. in fact, it’s plausible that the timetables are designed around sunsets, as the trains always happen to bein perfect vieweing posture at that time, passing by a smooth lake that reflects the colours like an artist’s palette, and the conductors – maybe they’re dazzled, too – seem to slow the train up a bit so we can all soak in it, at least briefly. i think they take for granted that no one taking the train cross-country is in any particular hurry, as evidenced in the puzzled looks i get from conductors when i utter the word “connection” in reference to my imminent, 7 am train from San Antonio to Austin. i thought four hours would be a safe buffer zone. apparently, that’s not guaranteed. so i could be taking a bus instead.

anyway, kids are apt to look at any one of the spectacular sunsets we have been dazzled with and suggest angelic involvement, rather than comment something along the lines of, “man, how beautiful… isn’t it a shame all this is caused by smog?” maybe it is, buddy, but you’ve got to let that wonder do its thing and leave words out of it.

the very old are interesting, if nothing else, for their fountains of experience and their inimitable storytelling (and inexhaustible desire to tell stories).

so when i had dinner with two old ladies (think: Selma and Thelma (?) of the Simpsons) and their (?) granddaughter of nine years, they complemented each other perfectly. the old never tire of the child’s imaginative banter (nor do i), and kids are never afraid to talk around old folks, who rarely dismiss them as being ignorant as their parents are wont to. i enjoyed making them all laugh, one an innocent laugh and the other two coloured by years of cigarette smoking.

i am really jealous of that little girl. she saw three alligators in Louisiana from the observation car. i told her she’s lucky, ’cause all i’ve seen are cows and trees. and sunsets:

i’ve also realised that i’m still very young, despite the almost daily reminders otherwise that i felt in my former lives in New York and Washington. i hope that, no matter what, i never lose my sense of wonder. trips like this definitely help prevent that from happening.

leaving the Crescent City

heading out of New Orleans in the morning, i finally pick up my rail pass at the station.  Amtrak offers USA Rail passes to disembark and reboard any number of trains across the country an unlimited amount of times for a fixed ticket price, like the Eurail pass or the JR ticket in Japan.  but it’s only made available to non-US, non-Canadian citizens with a valid foreign passport and non-immigrant visa.  so in order to take advantage of this option, i put away my Jersey driver’s license and pull out my Italian passport.

it’s ironic that in order to see my county of birth from the inside out, affordably, i have to pretend to be a foreigner.  the actual acquisition of the pass in New Orleans was pretty amusing, as it went something like this:

Blonde, nice, Southern Amtrak lady: So, what part of Italy are you from?

Me: South Jersey.

Amtrak lady: Oh, wowwww. [puzzled expression].  It must be beautiful over there.

Me: It has its moments, yes.

Amtrak lady: Ok.  Well, you enjoy your trip, now.  Welcome to the US of A!

Me: Thanks.

Ostensibly, the clerk either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that i have no visa and thus am technically in the country illegally, or that my Italian passport says quite clearly that i was born in the United States.  i wonder if Mexicans can buy rail passes to move across the country so easily.

as we wheel out of the Crescent City, we’re again thrust into the heart of the Ninth Ward:

i see a billboard that says, “be kind to strangers – visit your inlaws.”  then i see the offshore oil rigs towering above the gulf, and i think of Joshua.  i hope he’s wearing his life preserver.

the Ninth Ward

there’s really no better way to come through new orleans than by rail. after endless hours of muggy green Mississippi scenery and dozens of cow-infested catfish farms, suddenly everything disappears as the train sinks into the Bayou. patches of lakes are replaced by ever-shrinking patches of land, and suddenly you’re completely surrounded by water without any visible bridges or supports as the train rolls 6.2 miles across Lake Pontchartrain on a bridge built in the 1860s. occasionally, you spot fishing shanties – wooden structures stretching over the water dangling fishermen into the waves below – reminiscent of those i’d seen in Italy, the ones you pass on the train in Abruzzo along the Adriatic coast on the way to Paglieta, my family’s town.

when you again hit land, it is ironically the land hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina three years ago (has it really been that long?) the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. it still looks like a bomb hit here and the train goes right through the heart of it – perhaps the best way to survey the damage and get a feel for the level of destruction.

at this point, my New York complex kicks in, and after a few sparse shots i lower my camera, dwelling on the visceral reaction i feel when tourists over-photograph Ground Zero. in a way this devastation is more striking… maybe because it is so vast, spread across miles. maybe it is the somber markings that buildings here bear like a scar, which up until now i’ve only read about -

- tragic icons left by various rescue authorities after the storm that decode the devastation suffered by individual households. most of the houses here bear a “9″ indicating the ward, and numbers on either side to indicate how many bodies were uncovered. there are letters that indicate the responding agency. most of the houses here are also marked with “TFW” – toxic flood water. months went by before authorities could even respond to this area, which less than three years ago was almost completely underwater.

as the train wheels into the city, it pulls up next to the Superdome, and i’m reminded that for the weeks after the storm this stadium represented to the world all the suffering this city endured. it also serves as a painful reminder of the helpless pleas of so many people unearthed by the storm that went unanswered by the bungled, failed response of the federal and state governments, and most people in this region, as i’ve discovered, feel quite strongly about that failure.

we disembark and i shake Joshua’s hand, for tomorrow he heads offshore to the oil rig for another two week sojourn of hard work. i tell him to keep safe – always, he says – and to try not to fall off the boat again.

arriving in the big easy

in New York, people aren’t nice. they won’t all hold doors for you or smile freely as you walk by. but things make sense to me, and there is a certain order to existence there. if you’re bold enough to set your own pace, you won’t be swallowed up. New York, Philly, the Great Northeast; i feel a certain swelling of pride, almost, at saying it. as Steve points out, we have characters there. not to say there’s any shortage of “characters” out here – lots of people end up out here, too, with pretty disparate and unique stories. it’s just no comparison. standing around in a bar with a country western band playing covers of everything from U2 to Vertical Horizons, “with a twang,” and seeing the clamor of blonde white girls gyrating with bottles of Bud Light in their manicured hands. talk about culture shock.

we’re stalled an hour south of Birmingham, Alabama. i fear this is the first of many delays. starting to wonder what compelled me to want to ride trains alone for over 50 hours. i guess i figured it’d give me a lot of time to write about it.

not only are we stalled in this diesel relic (but it’s got real roomy and comfortable seats!) going about as fast as a lawnmower running on fumes, along track probably laid by fucking John Henry and Babe his Blue Ox. every five minutes they feel compelled to cantankerously announce that we are waiting on two other trains to pass us on the single set of tracks. then we will back up and get back on track and move along. so they blame it on others. clean transfer of responsibility. don’t blame us, blame them.  i guess Amtrak really is a government operation.

here is some of that fine track:

i know from megaloping that regional commuter lines like VRE and MARC have to yield to Amtrak, which owns the tracks. now, i’m told Amtrak (out here anyways) leases the freight lines and thus has to yield to freight trains, leading to these sporadic hourlong delays (i hope they figured this into the timetables, but somehow i doubt it). guess i really should have thumbed it cross-country and stowed away on stagecoaches and iron giants and freighters, a la Hemingway. i would, if i were armed. steve gave me his set of Japanese throwing knives, just in case, but my aim is pretty damn awful.

—

an hour later, a country boy headed to New Orleans puts down his Nintendo DX and asks what i’ve got in the case. i hand it to him and he’s ecstatic to strum around for a little while. he plays a couple catchy blues riffs and bends my new strings just enough without sounding unpleasant. then he breaks into the Stairway to Heaven. i need to get a t-shirt from Wayne’s World that says, ‘no stairway, and no deep purple.’ he’s interrupted by his mom calling him repeatedly, to which he replies, “mom, you gotta let me grow up someday, y’know.”

little did i know how grown up this “kid” is already. he works “offshore,” he says, on an oil rig. he says it’s not as dangerous as, say, fishing for king crabs up in Alaska, but a few weeks ago he was knocked off a 165-foot boat by a 13-foot wave into rough waters; he only survived, he said, because a fellow offshoreman grabbed his life jacket. he saw an offshoreman’s arm shatter to pieces when it was hit by a ‘headache ball,’ a 150-lb. suspended metal sphere that balances a crane.

he’s only been doing this for six months.

he says it’s all about “keepin’ up with yourself when you’re tired, keepin’ on your toes. sure, it’s risky, but all jobs are risky.”

i tell him it sounds a lot riskier than what most people i know do.

he can’t be more than 22, even though he’s been married two and a half years and leaves his wife in Birmingham every two weeks to work on the rig down in the Gulf. it’s good money, he says – most people haul in $48,000 to $60,000 after a year’s work; two weeks on, two weeks off, 50-plus hours per week. this nine hour train commute is just part of the job – gives him time to relax, he says, before going back to work.

he drops names of small towns and casinos in Alabama and Louisiana – he was born in Baton Rouge, and my familiarity ends there. i tell him i’m not from around here. he asks if i’m from “up north,” and i say yes. he says, “i was gonna say, you don’t have that ‘new york’ accent, but you definitely have that ‘new york look’ about you.”

i ask him how far we have to go, and he advises me not to count the hours, or the stops. “if you do, you’ll just get pissed off,” he says. “i’d add three hours for every 7 hours.” with this equation i can expect to spend 20 hours on various trains to Austin tomorrow. he laughs, and doesn’t envy me, but says the train is the cheapest option out here if you want to stretch out and you aren’t in a hurry.