Tuesday, 29 November, 4:35 PM, Car 2901, Roomette 2, Train 29, the Capitol Limited (Washington, DC to Chicago). Between our 4:05 PM EST departure and our 8:45 AM CST arrival, we will have traveled 780 miles. Our light is fading, although the clouds are thinning so that most of the sky is now open. It wasn’t like that today. We left the hostel at about 11:00 in a light drizzle and arrived at Union Station soaked. We first thought to wait for the Circulator Bus and then decided to walk to the US Mint to get more of the new Garfield (not the cat, the president) dollar coins. And eventually we were so wet it didn’t matter anymore. So it goes.
Our days in DC were busy, probably why I haven’t written. The hostel was full of youthful travelers and our co-ed room always had two extra males. I’ve mentioned the two Italians. We also had several Spanish men as well as several South Korean and Southeast Asians and a young man who deserves special mention.
He was from New York, somewhere in an artsy field. He told me he was here for a wedding that is costing somewhere past $1,000,000, at which Diana Ross was the entertainment and he, my unnamed informant, got to sit at a table with (an equally) unnamed female movie star. “I got on everybody’s pictures,” he gleefully told me. In our three minute conversation, the word “narcissist” flashed into view frequently. A few days later the wedding was reported in the Washington Post.
We visited National Geographic, The Holocaust Museum, Museum of the American Indian, The National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Natural History, The National Gallery of Art. The first and last two each visited by one of us. Each is so full of exhibits, displays, and information that we felt overwhelmed and worn out.
Saturday, we rode the Metro to the end of the line at New Carrollton and Brother Al and Carol picked us up for the day. Here we got a great leftover Thanksgiving meal. And we talked and told stories. The light was far gone when they dropped us back at the Metro for our return. They joined us on Monday so Al and I could visit the Spy Museum. Pat returned to the Portrait Gallery with Carol.
Sunday morning we walked up 11th a block to The Ascension and St. Agnes Episcopal Church for 10:00 High Mass. And it was. In an old, very Motherland looking Gothic church, with earthquake damage to one of the towers and the organ (rendering it unusable), we participated in the Highest of High Masses, a worship so beautiful and heartfelt I spent much of the morning wrapped in goosebumps.
The priests and deacons and lay assistants walked slowly each of the aisles as wafting clouds of incense drifted through the sanctuary from the censor waved slowly by one of the liturgical party and a robed one and we antiphonally chanted the Great Litany.
It was there we learned of the Service of Lessons and Carols for this first Sunday of Advent at St. John’s Church, on 23rd just past Washington Circle. We rode Metro there, got the last two seats in the church, sang (and we all did) lustily, and caught the Circulator home.
What a beautiful and blessed day.
In 2005, we visited the Dachau Concentration Camp. The relatively small camp located a short distance from Munich had recreated barracks, ovens, guard houses, and wire: a prison camp. We walked there from our hotel in the altstadt on a cool but pleasant December morning. By early afternoon, a winter storm had rolled in with grey skies, sleet and snow, and dropping temperatures. These were the conditions as we walked the camp and viewed the museum, realizing that here prisoners stood outside, sometimes for hours, in such weather clad only in light, pajama-like uniforms. Our Dachau visit was very much on our minds as we walked among the accumulated horrors documented at the Holocaust Museum. Through artifacts, numbers, survivor stories, and the photographic history of a village in Estonia with a large and eventually decimated Jewish population, the Museum relentlessly witnessed the years and deeds of the Nazi regime.
We learned also about the list of rescuers, those who hid, helped escape, or otherwise aided Jewish individuals and families. Joining notables such as Oskar Schindler, we saw Maria Schauer of Wein (Vienna) who hid several persecuted souls in her home. Even though the Gestapo suspected her, she was able to talk her charges out of danger several times.
The National Geographic exhibit was the “Anglo-Saxon Hoard,” a find of gold buried in a field near Lichfield in Staffordshire, England. An old guy with a metal detector discovered a large cache of gold only a few inches below the level the field’s owner frequently plowed. The find, valued at nearly $5 million, consisted of over 3,500 objects, dated from and before 650 AD. The displays of thin filigree, stamped animals or birds decorated with garnets, several crosses, and sword parts both decorative and useful were exquisitely done.
Returning - Train 7, The Empire Builder, Car 2730, Roomette 5. Currently parked at the LaCrosse WI station. 30 November, 19:42.
I woke at 03:00, somewhere early in Ohio. Snow was falling, dry enough to drift around. We were on a straight and smooth stretch of rail and we flew, blowing a swath of snow as we raced on.
Taking meals on a train is one of the times I am willing to at least appear social. Meeting other travelers and sharing stories is nearly always fun and enlightening.
So far, we have eaten with a lone woman traveling home to Michigan who teaches in a small college, two wonderfully classy and funny African-American women (one a recovered smoker, the other still living in sin) going home to Kansas, and for today’s supper, a couple living out their retirement in West Virginia on their way to Spokane. All very interesting, but none of them body-sacrificing, limit-pushing travelers.
Returning - Same Train/car/roomette, 1 December, 21:21 CST, ten minutes out of Minot. Outside our window, the tan brown of weeds and crop stubble contrasts clearly with the newly fallen snow. On fall-tilled fields, dark clumps of soil create a mosaic with the cold white. One of those passing plowed fields contained a curious Ring-Necked Pheasant, fascinated by the daily passage of the silver Empire Builder. Now we pass a small pond cold long enough that a firm sheet of ice covering is itself covered by an inch of unruffled snow.
The train held at Minot twenty minutes for some to get off and have several cigarettes; others to step off and say, “Damn that’s cold,” and hurry back into the warmth of the train. I walked the length of the train four times, looking for nearby evidence of the spring flood.
The Minot Amtrak office is now located in a former storage part of the building while clean up and repairs take place in the station area. The larger and more visible impact of the flood lies along a wide area north of the station. Mud lines halfway up houses, boarded up doors and windows, and houses simply sitting forlornly empty define the area. I did not learn the extent of the damage, but it looks as though the area has been abandoned of people and services. We read in the paper that several schools in the area are unusable and sit empty.
Nearing Stanley, our next station, we see signs of the energy industry that has enriched some so much that they have begun wintering elsewhere. To the north just past an abandoned farmhouse in the last stages of collapse, a large tank farm - framed by one of the famous mile long lignite coal trains - holds North Dakota crude. Pecking birds connected to the tanks pump oil to the surface. This will continue far into Montana. Talk of returning Dakota to the Buffalo Commons is temporarily suspended. The snow-capped bright blue water tower with STANLEY emblazoned on its southeast side has been given an extension.
Directly overhead, blue sky fights a slowly losing struggle against an advancing grey wall. For the moment, fields and snow are brightly sun lit, almost overwhelming sight. The earlier pheasant should flap his wings and raise his hoarse call. Too soon, the grey will envelop him and draw him back into the unending struggle for survival.
We have passed already two new oil wells being drilled. Nearby, a temporary village of camper trailers shelters the workers in brief hours away from their hard, long, and cold work. Later, when they are in the third day of being unable to see the camper beside them, they will question.
A part of me still lives here in this land of dried fields and drifting snow. I never really left this alone and empty place that is so far distant from, but so much like the spiritual nursery sought by long ago seers and mystics.
Home Again, Home Again: Saturday, 3 December, 08:30: The remainder of the return went according to the script. We arrived in Portland fifteen minutes early. I had enough time to run downtown to Rich’s to buy three Romeo and Julietta corona cigars. One will be the first cigar I have had in over six weeks. It will probably make me retch.
When we left Portland on one of the Northwest’s delightful Cascade Talgo train, I said to Pat “I can’t help but smile sitting here.” After near four days on Amtrak’s lumbering and swaying Superliners, we could just sit back and ... smile.
