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Short-story genre: Prose
Train Ride Back East in Autumn đ
On My Way to DC
As I look out my Amtrak window sitting cosily in my guest blue colour roomette there is an embankment I see. I see, majestic, all-knowing, beauties beginning to appear in a dance of sequential wonderment before a tired self.
I realize it’s trees; these trees; swaying past my vision in their all glory who are going to be my companions on this unusual journey before me.
Trees, trees and more trees as if going on forever “Shall Comfort Me” they say to me. 
I perk up doubting I’d been spoken to, and, 
suddenly, a mill; spilling its ground-up sandy wood pulp into the train’s side, its sawdust mist in the air. Disheartened I feel at this sight as it breaks my peaceful thoughts,
but, the train, continues.
Commandingly to the first station it goes.
Everett, Washington is in sight. We’re well on our way now.
Time moves. I’m unsure how long has passed.
At Shelby Montana we stop. Itâs snowing. Cold, very cold. 
Some Albertans disembark to yell and smoke.
A lovely man named Gul appears in front of me and says he is assigned to me. He is a most wonderful maĂźtre-dâ.
Taking him in, it strikes me that he might have been a child of parents of partition India; he has a very delicate manner, as if a subtle recognition in his eyes of the immense spiritual experience and history of train travel.
Interested in people, so very astute he is; to the point of knowing to have a glass of champagne poured for me 
just, so.
Pure poetry he achieves as he places the glass on a linen white napkin, under the comfort of my rectangular-window 
beneath the expanse of the rose sky.
A sky, a sky golden which is to be yet another of my journey’s friends; its moving and exquisite color shows itself to me at the train’s juncture. I am delighted.
Misty dusk approaches, getting on now for five in the evening now.
A soft sound of the train horn breaks the emotion contained silence as we pull east.
âSupper time”. Gul commands me, again.
âOh yesâ, I say.
He insists “Food for the core is to be had in the dining car”.
The meal eaten ever so happily by me; then returning to my roomette and cleverly nipping into the rince station when others were still chomping down and drinking.
Under the soothing blue light that doesn’t turn off above my head I peer to the outside again.
My peripheral catches the romance of another train passing by in the opposite direction. 
Then, white light: maybe stations; maybe just features along the rail line lending a helping hand, the strong steel âanimalâ smoothly making time, east.
America is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not.
As my train crackles along the deep worn tracks stealthily, courageously into the night; tears well down my face, music plays in the background and I think about whatever residue faith I may have left in me.
I sense a kind of Spirit engulf me but then I think, “Ah just being silly again”.
“Trees donât talk right, trees donât hug you”.
Alas they did: Me, that day.
We stop again. Folks get out to smoke again; others to stretch their legs.
Grain silos stand politely in the distance. 
Chilly passengers recollect themselves after a short while. Satisfied now. 
And we press on.
It’s the old side of towns we get to see from trains. Indescribably raw. 
U.S.A is poor in appearance, in parts, especially through North Dakota; sights that one might have the occasion to read about in a novel. But here, from my rectangular window, more vivid, ever so more vivid I gaze into the soul of the night to see what it has to teach me.
Damp from the corridor I return to my window. Safe again.
Pitch dark outside, barely able to see even the silhouette of even the branches now.
Blood red sky.
North Dakota. Home of American Indians.
Images pass through my mind of them fighting to protect themselves. Their land. A land so plentiful with oil.
Oil that is so voraciously, wanted and desired, and with an angry vengeance, by all those who surround it. But with “The Indian” in the way.
“God bless the Indian” I murmur, between Stanley and Williston.
On the east side of Williston, I manage to fumble for my camera to take photographs of North Dakotaâs oil rigs and their flame fires; only visible with a squint.
Oil, oil and more oil in North Dakota.
I witness tens and tens of freight trains. “Liquefied-Petroleum-Gas” I read plastered on jet black or orange rust-coloured cars;clambering by; in the opposite direction. 
How many times we waited for the freight trains! They get first dibs on the old tracks. Business before people; is the way on the Amtrak; these days. Not owning the tracks, [ourselves the public that is], 
we must beckon to higher authority.
It’s Burlington Northern Santa FeâBNSF that runs things in these parts; with their cargoes and their boxes of chemicals.
Cleaning products, fertilizers, black cylinders containing this and that. I noticed black cylinder cars as early as of Spokane, WA. I confirm to myself how they became more numerous through Montana and onwards.
Suddenly and eerily a shocking sight then appearsâŠthousands of horses crammed in a pen.
“For what?” I imagine. It hits me like a freight train. “Theyâre, for food! Horses destined to beâfood” I scream out loud in my mind.
A dreadful thought. One in my mind from which, like the horses, I could not escape.
But I knew I was right. Why else would so-many-horses be in a pen squashed to that degree.
It was their place before execution. Feed-lots.
Then I remembered that Iâd seen an article, the ban on killing horses for food had been lifted in certain States.
Poor struggling States no doubt.
St Cloud, Minnesota; it was.
Bleak. “A kind of Hell” I thought. Factories run down, no longer functioning. Crushed cars on top of one another; everywhere.
CP freight cars. Yes.
Yes, indeed. Canadian-Pacific, with government of Canada, printed right across them; parked abandoned, looking surreptitiously alongside the railway.
I choose to nap.
I awake.
The train is dormant. “Weâre ten minutes out of St. Paul, Minnesota” I hear on the channel box.
“Did you know that the Mississippi River can be seen for an hour and a bit out of St. Paul?” I pretend to speak to someone listening. Should I care. Yes, No? 
But up again, to the dining cart, I go.
“Rather luckily” I thought; I then meet Elsie Dodge, a children’s book author from Denver Colorado. Sheâs a special needs teacher. She carries a teddy bear. Permanently. That’s how she does it. Gets through this life. Sheâs the one with the smile.
Getting closer to the East now. Natureâs features are beginning to change and modify. The seasonal traits, I recognize from childhood, in Montreal.
Starting to see the maple trees, and their rust -colored leaves I love, through my rectangular window now.
Tributaries of the Mississippi seemingly going on forever. Then more maples; in Portage, Wisconsinâjust breathtaking.
Before the destination we move through what I know to be the old stomping grounds of American Civil War soldiers; back in 1850.
I look to see for any colonial fixtures that were still standing. There are some.
We move out of the country as sneakily and clandestinely as we’d moved into it.
Now scenes of urban life, begin to appear, outside my rectangular window. I know my stop is near. I pack up and plan my exit unto a pavement that I’d left so many days ago.
We arrive. I float to solid ground. My soul incubated with the images Iâd seen.
They grace my memory, now and forever.
I love that train, now behind me.
Hear me now. Take a long, long train ride. Never be the same.
Thank you, Maple.
Thank you, Sky.
Thank you, Pine.
Thank you, Indians of North Dakota.
Thank you, Gul.
Until Next Time. #IdleNoMore
~
By Diane Walsh
© mediageode 2012
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