Leaving Union Station, I asked at the information desk about the paper schedules that used to line one of the walls, only to be told that they were only available online these days.  I then asked the woman working there if she knew any hotels nearby, but the one she directed me to, the Metro Plaza Hotel, next to Oliveira Street, seemed like it would be too expensive, so I stopped just short of the door, and made my way back towards Oliveira Street.

Oliveira Street is home to the Angeles Pueblo, reported to be the first and oldest construction in the city, and is something of a miniature Mexican theme park, with traditional food and vendors selling some of the same wares you might find at the border.  There was Norteno music being cranked up and when I got to the Plaza, saw that it was being supplied by a young DJ in a cowboy hat, and that a handful of couples were up dancing around the bandstand.  It seemed like a leisurely way to spend a warm day.  There were benches to rest on in the shade and a woman selling cold drinks.  For me there was the anxiety of not knowing where I was going to sleep that night, however, so I passed quickly and headed for City Hall, figuring I’d make my way down to Central and the hotels on Skid Row.  In addition to the Cecil, I also knew about the Roosevelt and a few others, really the most disgustingly bad deals on the face of the planet, but what could be done.

Getting there I had to cross the 101 freeway, and saw that the overpass was lined with tents.  Seeing that made my stomach hurt, just like witnessing the encampments under the freeways.  It is OK that people can be rich beyond their wildest dreams and live in mansions and fly their own private planes, but no one should have to live in that kind of squalor.  The price of failure is too great in this country.  Once you start falling you might never stop.  There are countries where poor people still manage to maintain a quiet dignity.  There are societies where families take care of their own.  Here, homeless people end up totally isolated and go crazy, like Marvel Supervillains, as boisterous in their failure as the rich are in their revelry, being brought up to believe that they could’ve been anything, and now having it come to this and being told it’s all their fault.  I’d been out of the country for years.  Brought back by the pandemic and dislocated beyond measure, I was now waking up to that cold possibility every morning and the pain was very real.   

From Central, I made my way down to Los Angeles Street and tracked down the King Eddy Saloon.  Back in the day I’d sometimes be waiting for it to open at six in the morning.  You could get a pitcher of Natural Lite for four twenty-five and a chicken potpie for a dollar.  Half of Skid Row would be sitting there, getting a buzz on before the sun started rising.  Since the time I’d left Los Angeles, however, there’d been a move to revitalize downtown, and now not only was the King Eddy boarded up, but all the hotels, even the Cecil, had been converted into expensive lofts.  If the strategy is to price out the long-rooted transient, homeless population, they’ve still got a long way to go.  I witnessed more tents and makeshift lean-tos on the street than you would expect at an intercontinental Boy Scout Jamboree.

Outside of the old Rosslyn Hotel I asked a security guard about places to stay in the area.  He knew about a hotel a few blocks away that ended up being a boutique place for hipsters and urban professionals.  The cheapest rooms started at two-hundred and fifty.  Only when I was desperate beyond measure did it occur to me to do a search on my phone.  What I discovered was that the Metro Plaza Hotel, back by the train station, was the best I could do on such short notice.  Funny that I was almost on their doorstep earlier.  It was a long trudge back.

The Metro Plaza Hotel is on the edge of Chinatown.  The man working reception took a half hour to find my reservation.  Seeing that I’d just made the booking on Expedia, I accepted that it might take a while, but then it started to feel like another bad sign, as if nothing about the trip had worked out so far, and this was just another example of bad planning and money I couldn’t afford to spend, flying out the window.  When he finally did track down my reservation and handed me the key, the room I wound up in smelled like cigarette smoke, and from an adjoining door came the melodramatic strains of an Asian soap opera, interrupted every so often by a burst of lunatic chatter.

Now that I finally had a plan and place to stay for the night, I realized I hadn’t eaten all day, so grabbed whatever money was on the table and headed out the door, thinking I’d just grab something in Chinatown.  On the way there I passed four young guys wearing Dodgers jerseys and asked if the Dodgers were playing that night.  Of course, they were.  I could see the lights of Dodger Stadium shining from where we stood.  Now came a thought.  The game didn’t start for an hour yet.  Maybe I could walk up and check it out after I ate.

The restaurant I ducked into for noodles and orange chicken was unremarkable.  Their unwillingness to give me a cup of water with my meal may have skewed my opinion.  From there I walked through the Chinatown Central Plaza, past the statue of Bruce Lee, and over to Hop Louie, with its pagoda and paper lanterns.  It was easy to see Dodger Stadium, hovering in the night sky like a pulsating UFO, but hard to know where to cross the 110 freeway to get to it.  I finally googled directions and found a footbridge that crosses the freeway.   As close as the stadium seemed, it turned into a long plod uphill, feeling like my shoes had been dipped in cement.

My idea had just been to walk up to the stadium, but once I got there, I realized I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t make it inside the game.  The Dodgers were on a streak, poised to have the winningest season in their history.  Suddenly, I needed to get in.  All I had was forty dollars.  No credit card.  No ID.  Nothing else.  Back in the day that would’ve been more than enough for a seat in the outfield, but now I didn’t know.  Turns out that I could get in for thirty-five, but they no longer took money.  You had to purchase the ticket on a ballpark app.  The woman who explained this to me was firm.  No ballpark app, no game.  No game?  No game.

I stepped back and tried to think.  At that point my phone seemed to lose its connection to the internet.  The app I tried to download went spinning into infinity and even while it was doing so, I knew full well I didn’t have my credit card information to purchase a ticket.  This couldn’t be happening.  There was a kid working the gate that I went over and flashed my money at.  He’d get it.  He’d know.  What is this world coming to when they don’t take money anymore? 

The kid just shrugged at my dilemma and when I asked if there was an area where guys might be scalping tickets, he looked worried and glanced over at security.  There was no one that I could see, with their hat pulled low, flashing tickets, and it began to dawn on me that I probably wasn’t going to get into the game.  That just fit the pattern of the day perfectly.  Trains not running.  Hotels not operating.  Baseball games that don’t take money.  This was clearly the last trip of my life and it was all going downhill so far.

In the box office there was another woman working, an older one who hadn’t heard my sob story yet.  Before giving up, I approached her and explained the situation.  She sympathized and went to work on finding a solution, eventually buying me a ticket on her own credit card and having me pay her back with the cash.  It was the last thing I expected to find, a real human with a real heart, going against the grain, doing whatever it took to get a fan into the game.  Beyond thanking her, I should’ve led her out on the field during the seventh inning stretch and let the crowd know about the secret hero they had in their midst.  I’d stumbled across that rarest of finds.  Someone who actually cares.

Five minutes later I was sitting above left field in a sea of empty seats.  Strange to be way up there looking down on the lights of downtown after the way the day had started and mostly stayed.  It made me think that perhaps there might be a chance after all.  If one person could care, maybe there were other people who cared out there as well.  Maybe there was a solution, a hope, a future beyond the grim one that perpetually tortured me to the point where I was jumping out of my skin. 

It wasn’t much of a game against the Diamondbacks.  For most of it the score was tied at one a piece.  Then in the ninth the D-backs got a solo homerun shot.  It might’ve been safe to assume that the game was over.  Suddenly the bases were loaded, however, and the score was tied.  At that point, Mookie Betts, who’d been sitting out most of the game, came into pinch-hit and hit a single, driving in the winning run.  The crowd leapt to their feet and now, strangely, inexplicably, instead of jumping out of my skin in angst, I was jumping around in joy.

Perhaps that was the moment that my trip really got underway.  It was going to have its good and bad moments, and there was no way of telling when or what order they’d come in.  That is the beauty about heading off into the unknown.  I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that was way better than thinking that I did and waking up every morning barely able to face the day.

Check out was at twelve o’clock and since I was paying so much for the room and still had so much time to kill before the Southwest Chief departed that evening, I wasn’t prepared to give it up until twelve o’clock on the dot.  That gave me time to download and study some of the train schedules.  I already knew and had ridden most of the long-haul routes, the Southwest Chief, the Sunset Limited, the Texas Eagle, the Coast Starlight, the City of New Orleans, the Lakeshore Limited, the Crescent, the Silver Star.  What was important to know was what days they ran and what times they departed and arrived.  The best thing possible is to be able to just hop from one train to the next.  Most of the time it requires an overnight stay, however, so I’d have to download an app for hostels as well.  One thing I could not afford was to be stranded in a big city, paying a lot for accommodation.

When I was in college I’d gotten to study in England and do some traveling in Europe, so had been introduced to the hostel system, shared rooms, often with bunkbeds, and shared bathrooms and cooking facilities.  I’d never heard about anyone staying in a hostel growing up.  No one I knew had ever done much traveling.  The assumption seemed to be that you would need a lot of money and possibly some connections if you wished to do so.  In Europe I met kids, however, often without much money, who were traveling all over the world in ways I never dreamed possible.

My preference is to go to affordable countries, where a single room can be found at a reasonable price.  Latin America and Southeast Asia have been such destinations in the past, although prices seem to be going up all over the globe.  If it comes to needing a cheap place to crash, I still do hostels, when necessary, particularly in Europe or some of the big cities in America where they’ve begun to spring up.  It doesn’t pay to go bankrupt if all you really need to do is lie down for a few hours.

The Hotel Metro Plaza let me store my things behind the desk once I’d checked out, which was convenient seeing that Union Station was right across the street.  My plan was to go back and revisit some of the old haunts from my days of living downtown.  Ah, the good old days when I’d lost my mind and completely fallen out of society.

From Spring Street, I walked past City Hall and the Criminal Courts building, then took First up to Broadway.  What is left of the historical core of downtown Los Angeles is buried as deep in years of neglect as ancient Pompei is in volcanic ashes, but if you know where to look you can see signs of it.  I walked past the Central Market and Clifton’s Cafeteria, where my grandfather used to eat as a young man, before the city, in coordination with the automobile industry, replaced all of the streetcar lines with freeways, creating the first car city in America and dooming future residents to a gridlocked dystopia, with over 500 reported incidents of road rage in one year alone.

As the name might suggest, Broadway is also home to a number of historic theaters, some of which have been refurbished and are back to hosting concerts and events.  The Los Angeles Theater had something going on called Metal and Monsters.  The Globe was advertising travesuras, which translated to antics, or mischievous conduct, when I looked it up.  Joe Satriani was playing at the Orpheum, and a few blocks over, at the Mayan, there were two acts on the marquee, Minimal Effect and Detroit Love.

The place I was really interested in tracking down was the Stillwell Hotel, on the corner of 8^th and Grand, where’d I’d lived my last two years in Los Angeles, dreaming dreams so big all they did was send me over the edge.  I’d paid five-fifty a month the first year, and six-fifty the second, for a room that included room service once a week, with an Indian restaurant on the ground floor, as well as the famous Hank’s Bar, which I would descend to nightly in the elevator, like Batman sliding down the pole to the Batcave.  The Hotel was still there.  Hank’s was still there.  The Indian restaurant was still there, but looked like they were only open for take-out.  I asked the guy at the desk if they still rented rooms on a monthly basis, but the answer was negative.  Apparently, during COVID they’d tried to fill the hotel with homeless folks and the owner had put his foot down and stopped taking new residents altogether.  That was a pity.  There was nowhere even remotely affordable left in the city, as far as I could tell.

From the Stillwell I walked up and through the Central Library, where I’d spent long hours checking out books and world music CDs that I would take back to my room and burn, never listening to one of them, just burning boxes of CDs that never got played, kind of like the CDs of my own music I was producing at the time.  The library was one place still enforcing the mask mandate, so I dug one out of my pocket and put it on, just to walk to the door on the other side, pass through, and climb the steps to Bunker Hill.  There was my old YMCA, the best in the world.  It occurred to me then, quite sadly, that no matter how bad things had seemed back then, they were way worse now.

The Arts District was a long way from Bunker Hill, but it was a walk I was intent on making.  I had four hours before the train left and there were things I still wanted to see.  On the way I passed Pershing Square with its strange, purple tower, crossed Broadway again, and then headed down 5^th, back in the direction of Skid Row and the King Eddy Saloon.  As far back as the 1930s, there’d already been upwards of ten thousand homeless folks crammed into the one square mile of Skid Row.  For most of its existence the policy was one of containment, like locking a bunch of wild animals in the same cage.  They might hurt each other but can’t get at anyone else.  I crossed Los Angeles Street and walked past the Los Angeles Mission, which seemed oddly vacant on this day.  Perhaps everyone was being housed in the big tents that lined Sixth Street all the way to Alameda.

At the Little Tokyo Market Place, I had to stop and get an iced tea.  Twenty-five earlier, after making my first record and moving downtown, I’d gotten hired to do patch work on the roof. The guy who’d engineered the record got me the gig and I’d spent a few miserable weeks up to my elbows in black tar, before the rains of El Nino put us on a permanent hiatus.  It wasn’t much money, but more than I’d ever get playing gigs and selling CDs.  No.  That was never going to happen.

Walking up Hewitt was like walking through a dream, as I got closer to the American Hotel on the corner of Traction.  That had been a lucky find and good, if brief, time of life.  If we hadn’t recorded my record right across the street from it, I never would’ve known about it or the famous Al’s Bar downstairs.  As luck would have it, I was able to get a room there shortly thereafter, four hundred dollars a month, if I remember right, and there began my life in Los Angeles.  There would be three or four bands playing every night and the floorboards would be shaking too hard to fall asleep, but who wanted to sleep?  If all I’d wanted was to party and play foosball, I’d come to the right place.

Al’s Bar closed down in 2001, but the American Hotel is still in business, either that or back in business.  Four nights probably costs the same as a month used to, and you probably won’t be sleeping on a hairy futon in a closet-sized room, adorned with snot and punk rock stickers.  That kind of charm can’t, and maybe shouldn’t be, recaptured.

By now, I realized I should probably head back up to Chinatown and get my bags.  I needed some time at the station to prepare for my upcoming ordeal.  Passing Oliveira Street, I heard the same Norteno music from the day before and saw some of the same couples dancing in the plaza.  I’m getting old and should’ve been sitting on a bench in the shade, drinking a Jamaica and reminiscing with acquaintances about the way things used to be, not jumping on a train with no idea what I was doing or where I was going.

Was this another adventure I was chasing or just more madness?   There seemed to be no difference anymore.  If there’d ever been an easy option, it no longer existed.  I’d pushed things too hard and too far to ever get back what I’d given up or passed on, and though by now the cost had become unbearably steep, the only way to keep desperation at bay was to just keep moving.  So, that’s what I intended to do.

The Southwest Chief is roughly 2,300 miles long and runs from Los Angeles to Chicago, passing through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois.  Before all the independent lines were consolidated in 1971 under the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, which became known as Amtrak, it was called the Super Chief and was operated by the Santa Fe Railway.

After grabbing my bags at the Hotel Metro Plaza, I headed over to Union Station, which looks like an old Spanish Mission on the outside and an opera hall on the inside.  Riding the train can be like traveling back in time.  I’d always envied the explorers and pioneers, who’d made the journey out west, back when America was a land of unlimited opportunity.  By the time I got out of school, there was no place you could just show up and not be trespassing.   It could even be considered a crime to sleep in your car, if you could afford one. As long as my Rail Pass was good, I had a place to be.  After that I’d need to find something fast, which probably meant leaving the country.

I checked in and requested a window seat.  The gate had yet to be announced, so I went over to sit down in the cavernous waiting room.  The chairs were roped off.  You needed to prove you had a ticket to enter and sit down, so I was curious about a guy who appeared to be homeless, his bags scattered all over the floor, laughing at jokes that no one could hear and speaking a stream of unintelligible gibberish.  It was hard to contain my dismay then, when we finally boarded the train, and he ended up on my coach, only a few seats back.  He couldn’t sit still and began to pace the aisles, his pants down to his knees, flapping his hands in the air.  The tag above his seat indicated that he was going all the way to Chicago.  It was an inauspicious way to begin the trip.

When we pulled out of Union Station, the train retraced the tracks I’d arrived on the day before, past the same riverbeds, graffiti and industrial rooftops, stopping once again at the Fullerton Station.  Then we headed east, reaching Riverside by dusk and San Bernadino by nightfall.  A short while later it was Victorville.  The car I was in was still pretty empty.  Everyone had two seats to themselves.  Young homey would be up pacing the aisles for the duration of the trip.  It was clear he was high on something, but on what, I wasn’t sure.  He appeared to be harmless, almost autistic, but was definitely a nuisance.

The first stop we came to where we were allowed to get off the train for a smoke break and to stretch our legs was Barstow.  It was cold out and I wandered the platform, feeling like I should join a conversation circle, but lacking the appropriate vice to do so.  I took pictures of the sides of the train and the Amtrak logo, then walked behind it and took pictures of the caboose, the two red lights flashing like the eyes of a silver robot.

After leaving Barstow, the overhead lights turned blue, with a matching set of green lights running down a strip on the floor.  The desert outside was dark and the train rocked back and forth, the whistle blowing incessantly, giving voice to the sorrow and angst that was rising in my soul.  In the blue light I caught my reflection, the same reflection I’d been seeing in bus, train, airplane, and boat windows for years now, once as a young man with a dream in his eye, now as a battered, blown-out old one, still desperately clutching to that dream because there was nothing left to hold onto.  Had it ever come true?  In some ways, it had.  Had it mostly been a nightmare?  There was no question that it had.

Sometime during the middle of the night, not long after passing through Needles, the train stopped dead on the tracks and just sat there for a long time.  I knew they had to yield the tracks to freight trains from time to time, and hoped that it was that and not a mechanical issue.  Behind me a Mexican with a baseball hat was leaning back in his seat with his mouth wide open, snoring as if he’d swallowed a rattlesnake and was trying to choke it back up.  Behind him the guy who’d been on the phone all night, talking to women from foreign countries, promising to send them money, took the opportunity to call another one.

Habibi, I heard him greet her.  You know I’m not wealthy.  Rich.  I’m not rich.  But I will send you something.  I also heard him complain about the guy, right behind him, who couldn’t keep his mouth shut and had been pacing the aisles all night.  It’s the drugs, I heard him explain to her.  In America we’ve got a lot of people hooked on drugs.

Once we got underway again, I bent over and tried to sleep.  I’d pulled out the leg rests on both of the seats and could just cram into a horizontal position with my knees drawn up against my chest and a thin sweatshirt between my head and the headrest.  The train managed to rock me to sleep, over and over again, but I kept waking up in fear.  Why had I lived this long?  I’d missed my chance to go out with any dignity fifteen years earlier, when I’d still been in Los Angeles, wrapping up my final record.  Since then, I’d wandered the world like a hungry ghost, inventing new ways to suffer. 

The guy two seats back got on the phone with another woman.  How’s my little monkey, I heard him ask.

I passed out and woke up to a pink and purple sky.  The sun was beginning to rise over the desert.  A yellow crown appeared and was reflected in a narrow stretch of water that had gathered beside the tracks.  In the distance, beyond the scrub brush, were a series of flat-top mountains.  By now we’d already passed Flagstaff.

Around eight, I went to get a cup of coffee at the café and sat drinking it in the observation car as we pulled into Gallup, New Mexico.  I’d been through Gallup the year before and recognized some of the Zuni trading posts.  Waiting to board the train was a young guy in a blue suit jacket and black sunglasses, looking like he was on his way to audition for a Blues Brothers cover band.  The train was heading to Chicago, after all.  When I went to my seat to grab my charger, I saw he’d been given the seat next to mine.

Back in the observation car, I noticed another musical type, now sitting at the far end with a guitar on his lap.  As we pulled out of the station, he began to serenade us with fingerpicking music that was the perfect soundtrack for a journey across the high plain.  When he took a break, I complimented him and found out that he was a songwriter from Pasadena on his way to try his luck in New York.  We talked about the music scene in Los Angeles and how difficult it is to gather any momentum.  It used to be that there were very few entertainment options available and a huge audience for them.  Nowadays, with the internet, social media, and streaming, there is endless content and if an audience exists at all, it is one with a diminished attention span.  Mark, as he introduced himself, was hoping to make a record anyway.

Just then there was a call for emergency services from the dining car.  They were looking for a doctor or nurse, anyone with a medical background.  A few minutes later, young homey emerged, trailed by a concerned crew member.  Apparently, he could speak coherently when required to, and was insisting that he was all right.  My hope was that they’d kick him off the train before long.  We still had over thirty hours before we got to Chicago.

At a nearby table there was another guy who might require an intervention at some point, already starting in on his third whiskey coke of the morning.  He’d intruded on a couple, the guy in a paisley sweatshirt, the woman tattooed and looking recently beat up.  He was angry about the no smoking policy.  What he really wanted to do was get high and wondered if he could smoke his vape in the bathroom.

It was time to try to book my next leg of the trip.  I’d studied all the schedules and what seemed to make sense was to head to Miami straight away, as it was the one place I really wanted to see.  Years earlier, I’d traveled from Miami to Washington DC on the Silver Star, but didn’t recall much, since my condition at the time had been close to that of the guy looking to get high in the bathroom.  Florida seemed like the most exotic place I could get to on the train, something different.  All the other places, I’d been to many times before.

With a Rail Pass, all you need to reserve the next section of your trip is call 1 800 USA RAIL.  As soon as I was able to interject myself into the menu, I asked to speak to a representative.  After ten minutes on hold, I got to talk to a real, live person.  She was able to get me on the Capitol Limited the day after my arrival, with a direct connection to Miami from DC.  I’d have to spend one night in Chicago.  The next step then, was to find a hostel.  Looking on Hostelworld, I found one a mile from the station that would work.  It was forty dollars for a shared room with six bunks in it.

Now that I had the next few days straightened out, it felt like a could relax a little and enjoy the view.  The range outside the window looked like one a cowboy would go galloping across in a Western.  There were herds of cattle grazing on the bleached grass.   Mark sat at the end of the observation car playing a plaintive ballad that sounded like something Sergio Leone would’ve come up with.  When I asked him about it, he admitted it was a song by Madonna he’d been trying to learn.  I never would’ve guessed.

There was an hour layover in Albuquerque and the guy in the café was suggesting that everyone hit up a market right outside the terminal if they wanted to save some money on lunch.  Maybe he was running low on turkey and cheddar sandwiches.  A few Native women had tables set up on the platform and were selling blankets, jewelry, and baskets.  I made my way through the station and over to the market where the special of the day in the deli section was the Frito Bowl, basically a bowl of chili and a bag of Fritos, not bad but why not just call it chili.  I bought an Arizona Iced Tea to drink and went down to sit down and eat on a wall outside the terminal. 

On a bench, not far away, I saw my seatmate, the Blues Brother, who I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to yet, looking like he was waiting on a special assignment.  After about fifteen minutes an old man pulled up and he walked over and got into the car with him.  Apparently, his mission had either been aborted or completed and he was going home with his dad. 

Back on the train, I returned to the observation car.  The guy who’d gotten an early start on the whiskey cokes, who was wearing a Thug for Life T-shirt, was sitting at a table with the guy in the paisley sweatshirt, jamming his jam real loud for everyone to hear.  At a table next to them sat four Amish folks sat playing cards, looking like they could’ve just arrived on the Mayflower, so out of touch with modern times had they remained.  At first one of them appeared to be giving Thug for Life the evil eye, until I walked past and realized there was no eyeball in the socket.

After a short stop in Lamy, we passed through pine mountains before reaching Las Vegas, New Mexico.  From there, it was largely blue skies and yellow plains.  Small groupings of pronghorn antelopes stood in the grass and watched the train pass.  Beneath a distant windmill, a herd of cattle grazed contentedly, no thought of the past or future, suspended in the eternal now.  A river flowed beside the tracks.  Yellow wildflowers appeared in thick bunches.

Around 4:30 we pulled into Raton and were given a ten-minute smoke break.  I’d been through Raton on the train before but only remembered it because Townes Van Zandt had written a song about it snowing there.  Townes was a songwriter who’d had a big impact on me as a young guy, and I’d done my best to become the kind of traveling troubadour he’d been, going so far as to emulate all the self-destructive habits that destroyed him by his early fifties.  What I’d discovered about tortured artists is that their suffering can seem romantic from afar.  When it happens to you, however, there’s absolutely nothing to recommend it and you can be sure there’s no one standing around applauding.  I still love Townes Van Zandt, but realize now that it’s too late that I should’ve chosen my role models more carefully.

Just outside of Trinidad, as we were beginning to enter a mountainous, forested region, the conductor announced that he’d seen a lot of black bear activity in the area lately, and that if we kept our eyes open, we might get lucky and spot one.  I sat at the window scanning the hillside intently, but saw no bears, only a lone bull elk with an enormous rack, bugling with its head tilted back. 

I got a cheeseburger and coke in the café and returned upstairs to look for more wildlife.  Deer and antelope were everywhere, and it struck me that this was the proverbial home on the range.  There were no buffalo roaming, but all the other elements were in place.  It was the very opposite of the downtown Los Angeles scene I’d just left, and what you might call home on the street – tents on sidewalks and under freeways, toxic rivers, rats, and cockroaches – the place that had driven me out of my mind and onto the road, with no end in sight. 

Just then, young homey appeared over my shoulder.  He pointed to the seat next to me and picked up an ipad, asking if it was mine.  When I shook my head no, he went looking for the conductor so he could turn it in.  It wasn’t what I expected from him.  He wasn’t that bad, just crazy.  If that were a crime, most of us would be locked up for life.

The sun had already set by the time we pulled into La Junta, Colorado.  Three women who were traveling together took the seats behind me.  The one who was right behind me had a mask on and was sniffling and wheezing from the get go.  It was around then that I looked on my phone and saw a news report about a hurricane that was forming in the Caribbean and making its way towards Cuba.  They were predicting that it would continue to gather strength and hit Florida the exact day that I was scheduled to arrive. 

We made our way across southern Colorado and the sound of the train whistle felt like that of my own pain and disappointment, pouring out of my open mouth and bellowing into eternity.  What were the chances of a hurricane striking Florida on the one day I was going to be traveling through?   If I could ride the train straight into the hurricane and get ripped off the tracks and blown into smithereens, I gladly would have, but that’s not how it would go down.  Instead, I’d get to DC, find out the Silver Star line had been suspended, and then be stranded there too late in the day to come up with a backup plan.

Eventually, I slumped over and got back into my sleeping position, bunched up on the two seats, with my knees tucked into my chest.  In the middle of the night, I woke up and my throat felt itchy.  I thought of the woman behind me who’d been sneezing and blowing her nose all night, and couldn’t even go there.  To get sick right now, probably with COVID, would make this the most ridiculously bad trip I’d ever been on, at a time in my life when I could least afford to take it.  The train whistle kept blowing and blowing, almost like it was sobbing, and the darkness at the window seemed like it would never dissipate.

One of the most enduring images to come out of the Great Depression is that of the hobo hopping a freight train to get from one end of the country to the other.  Even though many of those who did so had been driven to it by economic desperation, for many young travelers the idea of hopping a train remains the ultimate symbol of breaking free.  I doubt they’d much enjoy it. 

For one, back during the Depression there was a sense of solidarity between the dispossessed that is sorely lacking now.  Two, the men and women riding those trains were often heading towards the promise of employment, so there was some measure of hope in their hard travels.  Where can you hop off a train and find opportunity now?  Nowhere.  Third, they were doing it out of necessity, not as an adventurous stunt.  Jump on a train and cling to it all night long, only to be arrested in the morning.  It might make for a good story, but is no way to live.

All night long I tossed and turned, groaning aloud every time I thought about the hurricane heading for Florida.  We approached Kansas City right as the sun was rising, but only had a few minutes to stretch our legs on the platform once we arrived.  The women behind me were getting off there.  By now I’d determined that I wasn’t sick, sick with depression, yes, but not sick with a cold or COVID, at least not yet.

A whole bunch of riders were getting on in Kansas City.  From here on out the train would be full all the way to Chicago.  A family coming from a wedding occupied the seats all around me, and the adult son who was taking charge of everyone’s seat assignments and luggage sat down next to me.  We rode for twenty minutes without talking, but when I asked to get by him to get to the café car, he was extremely courteous, almost leaping up to let me pass.

In the observation car, with a cup of coffee in my hand, I looked out at the passing farmland, the cornfields, barns, and grain silos, that were familiar to me, having spent most of my upbringing in the Midwest.  The way the sun was splashing through the window led me to try meditating, thinking it might have a calming effect on the anxiety that was surging through me.  Instead, the yellow light just flashed across my eyelids, and I could almost sense the size and shape of objects the train was passing, as if by radar.

The guitar player from Pasadena, Mark, sat down a few seats away without his guitar, complaining of the rough night he’d had.  As we passed through the small farm towns, he talked about another dream he had, that of investing in some property in the country and working the land.  Even though he didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type, that seemed more reasonable than spending all his money to make a record.  If I’d done the same at least I’d have a place to live, as opposed to boxes of unsold CDs that had just ended up in a landfill.

Back in my seat, I got to talking to the guy who was coming from the wedding with his family.  Turns out he actually worked for Amtrak as a mechanic.  Both of us had noticed that the conductor who’d gotten on the train in Kansas City had started off that morning with a full British accent, but that it was gradually slipping away as the day wore on.  By the time he got to us to ask us for our tickets there was no trace of it.  The mechanic confirmed it, saying yep, he’s a Chicago guy.  My thought was that if he wasn’t auditioning for a part in Murder on the Orient Express at his local repertory theater then what was up with that?

When we reached Fort Madison, Iowa, we passed a replica of the fort that was one of the first established in the Upper Mississippi, and later abandoned and burned to the ground by the troops after a siege by the Sauk Indian leader, Black Hawk, during the War of 1812.  It was here we crossed the Mississippi River and reached Illinois on the opposite banks.

A few hours later, the conductor, his British accent now only a distant memory, announced that we were arriving in Mendota, and not long after we were approaching the outskirts of Chicago.  The mechanic sitting next to me pointed out the neighborhood where he grew up, the street where he went to high school, and even the garage where he worked, once we got into the railyards.  The skyline was one I knew well, made prominent by the Sears Tower, which for a while was the tallest building in the world, and now, according to the mechanic is known as the Willis Tower.

At Union Station, we pulled into the subterranean platform area and the Southwest Chief came to a quiet halt.  The first leg of my journey was up, and what lay ahead looked to be chaos, thanks to a hurricane that had formed in the Caribbean and was making its way towards my next destination, which was supposed to be Miami.  At least I’d booked a place to stay for the night.  When I got there, I’d try to figure out what to do next.  There are always options, even if you don’t like any of them.  Sometimes you need to decide what the least terrible thing is and just go for that.

Chicago is the hub of the Amtrak network, so if you can’t find a long-haul train leaving from there on short notice, you probably can’t find one anywhere.  As I dragged my suitcase towards the Great Hall, passing the various gates with their prerecorded arrival and departure times all playing at the same time, like an unsynchronized symphony of androids, my sense of dislocation was only heightened.  It was hard to know which street to exit to in order to reach the hostel I’d booked the day before.  Climbing up a staircase and walking out the first door I came to, I discovered that the sky was overcast and it was beginning to drizzle.

Until very recently, I’d had no experience with google maps, but by now I had a hard time living without it.  It began directing me towards my hostel, but was difficult to make out as I needed to clutch the phone to my chest in order to protect it from the cold rain.  The street it wanted to take me down was closed due to construction, so I was detoured a block north, and then over the 91 freeway.  The area I found myself in was a Greek section of town.

Check-in was fairly simple, but the room I was assigned to wouldn’t open at first.  I went back down to ask about it at the desk and was told to push harder.  When I did, I was met with a blast of hot, stale air, perhaps the same that greeted the workmen that blasted Al Capone’s vault open thirty-five years earlier during a televised special that Geraldo Rivera had hyped as equal in importance to the excavation of King Tut’s tomb.  Outside of the stale air, all they’d discovered was dirt, rubble, and two empty bottles.  The only way Geraldo could’ve justified his extravagant hoax at that point would’ve been comparing it to the American Dream, mostly hype and empty promises.

The room I was staying in had twelve beds in it.  Fortunately, there was a bottom one open.  There were also lockers available, but I’d need to provide my own lock, so I took a walk to a Walgreen’s on the corner to pick one up.  It had stopped raining, but was still cloudy and cold. After locking up my things, I walked back in the direction of Union Station and found a pizza place that was showing the Monday Night Football game between the Packers and Buccaneers, a highly anticipated match-up between Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady, which came down to the last second and justified my buying a second piece of pizza so I could sit there until it was over.

Back at the hostel, I sat in the stuffy common area for a few hours, watching back-to-back episodes of NCIS, nothing I would’ve considered under different circumstances.  Most of the odd characters I observed charging their phones and checking their facebook accounts ended up in the same dorm room as me.  By the time I went up there at ten o’clock, half the beds were full and two guys on top bunks by the window were already snoring.  I lay down, but was never going to sleep.  The snoring was beyond intrusive.  One old guy with a white beard was lying flat on his back, like a corpse come back to life, trying to blow the lid off his coffin.  A younger, bearded apprentice in the bed next to him sounded like he was releasing the air from a whoopie cushion, one rattling blast at a time.  Between the two of them, they’d been tasked with gathering all the stagnant winds of the universe and releasing them into the already putrid air of the crypt we were in.

After a few hours I was rigid with fury.  A few times I leapt to my feet and shook their beds in frustration.  They would rearrange themselves, it would get quiet for a moment, and then as soon as I lay back down it would start up again.  One guy got up with his blanket and pillow and disappeared.  A short while later I went down to the common room and found him sprawled out on the couch.

As soon as daylight appeared at the window, a chorus of alarms began ringing like the chirping of birds.  The two snorers were the first ones up, now wanting to smile and wish everyone a good morning.  Good morning.  How did you sleep?  My anxiety was at peak levels.  I’d hadn’t slept at all and in ten hours was scheduled to be on a train heading towards Miami.  All signs now indicated that Hurricane Ian was going to be a real thing, perhaps the most destructive storm to hit Florida in years.

I knew something needed to be done, but wasn’t sure what.  I’d have to figure it out fast.  Maybe New Orleans.  That might be a good place to lay low for a few days.  Jumping out of bed, I snatched my computer and travel documents out of the locker and hurried down to the common room to see what I could do.