Tag: trains

Three Out of Five Times

Daily writing prompt
You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?
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I’ve gone across the United States a few times. Furthest was from San Fransisco to New Hampshire via New York. I did that a few times in the military, always by train, and then SF to Connecticut via NY a few times for business, also by train.

I’ve always loved traveling by car. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my parents loaded us into cars and off we went! One trip, barely remembered, was in a large Chevy station wagon from California to Pennsylvania. I think I was three years old. What I best remember about that was that I shared space in the station wagon’s back end with my older sister and a large black trunk. The trunk was useful as a fort and a table. Traffic being what it sometimes was, peering out the windows and waving to others was a recurring pastime. There were many coloring books involved with that trip, too.

My wife and I took a few almost cross-country trips. After I returned from my military assignment in the Philippines, I traveled to West Virginia where my wife stayed with her parents via commercial aircraft and Greyhound bus. Some of the logistics are a little foggy in my head, but I ended up visiting family in Pittsburgh and bought a used Porsche 914 there. I drove it down to West Virginia, and then my wife and I drove it across the southern United States to my new duty location outside of San Antonio, Texas. The first five hundred miles was through a blizzard. We then drove the reverse trip eight months later, when I decided to exit the military.

Funny enough, years later, there we were, in Texas again. This time we’d returned to the United States from an assignment in (on?) Okinawa. We’d been there for almost four years. Two things to know about driving in Okinawa was that it was on the left side of the road, with a right side steering wheel and the fastest speed we’d gone was 100 KPH, about 61 MPH. Renting a car in San Antonio at the airport, we were suddenly driving on the other side of the ride, the steering wheel on the other side, in the rain, at night, at 70 MPH. It was an awakening.

We then bought a new car, a Mazda RX-7, and drove it from San Antonio, Texas, to…ready? West Virginia. A big blizzard struck Texas that year. Interstate 10 was closed. Fortunately, Texas has Interstate ‘access roads’. We drove out of San Antonio through the blizzard via the access roads until we could get onto I-10. Man, I’ll tell you, traffic was pretty light.

I’ve flown cross country multiple times since then. The last time that my wife and I drove across cross country was from West Virginia to California. This was 1991. We’d been assigned to a base in Germany. She returned a few months early and was living not far from her parents in West Virginia. She’d bought a little Honda Civic. We loaded her and our three cats, Rocky, Crystal, and Jade, into the Honda, along with her belongings, and drove to Sunnyvale, California, via the Rocky Mountains. Let me tell you, the Honda, with its 1.5 liter engine, wasn’t happy about the Rockies. We’d swooped down the mountains as fast as we dared to build up speed to get up the next one. Geez, what a trip.

Not our actual car. Our car looked just like this, except it was gray.

I’ve also gone from Texas to Pennsylvania via Greyhound bus after finishing military basic training in 1975. But the one thing I always wanted to do was take a train across the country. We traveled by train in Japan and Europe, and loved it. It’s hasn’t come to pass in the U.S.

Maybe, someday, though, maybe someday…I’ll get to take a train ride across the United States.

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Friday’s Wandering Thought

I called to make an appointment. Speaking with the agent, I heard her typing fast. Her keyboard’s clickety-clack sounded like a train going by, reminding me of all those moments of sitting in a car behind the red and white boom barrier, bells ringing, red lights flashing, waiting for a train to pass.

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Trains & Cars – A Dream

I was a young middle-aged man, about thirty yeas old, I’d say. Outside was a place where organizers had built a huge platform for HO-scale cars and trains. These are the moderately small things but not the really small or tiny ones. The layout was huge. Workers were in a center pit. From there, they could go anywhere to reach the cars, trains, and track.

I ended up as one of the people allowed to play there. I first built cars. You These models were replicas of famous sports racing cars through the decades. My main car in the dream was a white Chaparral 2E.

Young people were there to help. A group of teenage girls controlled the parts stock. I’d go to them to request parts and supplies. Young boys were always willing to paint things for you for a small fee.

After perfecting my Chaparral’s looks and performance, I began practicing on the long track. The racing car controller was a pistol type, with a light trigger. That made it harder to modulate the speed through corners. I had all but section of track mastered within a short time. The one part was right by the end. I knew it was a curve but it wasn’t visible to me.

After wrecking out on that one place multiple times, I went up to take a closer look at that particular corner and discovered that it was like a parking garage corkscrew. It reminded me of Laguna Seca’s famous corkscrew, which had a blind approach before diving into curves and descending eleven hundred feet at speed. I told everyone there that’s what it reminded me of, then set it aside to deal with later.

For now, I’d play with my trains. A young boy had been painting them for me to forge detailed realism. It was with great pride that I set them on the track and started running it. This train wasn’t short, but was one hundred and two cars long. All went well for a bit, and then my train derailed.

A pit person went to retrieve my train and set it up again. The derailment had taken place at an area accessible to me, so I went there, too. As the pit man set it up, he gave one car to me, saying it was damaged. As I took it, another person came up. I recognized Jeff, a person I haven’t seen in thirty-five years. The man gave Jeff an identical car to my car. I believed it was my car, that I’d had two, but the pit person didn’t understand what I was trying to say. That’s where it all ended.

It was an interesting and vivid dream. My other sharply recalled dream was about a job I had counting prostitutes, but it’s really too weird to go into. For one thing, some of the girls would disappear into smoke when I would try to count them. For another, I didn’t know why I was counting, a question that I kept pursuing, without ever finding an answer.

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How

Just before his grandmother died, she told him stories about her grandmother. Her grandmother had gone across America in a covered wagon, traveling from the Appalachian Mountains to Seattle. It’d been a long and bumpy journey. She didn’t remember how long it took. She didn’t like it there, so she took the train back. It was hot. Black smoke and cinders filled the car whenever they opened the windows for a breeze, so they kept the windows closed and dripped with sweat.

His father heard the story and and remembered his father telling him about driving a Chevy station wagon across the United States. They’d started in Indiana, where it was raining, and drove across the flat plains of corn to the towering Rocky Mountains and up them, and down into California. It took five days to reach San Francisco. They stayed in motels every night. There was a swimming pool at one. Gas was less than two dollars a gallon.

His father’s brother remembered flying from San Francisco to Washington, and how it took almost a day to get there. He remembered looking out the window and watching the ground roll past as the engines roared and the plane climbed into the sky. He remembered the clunk of the wheels going up into the aircraft’s belly, and the change in the engines’ whine, and the wisps of clouds slipping past the windows. They’d had to be at the airport a few hours early, and then they stood in line to check their bags, and stood in lines to go through security, and stood in line to get on the plane, and stood in line to get off and get their bags.

He’d asked each of them, what’d you do when you traveled like that? Well, they said, we sang, and ate, and talked, played games, read books, watched television, listened to music, slept, looked at the scenery, and met people.

He remembered all these things in the time it took him to teleport from his home to the teleport center and out the other end at the moon colony. His last thought before he glanced out at Earth and went into his meeting was, what he would tell his children in his old age, and how they would be doing what he was doing now?

 

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