At certain times of day, Amtrak's Empire Service from NYC to Albany becomes the Lake Shore Limited. I found this out when I ran to platform 8 at Penn Station with minutes to spare and saw that the train was bound for Chicago. I ran back up the stairs, checked the board again, then looked at the app, then ran back down to platform 8. Travel has always made me anxious! I used to have dreams where I missed the plane and had to find ships to get to where I was going.
Where are you going? asked the conductor. I showed him my ticket and he let me on.
The train was already filled up, so I walked down the aisle looking for an empty seat, finding everyone had made their row as uninviting as they could—bags on chairs, food out, knees spread, eyes bent into spikes—to discourage anyone from sitting down. We’re all dirtbags on Amtrak, even in our blazers. There were no empty rows, so I backtracked to a skinny man around 60 years old with long grey hair sitting neatly with a backpack at his feet. "You mind?" I asked, and sat down.
The man had a camera with him, and asked me if we were on the right side to see the Hudson River. Which way will the train go? I asked sitting in the tunnel. He pointed ahead of us. That way.
Oh! I said, Then yes, we're on the river side. It's very pretty.
He had a Scottish accent, but a soft one. I decided I'd give him a heads up when we were nearing Bear Mountain, as I think the stretch between Peekskill and Beacon is the best bit of the ride. You pass the Bear Mountain Bridge and then the tall medieval wall of West Point, past which Breakneck Ridge scumbles up from the other side of the train. As soon as we came out of the tunnel and moved up through Yonkers, he started snapping photos through the dusty Lexan window of the cliffs on the New Jersey side of the river. The river is very wide down by the city, and the cliffs taller, but it never looks as good in a photo. So dirty, he said, shaking his head at the crummy photos and flicking the window, Not like European trains.
They're not big on public transportation here, I said. People like to drive.
Don't get me started on the cars! he goes, his eyes coming to life. I'll be driving my sister's little electric car in Dallas and you can park it under some of the big trucks there.
When the conductor came through to check tickets, one of the guys behind us didn’t have one, though he pretended someone had booked a seat for him and they had to go through the motions of sorting it out. There were phone calls and feigned confusion but the conductor made him get off in Croton-Harmon to return to the city and buy a ticket there. Wild that trying to steal travel ends up costing you so much time.
The conversation between the Scot and myself was like the track, sections of straight and quiet and then curving bits of interest. Past Peekskill, I spoke up. The best bit is coming, you'll see Bear Mountain.
He looked at me. I know, he said, I used to go to school over there, 50 years ago. He pointed over the river.
I had his accent pegged instantly, but it took him a bit to hear mine. We sketched out the where-froms. He had a sister in Dallas, a sister in Chicago, and a son in New Zealand, but himself still lived back in Scotland. He asked me, How'd you end up in Albany of all places, then?
It’s a bit random, I said.
Life is all random, he replied.
We talked for a bit more, and he brought up how September had been the hottest on record. We watched the houses glowing on the far side of the river in the dusk, and he said, Feels like we’re past a tipping point.
It’s not good, I agreed.
We talked about the best worst places to ski, Scotland and Australia obviously among them, with their marvelous old mountains and horizontal ice bullets.
A bit later, he asked, What’s that bridge?
I thought maybe the Walkway over the Hudson in Poughkeepsie?
He scoffed. We’re not in Poughkeepsie!
Google showed it was the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, so now I know, but in my defense, it’s a marshy section of river that doesn’t feel as distinctly Somewhere.
A British swimmer “swam” the entirety of the Hudson earlier this year from its boggy origins in the Adirondacks to promote clean waterways. To get technical, he only swam the swimmable bits; there are photos of him picking his way on tiptoes through creeks and over rapids in a swim cap and Speedos.
By the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, the Scot began peeling an orange. I watched him eat it segment by segment. Want some? He asked. I offered him my packet of Sun Chips. Really, I said, I stole it from the office, and won’t need it now, I’m almost home.
He said he was saving himself for the dining car after Albany. Maybe two drinks and a snack and then he could try and sleep sitting up in his chair. Travel isn’t what it used to be, but his ticket was only $100 for a pensioner all the way to Chicago. Money, he goes, You can’t take it with you.
For comparison, I paid—or my company paid—$45 just for this leg. In New South Wales, you can ride all day for $2 as a pensioner, from train to ferry to bus, on and on as long as you like. Nice to think when you’re old enough no one tells you where you can or can’t go. You just get on the ferry and plosh forward under your own steam until you want to stop, which is really what this guy was doing, hopping around the globe from family to family, rock to rock.
The New York-Chicago line used to be known as the 20th Century Limited. It had a barbershop, sleeper cars, a post office, red carpets, and a namesake cocktail:
1 1/2 ounces gin
1/2 ounce Lillet blanc
1/2 ounce white creme de cacao
3/4 ounce lemon juice
lemon twist to garnish
The Times once called it the “world’s greatest train,” which is funny to think about as you offer a stranger a bruised banana taken from the company break room and watch unticketed travelers be dumped out in Croton. I was washing my hands in the bathroom on a different trip when a man yanked open the sliding door. World’s greatest train?
The train slowed as it got closer to Albany. The Scot stood up. I’m going to see if I can find the little boys’ room, he announced, sliding out into the aisle.
I put my laptop away, having done nothing on it but feel its warmth on my legs and stare at the wash of late-day colors out the window. The Scot came back before we got into the station, and we had a few final words. I wished him a good rest of trip/travels as he headed into the night.
I’ll see you in the Cairngorms! he said.
🍸coasting 🍸
Bonus: Life and death, as told by Flaming Flamers in Reservation Dogs
Who among us has not eaten too many Cheetos in limbo?
Reservation Dogs begins with four teens who live on a reservation in Okern, Ohlahoma—Cheese (Lane Factor), Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis)— stealing a truck full of merch, among which, many many boxes of Flaming Flamers chips. They’re stealing and running their black-market chip-sales operation in order to save up money to get out of this go-nowhere town and head to California after the death by suicide of their friend Daniel. The place killed him, they believe.
The Flaming Flamers chips are addictive, with that neon red dusting you know from Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Takis, and also corrosive to the stomach lining if you eat too many (who among us… ), as we find out when Elora winds up at the IHS with abdominal pains. “How many packets are you eating a day?” the doctor asks her. She tells him a couple before admitting it’s somewhere in the teens.
In the Season 3 finale of Rez Dogs, Willie Jack visits Hokti (Lane Gladstone) in prison to break the news in person that tribal elder Fixico has died, and there, over Flaming Flamers, Hokti offers her philosophy. Arranging candy bars in a circle to represent the people who knew Fixico, she doles out a chip to each from the Flaming Flamers bag at the center, explaining that those people will always carry a piece of Fixico with them, and the people who know them will carry a piece of their spirit—including their piece of Fixico—with them and so on. That’s what community is, she explains—a theory that also allows you to cast back over the three seasons and see how indigenous identity has endured, and how Cheese, Bear, Elora and Willie Jack each carried Daniel with them (also: bags of chips). Willie Jack’s black-market chip stall, launched out of despair for Daniel, led her to Fixico, who helped her to take on his knowledge as a medicine man sitting at the trestle table outside the IHS.
Also important to note that Hokti leaves an offering of a Flaming Flamers chip on the empty stool in the prison visit room for the spirits she can see (the show is full of spirits), who then enjoy their packet across the room. So, if you want a chip deep-dive on the show, I KNOW I DO, the Flamers are a spiritual lifeforce, connecting people on both sides of the veil. The Rez Dogs begin the show feeling aimless, needing more than the town and community can offer them, hopped up on risk-taking and despair as they shovel chips into their mouths. They finish it with deep appreciation for what their community, elders, place, and inheritance mean to them even when they leave. Cheese dust to cheese dust.
🎶chips chips, do do dododo chi boom chi boom boom 🎶
My pizza rat Christmas ornament arrived—
—which reminds me
Goodies
Inside was my passport.
There was my face, or what had been my face
at some point, deep in the past.
But I had parted ways with it,
I have an essay in the latest Mother Tongue, out Tuesday! Natalia and Melissa have made something so unexpected and complex and weird and funny with this magazine, which motherhood deserved, you know? What a treat to get in the mail! You can subscribe and find stockists here.
Lewis Pugh, river warrior above, was razzed for using drones to film himself in wilderness areas (where drones require permits).
Bad case of the “shoppies,” hah (like the zoomies but for buying stuff). I’ve been listening to Cool Story with Bri and Bridie, thanks Clare for the rec!
Curious look back in The Nation on “literary fiction’s” road to “literary indistinction” as a marketing concept:
The categories of literary and commercial fiction were further scrambled when Oprah launched her book club in 1996. She casually mixed middlebrow culture (Pearl S. Buck, Ken Follett, Anita Shreve, John Steinbeck) with high culture (William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison), thereby diminishing the distinction between them, making all of it literary fiction and turning literary fiction into mass culture.
Literary Hub: “What to read right now on Gaza and the Hamas-Israel war.”