Chicago-A-Go-Go
Chapter One: Train Songs
Why is it that most songs about trains are sad? Sure there's Love Trains and Peace Trains and even a Soul Train, but most of them are full of mournful distant whistles blowing. Take Tom Wait's Train Song: "It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can't bring me home. What made my dreams so hollow was standing at the depot." Or the Magnetic Field's: "Some people don't believe in time and some don't believe in life. I've been making promises I know I'll never keep. I was born on a train." Solomon Burke sings "Your lover has gone away, don't it make you sad. 'Cuz you're under a strain. So you jump on a fast train." The group Train is just sorta altogether sad.
But why the doom and smokestack gloom about riding the rails? I, for one, was giddy to be climbing aboard Amtrak's Empire Builder--fresh in from Seattle--to take us to Chicago. Of course, I had a pocketful of cash, a beautiful woman at my side and a long weekend away from work just up over yonder. I wasn't even just out of prison for killing a man. Not exactly the stuff that makes for good train songs.
The other side of the tracks became evident as we moved out of the station. The train heaved once and then slid past the platform. At the very end was a middle-aged man with tears in his eyes, waving good-bye to his young daughter. She pressed her face against the glass and twisted her head to watch him as long as possible. It was quickly clear that few people take the train for the romance or scenic majesty--people build up fences and brush to keep trains out of sight. They take it because they can't afford to fly. It's kind of a mobile home park that is actually mobile.
Take Keith, the burly belly of a man who brought his own cooler onto the train. When we sat down near him in the observation car, the first thing I observed was the five or six empty MGD cans lining the rail in front of him. Recently divorced and out of work, he got to talking with a couple, who appeared older than their years and who had also fallen on hard times.
This other man looked like a poster child for menwholooklikehomlesskennyrogers.com. Unkempt gray beard, parchment skin with tattoos that had long ago lost their shape and meaning and a voice that sounded like a honkey tonk singer with a five pack an hour habit. Snippets of conversation we overheard would have made great country and/or western lyrics. He talked of finding work where he could, about friends who became felons, living paycheck to disability check to unemployment check, about hitchhiking to his cousin's farm where they could hopefully stay in a camper on her property. Generally, in his words, about when "shit goes to hell".
Yet throughout it, he spoke in his gravelly tones like he was a lucky man, with a Hank Williams hobo Buddhist attitude who'd get up every time life knocked him to the ground and be glad the fall didn't crush his smokes. Take their final exchange as Keith got up to detrain at a small Wisconsin town that neither of us remembers the name of now.
"This is my stop. I gotta get off and go find myself."
"Well, Keith, if you can't find yourself, hopefully you can find us again on the way back."
"Hell, I'd need to rob a bank to pay for my ticket." said Keith. The look in his eyes was half-serious.
"You could rob a train. For $4.50 a beer, you know there's a lot of money on 'em. Although most of it will be ours." He and, who I'm assuming was his wife, made half-coughing sounds like a dragon laughing. "Good luck, brother. We'll end up where we end up. We're always moving."
They were moving, but they weren't going anywhere. They were like all the stripped, rusted husks of cars we saw piled along the tracks. The burnt buildings, the abandoned bits of machinery, the scrap yards and rag-riddled refuse heaps. Everything that had lost its purpose or usefulness was left waiting along the tracks.
Oh, sure, there were moments when you'd burst from behind a blur of green and squint across vast cornfields or ponds thick with lily pads and mysterious ripples from unseen sources. Sunshine glinted off silos and small-town bars beckoned with good food and cold beer. Kids waved, caught in suspended animation above trampolines and optimistic dogs ran out from bean gardens to chase you forward. There were seniors, heads on chests, saying silent prayers in their sleep. College kids contemplated the future always a bit ahead of them as the present slid by moment after moment.
But it was Keith and the gray-haired couple that stayed with me into that evening. We had just feasted at Souk in Chicago's Bucktown area and wandered across the street to a pub simply called Pint. Sipping a Guinness on the sidewalk I wondered aloud where they were right now.
Ms. Goodtush stared off for a few seconds as if she could see them just up the street. "I bet wherever they are, they're content." she finally said.
"You think?"
She nodded and picked up her Stella. Somewhere, blocks away, behind the bricks, a train rattled past.
"Everyone loves the sound of a train in the distance."
9:25:45 AM 
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