…and Back Again

I’m home, and couldn’t be happier.

After almost a month of traveling, I have at last returned to California, and I have posts galore to write in the coming weeks. Night after night of conversation with friends old and new, over whiskey, beer, and pipe-bowls, will do that to you!

But first, to tie up the loose ends.

Was my 4,500 mile trip, in fact, the “great atonement” Zbigniew Herbert said it should be? Hard to say. Certainly, much was demanded of me by the gray gods of travel, but meeting their demands was more like paying a toll than offering atonement.

As you know, my car died in Richfield, Utah, where, as far as I know, he has been salvaged. I was home in St. Louis for a week, followed by a week in Charlotte, North Carolina. There were no Alexandrian Jews or Smaragdine tablets in this stretch of the trip; instead there were humidity, thunderstorms, humidity, fireflies, humidity, the Smoky Mountains, and humidity. The bulk of the moisture in American airspace must be confined east of the Rockies.

What was I doing in Charlotte? Why, producing an original play, Passion’s End, at Belmont Abbey College’s lovely Haid Theater as part of Adeodatus’s Second National Conference on Catholic education and cultural renewal. (I and my co-author, John Turrentine, actually wound up being interviewed for an episode of Conversatio, Belmont’s podcast; I’ll post a link to the finished product whenever they publish it!) The performance went swimmingly, and the discussions afterward were delightful — amplified by starlight above and IPAs in hand. If you ever think Aristotle’s concept of happiness as contemplation sounds dusty and dull, you’ve never sat around with pizza, beer, and opinionated friends, arguing about the fabric of the universe.

Of course, I still had to get back to California, which was complicated by the fact that I drew a false universal and assumed that the TSA’s yearly deferral of requiring a RealID to fly would continue indefinitely — as it did for about five years, if not more. But wonder of wonders, the buck must have finally stopped somewhere in front of a blue-clad security paunch — though how they bent down to pick it up beats me. The RealID requirement, of course, didn’t hit me until I was in the Greyhound beside a pleasant older lady who informed me, between sidelong glances at our loud neighbors across the aisle, that she wouldn’t be on the bus if she’d gotten a RealID in time. “Well, shit,” I thought. I looked out the window at the painted Utah vistas and wanted to gulp significantly, like they do in cartoons: every mile we covered on the way out of California was one I’d have to cover again without leaving the ground.

So how did I cover said miles, lacking, as I did, a car? Therein lay the last adventure of my trip. I took two Amtrak trains between St. Louis and Los Angeles: one traversed Missouri and planted me in Kansas City Union Station, where I bummed around liminal spaces for nine hours…

…before boarding my westbound train at 10:31pm last Tuesday. I include that time exactly because we didn’t pull into Los Angeles Union Station until 11:07am on Thursday. Oh, and I was supposed to board my train on Monday, but delays ruined my chances of connecting in Kansas that evening. Amtrak was very kind about the whole affair, as they were kind about pretty much every miserable aspect of the travel experience they offer — and such aspects are legion. I was confined to the same metal tube for almost 48 consecutive hours, except for a five minute break in Lamy and a fifteen minute jaunt to the Silver Street Market in bombed-out urban jungle Albuquerque to nab something other than the prepackaged microwaveable food on sale in the cafe car.

The cashier warrants her own sentence: I doff my imaginary cap to the grumpy and geriatric Kimberly, whose commentary on the aches and pains of her job were a kind of continuo in the beeping of the microwave, the rattling of the windows and doors, and the other noisy contributions to in the musique concrète oratorio of train transit. She was especially impatient with the Amish/Mennonite passengers, who — oh, yes, I should mention, there were Hutterites everywhere, buttonless and suspendered in purple and blue. I recall standing beside a large Amish family waiting to board my train out of Kansas. They were a pleasant bunch: the dad was talkative, the kids were funny, and they all smelled like hay. Their presence added to the surrealism of wandering up and down the aisle of the train just to give your rump a rest: you’d pass blanketed old Mexican and Filipino women, Japanese families with little English, men with Satanic face tattoos en route to rehab (that guy was a gentle soul and I wish him the best), chatty salt-and-pepper widowers, and a random clump of bonnets and neck-beards. It was like being backstage during a fever dream.

I may complain, but I got what I wanted from my trip. I wanted to see the real “real America,” and I saw it. I smelled it. I talked to it. I ate with it. And as we finally entered the Inland Empire, groggy from two nights of sort-of sleeping on a train, with cozy mission-style subdivisions shaded by orange trees and cypresses out one window and graffiti’d industrial parks out the other, all under a greenish blue haze the locals call the sky, I felt a homecomer’s joy.

The end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where started

And know the place for the first time.

(Little Gidding, V)

Or, to put it more colloquially, home again, home again, jiggity jig.