Archive – Day 20
Thursday, April 29, 1993
Looking Back...
Day 20. Train. What else can I say?
We had to switch trains in Washington, D.C., which gave us a few hours layover to wander around the city. And even that warrants only a few sentences in the journal, and somehow I still manage to twist it so it’s all about me. What an asshat.
Is it now afternoon, on the train again after a day in Washington, D.C. And I forgot to bring the book, just like a complete idiot. Well, I now have the rest of the night to write.
Washington was aswarm with youths! Literally hundreds — perhaps thousands — of them were filling and spilling the museums. But, my dispassion didn’t even allow me to get excited at the National Archives or the Air and Space Museum. I must find an antidote to this dispassion!
The setting sun is casting itself brown on the paper.
Have I changed over this vacation? As the sun begins to set more and more in the direction of our travel, denoting a return to the West, I think back to what personal growth I had expected at the beginning of the trip. How many of them did I accomplish? How different am I now than on page one of this journal? Did anything really happen to me on this vacation? Did three weeks of carefree enjoyment and self-contemplation truly have a profound impact on my life? Truthfully, I don’t think so. I still hope to improve, but it will take more work! A few seeds may have been planted but none have come to fruition or even sprout. My toil is not yet done.
We are traveling through I believe West Virginia, and again the landscape is replete with greenery. But here the trees are sparse and the ground has more grasses and tiny shrubs. And the forest stretches on forever, vanishing into a swath of green. I just noticed that we are traveling at a relatively slow pace right now. A reason cannot be found because our tracks are fairly straight and there are no towns to be seen. There is a rusted train yard here, but that should not make us slow. Such are the mysteries of train travel, a lifestyle which I will soon be leaving. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go home.
Sunset in the Appalachians. They are more rolling hills than actual mountains, at least by Western standards.
Ah, the West. I have now begun to look forward to some aspects of our destination. The Sierra, the warm starry nights, Jasper, all these are parts of what secures my happiness back home. And now that we are headed into the sunset, it holds promise of those things. Things from which escape was nice but now return is necessary.
Firemen are our friends. We have been sitting in one spot for fifteen/twenty minutes now, waiting for a group of firemen to finish their operations and kindly remove their hose from our track. But these firemen, in their satanic wisdom, are leaving it right there. I suggest we continue on and cause “extreme damage” (as quoted by the Chief of on-board services) to their hoses.
The firemen let us go, and we have been proceeding for quite a while. It is almost ten o’clock now, time to rest up so I can meet the California Zephyr and my Superliners at three thirty tomorrow. We then begin the last leg of our monumental journey.
