The Southern Crescent

I just returned from New Orleans, having delivered my son to Tulane, which is another story.

We took Amtrak's Crescent, the old Southern Crescent, from D.C.'s Union Station to Union Station in NOLA. After a rather ridiculous scene checking son's giant box of books and tapes at the baggage counter, we boarded and found our cunning Roomette, very cozy (in the real estate sense) but perfectly comfy with a hidden toilet masquerading as a shelf and a fold out sink. An upper hidey hole for luggage. Little bottles of water. I was so excited and happy, especially having gotten the stuff onto the train and being able to stop worrying about it for 27 or so hours.

We were delayed about an hour waiting for an engine to come from Chicago (?). Why we knew not and our keeper O.C., could not tell us, not that we really asked.

Finally we started and went under the Capitol and then out in the pink and gold sunset across the Potomac with a beautiful view of the Jefferson and Washington monuments. Son (who has been immersed in early 19th century U.S. history and the John Adams HBO series) pointed out how pissed Adams would be if he could see that Washington and Jefferson had their glorious piles of white stone but he has -- nothing.

We got to Alexandria about the time we staggered down the hall to the dining car and then stopped again for quite a while. However, we cared not! We were put at a table with a gay man from New York and an Aussie from Hattiesberg, MS, who were perfectly delightful. We talked about traveling, plays, food, college. The Aussie paid for my wine, and we went back to find that our little roomette had transformed itself into bunks.

We snuggled down, read and then I went into a wine-soaked slumber, so utterly contented to be lying down, click-click-clicking away the miles instead of gripping a steering wheel for two days. The train screamed constantly, a high lonesome sound, that also reminded me of my big cowardly dog Cid, who trumpets the same way when he leaves the house, to let everyone know I'M COMING!! DON'T MESS WITH ME NOW!

I wafted away to slumberland, ever so happy.

When I woke up we were nearly to Atlanta and called my friend Nancy, who just moved down there. She had left me a voice mail overnight! We had a nice chat, then after we left Atlanta, son and I had a hearty breakfast. When we went back, our roomette was two facing seats again. We settled down to read and/or sleep while the train poked along between Atlanta and Birmingham, going about 30 or 40 mph, alongside quiet back roads, through peoples' back yards, and across ravines overwhelmed by kudzu, through little towns. Apparently north Georgia had a gold rush! The coolest place of all was the totally steampunk Sloss Furnaces, an old pig iron (what is pig iron, anyway), that is now a museum.

We then passed through Anniston, Alabama, where we saw a lone buffalo in a field and a bunch of Sherman tanks aimed at the train. Then finally we got to Birmingham, where O.C. announced that "fresh air, fresh air," was available outside. It did wake me up a bit to go outside, although the air wasn't really fresh, being very hot and humid and smoky from the smokers who'd been going crazy. Actually this one elderly woman had not refrained from smoking that morning in the train, even though she was hooked up to an oxygen tank and still had her nose apparatus on when she was having her smoke in the fresh air of Birmingham.

We picked up speed a bit after Birmingham. Finally crossed into Mississippi and then went to dinner, where we met a lovely girl from Philly and her Dad. She was also going to Tulane and she and son struck up a conversation.

Then at last, we were into the swamps, where egrets posed against the dark grasses, and quite suddenly onto Lake Ponchartrain. We crossed six miles over the lake with no visible support as if the train were sailing right on top of the blue water. In the south a huge pink and gray thunderhead loomed up, flashing with lightning.

And after a poky, exasperating final few minutes through the wastes of Gentilly, past ancient pumping stations, up and down a wilderness of tracks and highway overpasses and underpasses, we arrived at Union Station in New Orleans.

Amtrak Crescent = Highly recommended

A Loong Time Ago

I was born in 1949, before the publication of either Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Lord of the Flies (1954), both of which were seminal influences of my generation. A discussion on the Blue Board the other day made it clear that the torch of my generation is flickering. When I was in high school and college, we were all Holden Caulfields, too sensitive to bear how "phony" the world was. And we all viscerally understood the Lord of the Flies' depiction of the cruelty of society, its lust to crush the individualist, to feed on our fears, and the irony of the boys being picked up by a naval cruiser.

But now, those two novels, or at least LOTF, should be "retired from the canon." They are old school. My own son didn't like Catcher. I can't remember the word he used, something about Holden's semi-hipster slang that he thought was--damn, see the mind's going. I'll have to ask him.

Now once again, ardent patriotism is the dominant American ethos. And the startling parochialism of our world view pops up constantly, like this morning when CBS's Harry Smith interviewed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who pleaded for the world to notice that the Russians were "cleansing" South Ossetia and Abkhazia of ethnic Georgians and still shelling Gori nearly a day after the "cease-fire" brokered by that Nicholas Sarkozy. And we so despise the French. (BTW: We now know John Edwards is a closet Frenchman.)

(Yet another divigation: If the comments on that CBS link don't scare you, nothing will.)

Anyway, back to my point (NB: the wandering mind of the old lady), Harry Smith practically cut him off in mid-sentence, "thank you, thank you, Mr. President, now from Armaggedon in Georgia, to the important news, the news you've all been waiting for, MICHAEL PHELPS ... the greatest athlete of all time."

Now I like the Olympics as much as anybody (no, that's probably not quite true, but I do love televised sports), but really! This is a big deal. It's the newest move in the old 19th century Great Game. And we can't do squat about it. The Russians undoubtedly would like to reestablish their old imperial borders in the Caucasus and Central Asia. And not have pro-Western democracies (Armenia is another) lining their southern border, not to mention a possible new NATO member north of Turkey.

But as Saakashvili said this morning, Georgia is a faraway country that we know very little about, like Czechoslovakia in 1939. Like Holden, I felt that Harry Smith was gloriously, freakishly phony. Like Ralph, I am afraid there's nowhere to hide from the world's inveterate cruelty and aggression. Like everyone else, I am day to day more concerned about the fact that I can't sell my house and can't figure out how to get all my son's stuff to college in New Orleans.

WTF, remove those two old novels from the high school reading lists. Replace them with The Giver, by Lois Lowry. I didn't like it very much, the point was much blunter and less interesting than in either Catcher or LOTF, but it wasn't written so long ago as to be completely irrelevant. Or maybe just The Gossip Girls. They're quite revelatory.