| Theater, Rustin Larson, Poetic Commerce, Music, Junk food, Inspiration, independent bookstores, Environment, Arts and Entertainment | 6 Apr 2010 |
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| The Lake Shore Limited by Rustin Larson | ||
In some past life I must have been late for a train. Overburdened with luggage, breathless, I can see me running, fedora whisked from my head by the wind. Only by some feat of strength, some last surge of energy, am I able to clamber aboard the moving coach, neither helped nor encouraged by the barrel-chested, walrus-whiskered conductor. I lay breathless on the floor of the shifting accordion-like no-man's land between cars, buried under a two large suit cases and a slightly smaller piece of carry-on. If I die of a heart attack now, let it come, I say to myself. I've given every last ounce of energy to get here. Let them flush me out on the tracks somewhere between Chicago and Elkhart if they must.
But for a moment, my wife's voice puts an end to this waking nightmare: "You have every right to board a train with calm, quiet dignity," Caroline says.
I contemplate this. How I want to believe. Here we are in this antique railroad station, sitting on smooth wooden benches, surrounded by our wheeled luggage. The wheels are nice, but there is too much. There are four of us headed for Vermont, and we each have three pieces of heavy, nylon-reinforced death. Can't we rethink this? What can we abandon?
But it's too late. "Here's your train, folks!" the station manager cheerfully announces. Sure enough, we hear the horn's blast as the train slows to the platform. It's time to line up. It's time to get on.
I will try the calm, quiet dignity thing. I'm calm. I'm quiet. I stand at the head of my family: Caroline, Julia and Katie calm and dignified with their baggage behind me. The conductor sniffs my ticket and then sends me straight upstairs; that's right, this miserable coach is a kind of double-decker affair, and here I am now wheezing up a narrow twisting stairway with 300 pounds of tightly packed punishment. OK, maybe I exaggerate about the actual weight of my burden, but here I am now none the less, out of breath, with a coach full of amused riders staring at my purple-faced demise. And my family? Where are they?
"You were with them?" the conductor seems totally amazed. "I seated them downstairs!" So down I trip and fumble with my bags of doom, and there is my family, my girls, seated in a special undercoach room with a few other riders, some in wheelchairs and some breathing from oxygen tanks.
"Gimme a hit of that!" I want to say to one of the oxygen people. But I don't. And after I shed my hated bags, I collapse breathless in an almost comfy padded chair, riding backwards of all things, next to my wife.
"Are you alright?" Caroline eyes me.
"I'll talk about it later," I wheeze. She raises her eyebrows and turns to her book. Backwards the cornfields fly, backwards, zoom, zoom. We are rolling to Chicago.
***
The train we're on is called the "California Zephyr," and although I'm facing California, I'm not riding toward it. It is November and I thought best we bring our parkas; who knows what kind of weather we'll encounter in Vermont? I stow mine in the luggage rack above. The weather is mild for the moment, but I envision snows and stretches of ice covered highways through the Green Mountains.
We will switch trains in Chicago and board the "Lake Shore Limited" (as its name implies, it skirts the shores of the Great Lakes) to Albany, New York. In Albany we will catch the "Ethan Allen" (he is the patriot who fought for Vermont's independence) to Rutland, Vermont. I love the names trains have: "The Empire Builder," "The City of New Orleans," "The Hiawatha." What swagger. What bravado. Shouldn't there be a train called "The Bravado?" I pull a turkey and cheese tortilla wrap from our food bag and start eating. It tastes wonderful. I daydream and forget the agony of boarding.
As I eat I feel the eyes of someone on me. It is the large woman who has a small green oxygen tank on a wheeled caddy. She is breathing like Darth Vadar and frowning at me. She is catty-corner to my left, and since I am seated backwards we are more or less facing each other. Caroline glances at me and then she smiles at the woman. The woman's expression entirely changes to sweetness. What the hell. How does C do it?
Katie and Julia are in the pair of seats directly across the aisle from me, however they are seated forward and are lost in their I-pod worlds and drawing things in their sketchbooks. The landscape streams by their window. They ignore it for the most part and draw figures of people only they see in their minds.
The mission of this trip is to get Katie to White River Junction, Vermont so she can check out the College of Cartoon Studies, a graduate program she has her eyes on. She is already a brilliant artist and cartoonist and creates worlds full of strangeness, quirkiness and humor. She needs to create something with herself, a snowman and a piece of fruit for her application. Her creative process is full stream and flows. She sketches busily as the train whizzes along.
***
A change of trains in Chicago gets us on an overnight called "The Lakeshore Limited." It is past 9 p.m. when we board, bedtime for some Midwesterners, but who can sleep? Who WILL sleep? The train rolls through the autumn dark, only to pause for smokers' breaks on the platforms of stations like Elkhart. The coach car is sparsely populated this stretch, so we can all four of us spread out to "bed-down" arrangements, claiming two seats each. But finding that comfortable, sleep-inducing position is elusive. Fetal with head to the left arm rest; fetal with head on the aisle; sitting upright in one seat; slouching diagonally across two seats with unshod feet on foot rest bar. Finally, sleep overtakes me at about 4 a.m. after discovering leg rests that can be elevated to create an almost tolerable, barely ample sleeping surface. Sleep is sweet when you're almost dead. I cover myself with a blanket, only my sweet, unconscious, clean-shaven face and curly locks greeting passersby in the aisle.
Soon dawn breaks, and in my daze I hear a voice.
"Ma'am, Ma'am-sir? Are, are you an United States citizen?"
We are paused temporarily in the station at Buffalo, New York, and I am being questioned by a ball-capped INS agent who not only misjudges my gender, but also has serious doubts about my legitimate status on his planet.
"Sure as shootin', sailor!" I lisp. "I'm a citizen!"
He looks away quickly, and proceeds deeper into the coach, totally ignoring the guy behind me who yaks away on his cell phone in Russian. God bless America.
***
Rolling again. Dawn and upstate New York. The landscape is frosted; there is a thin layer of ice on small pools. We are rolling through vineyard country. Frost-covered ground, frost-covered vines. By the afternoon, we reach Albany and switch to our final train to Vermont.
It's been over twenty-four hours, and all we have known has been the inside of coach cars and stations. Our food bag is running low, so I buy sandwiches at the station's newsstand in Albany. And though it's late, I also buy coffee. We're talking survival now. Above our heads is a bank of television screens which is stuck on one station, the 24 hour news channel. The news circulates through a half a dozen top stories. They keep returning to the story of the "Duct-taped beagle." Some sicko, tired of his beagle's barking, wrapped the poor animal in duct-tape and threw him in a dumpster. The dog was later rescued by a dumpster-diving homeless man. They show the picture of the duct-taped dog. The cycling of news stories is, at first, hypnotic. It is a terrible thing to duct-tape an animal. It's inhumane. It's satanic. But the effect of news stories endlessly looped and repeated (with commercials!) is, unfortunately, lampoonish and cartoonish. "You deserve a break today;" so does the duct-taped dog. On the 40th presentation of the duct-taped dog on the screen above, I start laughing and I cannot stop. It is all too absurd. This universe of travel is relentless; the sleeplessness of living is troubling; traveling on a human, inhumane planet, perplexing. I laugh and laugh and laugh, maybe because I'm too exhausted to cry, or maybe I am finally going nuts. We miss the announcement to board our next train. We sit there dazed. Finally, some stab of intuition tells us to make a run for it. We board the "Ethan Allen" with just a few minutes to spare.
***
Feeling sore and sleepless as a duct-taped beagle, we make our final leg to Rutland, Vermont. It is late. The "Ethan Allen" chugs along slowly, screeching and singing over wobbly, warped rails fitted into the night-smothered mountains. Occasionally, the lights of some small town, or some highway crossing, drift by like a lanterned boat. The coach car in front of me does a herky jerky dance of positioning as we round bends in the tracks. I watch through the vestibule window. Screech, scratch, clackity clack. Drift, lurch, wiggle, waggle. Amtrakamtrakamtrakamtrak... We see the outskirts of Rutland. We crawl now. We crawl for half an hour. Finally, we pull into the station.
***
We hire a mini-van taxi to take us to our Ramada Inn. The family who runs the place makes full Indian meals just for them, so the lobby smells like a wonderful buffet we can't access. A fragrant, appetizing torture. Once in our room we all take turns showering and getting ready for sleep. We sleep for half a day. When we wake, we rent a van from Enterprise and search for food. A hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant always seems to fit the bill; the food is substantial, the price is not insane. We have time to drive and explore. We do. The mountains are beautiful, and though it is late in the fall, there are still patches of dazzling yellow leaves to be seen. We drive to see Katie's potential grad school, The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), in White River Junction. We stay the night at the very old and quaint Hotel Coolidge. Katie's interview with the faculty goes well. Later, on that drizzly afternoon, we make our way back to Rutland. I get lost a bit; all curvy highways skirting picturesque Vermont rivers look the same to me. But sanity and our collective sense of direction prevail. The day after that we are bold enough to visit my sister in Massachusetts. The day after that it's time to go back.
***
To say the train trip back is just the trip out in reverse is not quite true. This time we wake up, gather ourselves, catch the taxi, and board the "Ethan Allen" earlier than I ever thought possible, only to be let out on the platform a couple hours later in Schenectady, New York for a 13 hour layover. That's right. You heard me. Thirteen hours. What do four fellow travelers do for 13 hours in Schenectady?
I did some internet research before the trip because I was worried about this Schenectady thing. My research revealed that there was a multiplex movie theater and a substantial shopping district within short (fewer than a couple blocks) walking distance from the Amtrak station. As Katie wrote in one of her cartoons, "Trouble would be able to find us easy peasy." Trouble in this case means the spending of American dollars. We mull over the movies at the multiplex, but nothing appeals. So we walk. Just down the street I see a marquee that says, "Proctors." Thinking it more movie possibilities, I make a bee line. What I find is not what I expect. It is what appears to be a corridor of shops on first glance. If they had made shopping malls in the 1920's this would be one of them, I think to myself. The architecture is beautiful; I can't give it a period name, or an architectural school name, but I know what I like. We sit for two or three hours (for we have the time) in a coffee shop, drinking coffee and reading avant garde comic books from Katie's backpack. We notice there is a box office selling tickets to Broadway hits like "Wicked." We browse the video monitors that view samples of the shows. We walk down the hallway, browse a gift shop where Katie buys a doll-size Stratocaster and Julia a finger puppet. The kindly old gentleman who helps run the gift shop talks to us. We tell him about our long layover. He asks, "Would you like to see the theater?" He is a man with keys. He can make this happen.
Proctor's theater is amazing. It's a classic old, beautifully restored stage and auditorium, something that many cities used to have, but alas, many let fall under the wrecking ball. To quote Proctor's website: "On December 27, 1926, Proctors Theatre opened with a showing of 'Stranded in Paris,' a silent film starring Bebe Daniels. People had lined up for hours, and once inside the theater, they were overwhelmed by the ornate decorations - plush carpeting, marble staircases, drinking fountains, and velvet draperies. Enthralled patrons didn't even seem to mind that the $50,000 Wurlitzer organ malfunctioned. Over 7100 paid admissions were collected that day, making F.F. Proctor's new vaudeville house a rousing success. In 1928, sound equipment was installed at the theater, ushering in the age of the 'talkies,' which were fast replacing vaudeville as the public's entertainment choice." http://www.proctors.org/about .
The ornate decorations - plush carpeting, marble staircases, drinking fountains, and velvet draperies- are all beautifully restored to their 1926 luster. It is a pleasing space just to stand in and take into the senses, even with nothing going on stage. I could have stood there much longer.
After taking in the pedestrian mall in a restored shopping district nearby, and reading (I, half a biography about Lena Horne) at a gorgeous public library, we decide it's time to head to the station. "The Lakeshore Limited" is on its way. Back to the Midwest we go.
Besides talking to a strange little man in a New York Yankee's ball cap about sports memorabilia, and sitting near a smelly, sloshing, out-of-order lavatory on the ride back to Chicago, there isn't much more to say. We chose the train because I think we were all actually bent on group suicide. However, we did see sights we would not have on an airplane. Chinatowns, platforms and industrial districts; vineyards, mountains, and cities I've always heard about, but never thought I'd see. Rochester, New York is really an odd looking place, you know that? There is one tall building owned by Kodak that dominates the center of the city like an ancient Mesopotamian temple. And the people; remember my INS agent in Buffalo? I've written a song about him. It's called "Ma'am-sir ar-are You an American?"
I can tell you this much though, oh land of the free. It's good to be home.
But for a moment, my wife's voice puts an end to this waking nightmare: "You have every right to board a train with calm, quiet dignity," Caroline says.
I contemplate this. How I want to believe. Here we are in this antique railroad station, sitting on smooth wooden benches, surrounded by our wheeled luggage. The wheels are nice, but there is too much. There are four of us headed for Vermont, and we each have three pieces of heavy, nylon-reinforced death. Can't we rethink this? What can we abandon?
But it's too late. "Here's your train, folks!" the station manager cheerfully announces. Sure enough, we hear the horn's blast as the train slows to the platform. It's time to line up. It's time to get on.
I will try the calm, quiet dignity thing. I'm calm. I'm quiet. I stand at the head of my family: Caroline, Julia and Katie calm and dignified with their baggage behind me. The conductor sniffs my ticket and then sends me straight upstairs; that's right, this miserable coach is a kind of double-decker affair, and here I am now wheezing up a narrow twisting stairway with 300 pounds of tightly packed punishment. OK, maybe I exaggerate about the actual weight of my burden, but here I am now none the less, out of breath, with a coach full of amused riders staring at my purple-faced demise. And my family? Where are they?
"You were with them?" the conductor seems totally amazed. "I seated them downstairs!" So down I trip and fumble with my bags of doom, and there is my family, my girls, seated in a special undercoach room with a few other riders, some in wheelchairs and some breathing from oxygen tanks.
"Gimme a hit of that!" I want to say to one of the oxygen people. But I don't. And after I shed my hated bags, I collapse breathless in an almost comfy padded chair, riding backwards of all things, next to my wife.
"Are you alright?" Caroline eyes me.
"I'll talk about it later," I wheeze. She raises her eyebrows and turns to her book. Backwards the cornfields fly, backwards, zoom, zoom. We are rolling to Chicago.
***
The train we're on is called the "California Zephyr," and although I'm facing California, I'm not riding toward it. It is November and I thought best we bring our parkas; who knows what kind of weather we'll encounter in Vermont? I stow mine in the luggage rack above. The weather is mild for the moment, but I envision snows and stretches of ice covered highways through the Green Mountains.
We will switch trains in Chicago and board the "Lake Shore Limited" (as its name implies, it skirts the shores of the Great Lakes) to Albany, New York. In Albany we will catch the "Ethan Allen" (he is the patriot who fought for Vermont's independence) to Rutland, Vermont. I love the names trains have: "The Empire Builder," "The City of New Orleans," "The Hiawatha." What swagger. What bravado. Shouldn't there be a train called "The Bravado?" I pull a turkey and cheese tortilla wrap from our food bag and start eating. It tastes wonderful. I daydream and forget the agony of boarding.
As I eat I feel the eyes of someone on me. It is the large woman who has a small green oxygen tank on a wheeled caddy. She is breathing like Darth Vadar and frowning at me. She is catty-corner to my left, and since I am seated backwards we are more or less facing each other. Caroline glances at me and then she smiles at the woman. The woman's expression entirely changes to sweetness. What the hell. How does C do it?
Katie and Julia are in the pair of seats directly across the aisle from me, however they are seated forward and are lost in their I-pod worlds and drawing things in their sketchbooks. The landscape streams by their window. They ignore it for the most part and draw figures of people only they see in their minds.
The mission of this trip is to get Katie to White River Junction, Vermont so she can check out the College of Cartoon Studies, a graduate program she has her eyes on. She is already a brilliant artist and cartoonist and creates worlds full of strangeness, quirkiness and humor. She needs to create something with herself, a snowman and a piece of fruit for her application. Her creative process is full stream and flows. She sketches busily as the train whizzes along.
***
A change of trains in Chicago gets us on an overnight called "The Lakeshore Limited." It is past 9 p.m. when we board, bedtime for some Midwesterners, but who can sleep? Who WILL sleep? The train rolls through the autumn dark, only to pause for smokers' breaks on the platforms of stations like Elkhart. The coach car is sparsely populated this stretch, so we can all four of us spread out to "bed-down" arrangements, claiming two seats each. But finding that comfortable, sleep-inducing position is elusive. Fetal with head to the left arm rest; fetal with head on the aisle; sitting upright in one seat; slouching diagonally across two seats with unshod feet on foot rest bar. Finally, sleep overtakes me at about 4 a.m. after discovering leg rests that can be elevated to create an almost tolerable, barely ample sleeping surface. Sleep is sweet when you're almost dead. I cover myself with a blanket, only my sweet, unconscious, clean-shaven face and curly locks greeting passersby in the aisle.
Soon dawn breaks, and in my daze I hear a voice.
"Ma'am, Ma'am-sir? Are, are you an United States citizen?"
We are paused temporarily in the station at Buffalo, New York, and I am being questioned by a ball-capped INS agent who not only misjudges my gender, but also has serious doubts about my legitimate status on his planet.
"Sure as shootin', sailor!" I lisp. "I'm a citizen!"
He looks away quickly, and proceeds deeper into the coach, totally ignoring the guy behind me who yaks away on his cell phone in Russian. God bless America.
***
Rolling again. Dawn and upstate New York. The landscape is frosted; there is a thin layer of ice on small pools. We are rolling through vineyard country. Frost-covered ground, frost-covered vines. By the afternoon, we reach Albany and switch to our final train to Vermont.
It's been over twenty-four hours, and all we have known has been the inside of coach cars and stations. Our food bag is running low, so I buy sandwiches at the station's newsstand in Albany. And though it's late, I also buy coffee. We're talking survival now. Above our heads is a bank of television screens which is stuck on one station, the 24 hour news channel. The news circulates through a half a dozen top stories. They keep returning to the story of the "Duct-taped beagle." Some sicko, tired of his beagle's barking, wrapped the poor animal in duct-tape and threw him in a dumpster. The dog was later rescued by a dumpster-diving homeless man. They show the picture of the duct-taped dog. The cycling of news stories is, at first, hypnotic. It is a terrible thing to duct-tape an animal. It's inhumane. It's satanic. But the effect of news stories endlessly looped and repeated (with commercials!) is, unfortunately, lampoonish and cartoonish. "You deserve a break today;" so does the duct-taped dog. On the 40th presentation of the duct-taped dog on the screen above, I start laughing and I cannot stop. It is all too absurd. This universe of travel is relentless; the sleeplessness of living is troubling; traveling on a human, inhumane planet, perplexing. I laugh and laugh and laugh, maybe because I'm too exhausted to cry, or maybe I am finally going nuts. We miss the announcement to board our next train. We sit there dazed. Finally, some stab of intuition tells us to make a run for it. We board the "Ethan Allen" with just a few minutes to spare.
***
Feeling sore and sleepless as a duct-taped beagle, we make our final leg to Rutland, Vermont. It is late. The "Ethan Allen" chugs along slowly, screeching and singing over wobbly, warped rails fitted into the night-smothered mountains. Occasionally, the lights of some small town, or some highway crossing, drift by like a lanterned boat. The coach car in front of me does a herky jerky dance of positioning as we round bends in the tracks. I watch through the vestibule window. Screech, scratch, clackity clack. Drift, lurch, wiggle, waggle. Amtrakamtrakamtrakamtrak... We see the outskirts of Rutland. We crawl now. We crawl for half an hour. Finally, we pull into the station.
***
We hire a mini-van taxi to take us to our Ramada Inn. The family who runs the place makes full Indian meals just for them, so the lobby smells like a wonderful buffet we can't access. A fragrant, appetizing torture. Once in our room we all take turns showering and getting ready for sleep. We sleep for half a day. When we wake, we rent a van from Enterprise and search for food. A hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant always seems to fit the bill; the food is substantial, the price is not insane. We have time to drive and explore. We do. The mountains are beautiful, and though it is late in the fall, there are still patches of dazzling yellow leaves to be seen. We drive to see Katie's potential grad school, The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), in White River Junction. We stay the night at the very old and quaint Hotel Coolidge. Katie's interview with the faculty goes well. Later, on that drizzly afternoon, we make our way back to Rutland. I get lost a bit; all curvy highways skirting picturesque Vermont rivers look the same to me. But sanity and our collective sense of direction prevail. The day after that we are bold enough to visit my sister in Massachusetts. The day after that it's time to go back.
***
To say the train trip back is just the trip out in reverse is not quite true. This time we wake up, gather ourselves, catch the taxi, and board the "Ethan Allen" earlier than I ever thought possible, only to be let out on the platform a couple hours later in Schenectady, New York for a 13 hour layover. That's right. You heard me. Thirteen hours. What do four fellow travelers do for 13 hours in Schenectady?
I did some internet research before the trip because I was worried about this Schenectady thing. My research revealed that there was a multiplex movie theater and a substantial shopping district within short (fewer than a couple blocks) walking distance from the Amtrak station. As Katie wrote in one of her cartoons, "Trouble would be able to find us easy peasy." Trouble in this case means the spending of American dollars. We mull over the movies at the multiplex, but nothing appeals. So we walk. Just down the street I see a marquee that says, "Proctors." Thinking it more movie possibilities, I make a bee line. What I find is not what I expect. It is what appears to be a corridor of shops on first glance. If they had made shopping malls in the 1920's this would be one of them, I think to myself. The architecture is beautiful; I can't give it a period name, or an architectural school name, but I know what I like. We sit for two or three hours (for we have the time) in a coffee shop, drinking coffee and reading avant garde comic books from Katie's backpack. We notice there is a box office selling tickets to Broadway hits like "Wicked." We browse the video monitors that view samples of the shows. We walk down the hallway, browse a gift shop where Katie buys a doll-size Stratocaster and Julia a finger puppet. The kindly old gentleman who helps run the gift shop talks to us. We tell him about our long layover. He asks, "Would you like to see the theater?" He is a man with keys. He can make this happen.
Proctor's theater is amazing. It's a classic old, beautifully restored stage and auditorium, something that many cities used to have, but alas, many let fall under the wrecking ball. To quote Proctor's website: "On December 27, 1926, Proctors Theatre opened with a showing of 'Stranded in Paris,' a silent film starring Bebe Daniels. People had lined up for hours, and once inside the theater, they were overwhelmed by the ornate decorations - plush carpeting, marble staircases, drinking fountains, and velvet draperies. Enthralled patrons didn't even seem to mind that the $50,000 Wurlitzer organ malfunctioned. Over 7100 paid admissions were collected that day, making F.F. Proctor's new vaudeville house a rousing success. In 1928, sound equipment was installed at the theater, ushering in the age of the 'talkies,' which were fast replacing vaudeville as the public's entertainment choice." http://www.proctors.org/about .
The ornate decorations - plush carpeting, marble staircases, drinking fountains, and velvet draperies- are all beautifully restored to their 1926 luster. It is a pleasing space just to stand in and take into the senses, even with nothing going on stage. I could have stood there much longer.
After taking in the pedestrian mall in a restored shopping district nearby, and reading (I, half a biography about Lena Horne) at a gorgeous public library, we decide it's time to head to the station. "The Lakeshore Limited" is on its way. Back to the Midwest we go.
Besides talking to a strange little man in a New York Yankee's ball cap about sports memorabilia, and sitting near a smelly, sloshing, out-of-order lavatory on the ride back to Chicago, there isn't much more to say. We chose the train because I think we were all actually bent on group suicide. However, we did see sights we would not have on an airplane. Chinatowns, platforms and industrial districts; vineyards, mountains, and cities I've always heard about, but never thought I'd see. Rochester, New York is really an odd looking place, you know that? There is one tall building owned by Kodak that dominates the center of the city like an ancient Mesopotamian temple. And the people; remember my INS agent in Buffalo? I've written a song about him. It's called "Ma'am-sir ar-are You an American?"
I can tell you this much though, oh land of the free. It's good to be home.
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