Map #1: CHICAGO

Geographical Solutions

SOMETIMES I TRAVEL BACK BY TRAIN. There’s only one passenger train between Minneapolis and Chicago, so when I travel back by rail, that’s the train I take.

The Empire Builder is a double-decker Amtrak cruiser with curved and weather-splotched observation windows in the club car, not just one train but a small fleet of four—two traveling west, two traveling east—that pass each other in the middle of every night in the long open silence of the Dakotas. The narrow beams intersect in the dark, the whoosh of speed catching for a moment in the vacuum of their passing, lives echoing each other in the occasional lit-up windows, passengers up late drinking or reading or staring out into the empty plains, until the whoosh resumes and the meeting is over with a spark, a clank, a long whistle’s moan into the dark.

My destination is the seesaw of grime and glass that much of my family has left behind, still recognizable as the city pictured in the photographs, posters, calendars, and refrigerator magnets every single one of us have scattered around our homes in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Florida. I visit Chicago still, but my trips have become less homecomings than pilgrimages.

The eastbound Empire builder is scheduled to leave the St. Paul Station at 7:00 a.m, every morning, but of course it’s always late, not quite the efficient builder of empires that it used to be, hung up last night somewhere near Minot, North Dakota. I got up at least an hour earlier than I needed to in order to catch this morning train, and found myself waiting in the drafty, featureless station in a St. Paul industrial park, built to improve upon the older downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul stations. The former Minneapolis station is now an ice skating rink. I’d much rather watch pretty people ice skate than sit in this ugly replacement station in a dank warehouse gully of St. Paul, but this is where the train arrives and departs.

Neither Linnea nor I are morning people, especially on Sundays, but she’s good to me, getting up at 5:30 to take me to the train so I don’t have to call a cab, even nudging me awake when I hit the snooze without opening my eyes. She understands how badly I need to go back to Chicago, looking for something she wants me to find, some answer to a question about the ways maps color the bodies of humans like tattoos, the reasons we tend to love and hate or for whatever reason remember sharply the places that made us, particularly the ones we’ve left behind.

On this Sunday morning Linnea made sure I got up in time, then she drove me to the train, even came into the station with me. I knew she was itching to kiss me goodbye, so she could get to the Y to work out before there was a line to use the treadmill. Her clipped gray hair was mussed, one sweat pant leg shoved up a little higher on one leg than the other, her smile a little goofy with sleep. She waited with me for nearly an hour before I sent her on her way. She wasn’t really dressed to be hanging out in public, and I was lousy company, as I always am when I have to get up early, worse on this morning, griping about the cold waiting room, the stiff plastic train seats, the hard lights that made my eyes ache, the garbled speaker system and why the hell they never built that bullet train between Minneapolis and Chicago that promised to get us there in about three hours, which would pretty soon be the amount of time I’d been up and waiting for this blasted Empire Builder.

HALT. Years back, when I first quit drinking and started attending AA meetings, the old timers warned me about times like these, hours when I’d find myself hungry, angry, lonely, tired. HALT is what they called it. Acronyms and slogans are big in AA, and some of them are silly, but this one has always made sense to me. Stop moving forward. Think before you take another step. The idea is to stop you before you take a drink, not a big danger in this nothing train station so early in the morning, but in my case also a warning to change direction before I was sorry, before I was such a bitch that I made Linnea mad. This is one of the ways I’ve learned to live since moving away from Chicago.

So I sent Linnea on her way, before we ended up fighting, which would have meant I’d have to worry all the way to Chicago every time the train lurched. What if we derailed and I was killed and my last conversation with Linnea was a stupid fight in a cold train station? I kissed Linnea goodbye and rolled my luggage into the bathroom to put on my make-up in the hard light of the mirrors over the 1970s sink, trying to visualize some version of myself that might be sweet in the morning.

INSET 1 A Crown of Smoke

All the Amtrak trains on the northern Midwest to West route are called the Empire builder, named after the 19^th century St. Paul railroad magnate James Jay Hill, in homage to the roots of development frenzy, train tracks running all the way from St. Paul to Puget Sound that wrapped the continent in a leash of steel that must have made the old coot lean back in his chair, rub his one good eye, and think Mine, Mine, Mine.

I suspect more Americans than not have a little bit of the Empire Builder built into their makeup, some desire to locate and own, some passion for landing somewhere they can write their name. I wish this wasn’t so much of what it means to be an American, but I suspect it is, even among the most put upon among us. I recognize the baser version of the urge when I come across stuff I want, say a sweater with a low neckline I know will cause Linnea to kiss my collarbone. Mine. It’s that blank pull of wanting that erases all obstacles, that trips me into one of those give-that-girl-a-crown-and-a-bundle-of-roses moments, the girly version of James Jay Hill’s long lean back in a leather chair, cigar smoke forming a crown just above his head.

All of which I mention only to describe how I always cringe when I hear the conductor announce the name of the train that runs from Seattle to Chicago, stopping for 20 minutes or so in this St. Paul Industrial park along the way. I hate all those parts of American history that are about rounding up the natives and making way for progress, and yet even I have to admit that without progress nearly everything I love about the world would not exist. Skyscrapers. Turner Classic Movies. My little copper-colored iPod. I hate to admit it, but I’m probably as American as Marcia Brady, and so have some stake in the endless building of American empire, even if that empire is usually not my own.

It was cold in the St. Paul Amtrak station, so I wondered about the girl across the waiting room from me in the Shamrock green sweat suit and sequined flip-flops. She looked to be the age of the freshmen in my classes at one of the colleges I’d taught the previous Spring. I’d noticed her earlier because her sweat suit was so very green, sharp green, have-to-squint-to-look-at-her-green—but I noticed her again when I saw she’d stripped down on top to a thin t-shirt. How could she be warm, I thought, in this drafty station on a rainy September morning before the heat’s been turned on for the season? Then I forgot about her as we all lined up to board the train. I didn’t turn back until I heard someone yell. Hey. We need help over here.

When I looked back I saw that the girl, already a pale blonde, had blanched a gray-white color, her eyes unfocused, her thin body slouched on the shoulders of two middle-aged women with hair pulled back into pony tails. Mom-like. They were probably looking forward to curling up on the train and sleeping until at least Wisconsin Dells, and now they had this kid—I don’t think they knew her—hanging off their shoulders, loose limbed as a straw girl.

The line moved forward, out of the station and toward the platform, and I turned away, but when I looked back a few moments later the girl was laying down flat on the station floor. I noticed her pale bare toes, her feet that had fallen askew, the dull glint of her silver toe ring and a paunchy stationmaster with thinning hair leaning over her, shouting. Are you conscious? Can you hear me? Even though the guy was yelling he sounded calm, unruffled, almost bored, taking care of his daily routine. The women who had been holding the girl up were crouched around her, as if they were conducting a séance. The stationmaster called an ambulance. Was the girl having a seizure? Maybe she hadn’t eaten yet this morning. Maybe she hadn’t eaten in a week. She was skinny enough to be one of those college girls addicted to throwing up.

There was nothing for the rest of us to do; already too many people were crowding around her. The stationmaster asked folks to please step forward. We boarded the train, most of us craning our heads back twice, three times, to gawk.

This kind of thing, skinny blond girls fainting in broad daylight is always happening on Amtrak. Is it something about the train, a long fast container of change that compresses people together, like the plot of one of those 1970s disaster movies, all those lives that wouldn’t otherwise intersect stuck together behind a smoke-spewing engine dragging them across the prairie? Or is it Amtrak itself that’s the problem, the merging and combining of what was once a genius web of tracks and trains into one big corporation run by the government?

I sometimes travel by Amtrak because I like the train and don’t like planes and because the train helps me remember times past, such as when I was a skinny blond girl myself who may very well have passed out in some grim train station. When I was the age of that girl out cold on the station floor I did things on trains that I have trouble understanding today, risky things like making out all night with an off-duty conductor on the line running west from Syracuse New York, and safe-but-time-wasting things like spending a hour in an on-board ladies room lounge with a glazed-eyed redhead who tried to recruit me for EST. And even on this ride I will find myself doing things I’d never do on land, such as sit still and smile while a very thuggy, very young man in the seat next to me tells me he’s on his way into the city for his day in court and then tries to pick me up. Even though I am the type to tell complete strangers—if such things happen to come up in conversation—minute details about my life, I will tell this young man nothing about myself. I'll want to ask him, do you always hit on married lesbians old enough to be your mother? But I won’t. I will not want to be stuck on the train next to someone who knows that much about me.

It seems volatile enough that so many of the people on the train are the same people, in the Midwest at least, who can’t afford a car or even a plane ticket, people who are already in a little bit of trouble, some so close to combustion that one thing or another is bound to blow the minute they sit down for an hour or more, hoping to get away, hoping to arrive in a far better place. There’s always the danger, on the way there, of falling off or down or through, of never arriving at the Alabaster City.

INSET 2 A Far Better Place

The Alabaster City is a name for Chicago, or a part of Chicago, left over from the past, referring to the White City, the fake alabaster skyline built on the south side of Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition. People, 28 million, from all over, poured out the train depots just to see it, white buildings as long as the fields they plowed back in Indiana, statuary with bosoms bigger than cow heads, waterways wider than the boat harbors back in the Old Country, fountains spouting higher than the rock ridges along the Lake Superior shore back up in Michigan mining territory. The visitors stood on ferries, on overlooks, and they stared and stared, as if they were viewing ancient Athens before the birth of Christ, or maybe this was Mount Olympus itself.

Most of those people must have known the White City was a phony—not a real city but a vacation park, an extravaganza—but they didn’t care. 120,000 incandescent lights. 18,000 tons of iron and steel. 75 million feet of lumber. 30,000 tons of plaster, cement, and hemp making up a compound called staff that held up the walls. The Ferris wheel had cars the size of train engines. This was the late 19^th century, before the 20^th century’s machine-made wars and atrocities, when historians like Henry Adams thought we might replace the Holy Madonna with the Mighty Machine. The White City was a touchable mirage, a gorgeous scam, a whitewashed stage set sparking and trilling in the Midwestern sun. Catherine Lee Bates wrote about the White City in the song America the Beautiful. Thine alabaster cities gleam. Oh beautiful. An exclamation. A prayer.

If I had been among the exclaiming horde, a fairgoer from a different time than today, on a different train headed into the meaty center of Chicago, one of so many making the late 19^th century journey from the hinterlands into the metropolis, my destination the Columbian Exposition, then I would have been a woman not so much brave as stubborn enough to take a trip like this alone. I would have been fluttery as the trip began, as it begins, in my filmy black and white imaginings that bridge the boundaries of history.

The train platform in Chicago, October 1893, is crowded. She is the only woman not wearing a hat. The air is tart, but still she perspires. On the train, on the way into the city, her dress caught on a hinge of her seat as she tried to discourage the attentions of the well-dressed but somehow dirty gentleman sitting beside her. She hopes now the fray along her hem is not too obvious. She doesn't take the train directly to the fair, as some do, but rather gets off downtown. She wants to see the real city, the gray city. The station is cavernous, polished, hollow. She doesn't shout to see if her voice will echo, but wonders if it might. She would have tried if she'd been less alone, less fearful, or closer to home, but now she doesn't want people to stare. She pushes her way deeper into the station and sees there are so many people that if she did yell out her voice would be absorbed into mounds of cotton clothing, nests of ladies’ hats, the flesh of the masses themselves that suck up particular sounds and replace them with a monosyllabic hum. This is her first impression of the city. A cotton absorbed hum. The city is conscious. Can you hear it?

Once you’re citizen of a city and its hinterlands—the migratory web of people and products that circle in and out of any metropolis—what if you mean to leave it? How far does any person have to travel to move beyond a city’s reach?

I tend to think of myself as a an émigré who moved away from my home city, and according to the highway map I did depart from that yellow sprawl running from Gary, Indiana in the east, westward through Chicago to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Yet according to wider maps I still live in the same triangle of long-grass prairie land—criss-crossed with farms and train tracks, with little towns and broad suburbs and thickets of city—where I’ve always lived. If I’ve migrated it has only been from one periphery to another. According to friends born and raised in Minnesota I am a newcomer to Minneapolis. According to friends from New York or L.A. I am the one who never moved out of the Midwest, the Wisconsin border between Minnesota and Wisconsin an inconsequential crossing.

But the physical and cultural geography that shifts between Minneapolis and Chicago, this ground the Empire Builder passes through, is a seismic recalculation, a shift caused first by the slow ravaging route taken by the glaciers, by centuries of immigration, by the transformation of the prairie into the American farm. Or is the change I feel in the air, when I cross over, the vibration of the water parks and duck boat rides of Wisconsin Dells, or the pent up angst of Midwestern college kids driving back and forth on Interstate 94, speeding behind semis and tossing crumbled candy and potato chip wrappers out the back windows, bare feet up on the dashboard, moving toward or away from school or family, as the weather shifts along with the garden zone?

The same trip by train is both easier and dreamier. Driving is active; the train is passive and contained. It’s possible to ride the train across the Midwest and believe in illusions of fate and the narrative intention of higher power, while the car can dupe a person into believing she knows what’s coming next. Besides, it used to be that planes were too expensive for me, and the sorts of nearly junk cars I drove in Minneapolis couldn’t withstand the 350-mile drive. I was still, in those days, my early 20s, part runaway. I only traveled home when my mother or father begged me to attend a graduation or retirement party, showing up reluctantly, leaving much of myself back in Minnesota with my new world of oddballs and dropouts. Whenever I traveled back I felt transparent, stretched clear across the upper prairie, not fully occupying the present, not fully present in any one place.

I have a black-and-white photograph my father took when I was no more than 22 years old. The shutter captures me as I turn back to look at my parents before stepping onto the platform at Chicago’s Union station, on my way back to Minneapolis, wearing the same scowl I wore in all the pictures my dad shot of me then. Dad was a devoted photographer, not a professional but serious, with a darkroom in his basement and mounted prints hanging all over our house. At 22 I was serious only about riding hard into the future. I acted as if Dad with his camera were not a father who shared interests with his eldest child, his only daughter, a father who missed his kid, but instead some kind of invasive paparazzi. Jesus Dad, the look on my face said, stop bugging me by wanting to see my life.

In the photograph my hair is still long and braided down the right side of my head, as I wore it then, imitating some singer-songwriter I saw on an album jacket. As soon as I was alone on the train I would release my held breath, smile again. But before I boarded, still standing on the ground of Chicago, surrounded by the Louis Sullivan train station, migration history swirling past in 100 configurations, my mother crying, my father pointing that damned camera lens at me, I refused to let them know I saw anything I was sad to leave behind. How far would I have to travel to be out of my family’s reach?