May 2015 | view this story as .pdf

Motion triggers emotion in Amtrak’s new writer’s residencies.

By Gwen Thompson

Unless you’re a snowbird, winter recedes from the Pine Tree state leaving you so crazed with cabin fever you’ll leap at the chance to travel anywhere else. Visiting friends who’d recently moved to Pittsburgh wouldn’t help my vitamin-D deficiency or post-winter pallor, but an article about Amtrak’s writer’s residencies (http://blog.amtrak.com/2014/09/writers-selected-amtrak-residency-program/ #AmtrakResidency) convinced me the long, uninterrupted stretch of quiet time on board would be just the ticket to spring ahead with a writing project. I’d missed the deadline to apply, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t DIY it.

I hadn’t ridden Amtrak in a while; compared to planes, there’s such a Brobdignagian amount of leg room, I think I’ve wandered into business class by mistake. My plan is to undertake a structural analysis of the mystery I’ve written, but before we’ve left the station, I’m already feeling such a strong tug towards my destination that I dive into a poem I wrote years ago about counting the cars of an endless freight train in Pittsburgh with my father, who was born there.

When I realized in grad school that half of writing is revising–and that I did not understand how to revise poetry–I knew I’d never be a poet, much as I appreciated the genius of my Nobel-laureate professor’s critiques grilling me about what each and every word was doing on that page. Re-reading my train poem as I ride the rails reminds me of his litmus test–if I don’t know, it doesn’t belong there–and by some non-Newtonian law of motion, the real train sweeps my mind along with it too swiftly to stall out over the train in my poem. Limbo is a safe space to experiment, even in a field that’s not your forte, because nothing’s permanent.

As we roll along at a pace that dopplers our own whistle from an augmented to a major triad, time folds in on itself, rippling me back to other journeys up and down the Northeast Corridor to see my dying father, when I found some small comfort wondering when else I’d ever read Don Quixote–an accomplishment my dad, an English teacher, would appreciate. With the blare of Orwellian screens assaulting us everywhere from elevators to gas pumps, trains are a rare refuge of the concentrated quiet and mental space required to read a thousand-page novel and absorb its wonders. Yet despite the daily blitzkrieg of mis-, dis-, and non-information, there are still things people shouldn’t need to be told but apparently do: if, for instance, you don’t want the rest of the train to smell like the toilet, then you need to shut the door to the toilet behind you on exiting.

Another advantage of writing over reality besides odorlessness is the freedom to tamper with time and skim past the travails of transferring from North to South Station in Boston to the more sedate change of engine in Philadelphia, when the whole train goes dark for half an hour–just enough time to rest my eyes and stretch my legs nipping upstairs to the pub in 30th Street Station.

As we wend our way west from Philly, Main Line mansions of Wissahickon schist give way to white clapboard farmhouses with unmistakably Amish laundry flapping in the breeze. This already reminds me of Maine; as we pull into Harrisburg, where bearded and black-hatted or black-bonneted and shawled folk cluster on the platform to meet the train, I could almost be back in Houlton, where there’s an Amish colony and general store in Ludlow just down the road from my great-aunt and uncle’s farm.

I’d thought I was breaking with family tradition by writing about my misadventures there in my Bowdoin application essay (my brother, father, and grandfather all went to Swarthmore)–only to be introduced by one of my professors to my second cousin, whose husband, unbeknownst to me, had been Dean of the College until the year before I matriculated. And to discover via a yellowed invitation unearthed at random in my parents’ basement, that my Bowdoin roommate’s grandparents had known mine in Pittsburgh.

As if to illustrate the world’s roundness returning you home from wherever you roam, we creep along the famed Altoona Horseshoe Curve–a bend in the line so sharp you can glimpse through budding trees the train’s tail clinging precariously to the steep hillside of this wooded valley like the tail of your own past pursuing you. Some of my mom’s cousins who grew up in the County and later left the state have now retired back there; their offspring of my generation are already migrating to Maine without even having grown up there–to the point that I’ve now got more cousins scattered throughout the state than I can visit in one trip. Flashing past nuclear cooling towers sprouting up beside storybook silos and grazing Friesians puts me in mind of all that Uncle Jim and his Aroostook neighbors tried to keep their farms alive (potatoes, dairy cows, maple syrup, apples, the Soil Bank, Christmas trees); this recent reversal of the family diaspora is made possible in part by technologies that did not exist a generation ago.

By the time we reach Pittsburgh, I’ve matched my previous record of car-counting with a four-engine freight train towing 111 mixed hoppers, tankers, flatbeds, and boxcars exuberantly graffiti-ed; and my structural analysis is well underway. Unlike some Maine mill towns I’ve known, Pittsburgh has delicious drinking water; I now see why my dad was so particular about the taste of tap water. Since his black-at-noon boyhood (my grandparents’ pewter candlesticks are still pockmarked from pollution) in Chatham Village atop Mt. Washington, his old neighborhood that started out as affordable housing inspired by the Garden City movement in Great Britain has been designated a National Historic Landmark and acquired its own bucolic herd of deer as if it were the park of an English manor.

Mainers know The Way Life Should Be is uncrowded, but by New York standards it’s a shock to visit an art museum on Sunday with elbow room to spare on the closing day of a major exhibition. The Duane Michals (another Pittsburgher born the same year as my dad) retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art encapsulates in black-and-white photos with handwritten captions my mission on this rolling writer’s residency. I’d thought to cure cabin fever with a change of place, but true to the theory of relativity, found myself moving as much through time as space. Writing, like the suspension of travel, overcomes time by re-shaping it as a sphere with all points past and future on its surface equidistant from its omniscient, present center: “There is no past or future, only now. Our lives are real dreams, just one moment, all at once, now.”