Best. Plan. Ever.
Right?
So we do the first part, and it goes flawlessly. Visit our friends over Labor Day, eat freshly picked food, laugh, reconnect, drive down to Sacramento, have a lovely dinner with some other dear friends... then off to the train station to await our train!
Very excited were we. We parked in the parking lot, paid fifty bucks for five days in advance, and unloaded our suitcases, our yoga mats, and our backpacks from the back of the truck. (I forgot to mention, we were also going to have plenty of time for yoga.) We locked up and went into the train station, trying to avoid eye contact from the several street people loitering in front of the building.
This was an omen of what was to come.
We were a couple of hours early. No big deal, except that the train station was, as it turns out, not air conditioned. And it was Sacramento on Labor Day, which means about 90 degrees outside and about 80 inside. No problem, we were going to be on the train in a few hours and everything would be fine.
We check the board: departure time was supposed to be 11:59 PM, and it showed a delay of maybe ten minutes. No problem. Didn't even register.
We walk around the train station a little bit, looking at the cool old benches (those double sided ones that look kind of like Scrabble tile holders, but with people sitting on both sides... the middle having vents for heating in the cold winter months... so cool... so old fashioned.) Unfortunately, we could not see the ceiling as the entire floor of the station was covered by scaffolding, to retrofit everything from about 10 feet above our heads and upwards. So there was a slightly dystopian air to the whole thing... padded scaffolding legs in the middle of aisles, windows boarded up, plastic sheeting swaying in the breeze from the sole oscillating fan standing in the corner. But it was charming, right? And we were only going to be there for two short hours, so we could bask in the ambiance.
There were relatively few passengers in the terminal. Several were obviously crazy, or homeless, or both. These people wandered in and out, taking to themselves or soliciting money. Kind of made us uncomfortable, but we basked in our soon-to-be status of First Class Passengers and tried to extend compassion outward into the world (while still studiously avoiding eye contact.)
In an effort to start killing the two hours until our midnight departure, I went to a kiosk and picked up a couple of copies of all the train schedules they had. We could start fantasizing about our next train trip while we wait. Roger found a fully bound Amtrak book with all the routes marked and described, sleeping compartments diagrammed, and the other bonus programs highlighted (on some routes there are park rangers or historians that go through the train providing a live travelogue for the places you are traveling through). Train travel was looking better and better to us. Using our fingers we plotted out routes to New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Vancouver. All without getting on an airplane! All with the graciousness and ease of stepping on a train.
Time passed. People started trickling in. A pleasant middle aged woman, sharply dressed and looking chipper, was dropped off by a man who looked to be her son. A dazed girl pushing a huge suitcase was followed by two dazed parents, wheeling in another 150 pounds of luggage, apparently all setting out to get her installed in college. A bleached blond sat down, kinked her bare legs over her backpack on the bench, and looked around at the world as if wondering who would buy her a drink next. A young man of indeterminate ethnicity wandered in and sat down, lost in his earbuds, thumbs moving on his cell phone.
As we waited, I glanced up at the departure time every so often. And, every time I did, we were delayed by a little bit more. But there was no rhyme or reason, that I could tell. At 10:30, the departure time was about 12:16. At 10:45, the departure time was about 12:22. For awhile that was fine. Things happen. Part of the charm of this old fashioned mode of transportation. However, after it edged to a departure time of about 1:15, we started to get a little worried. This was a trend going in the wrong direction: 1:15 was a long way away.
I started getting texts from Amtrak stating updated departure times. This was interesting, especially as the times stated in the texts did not seem to jive with the times on the board. I then started checking the Amtrak application on my phone... a slick little app, actually, that gives you the status of trains by station. The app gave us a slightly different time altogether.
We were getting concerned. And we were tired. Roger had helped our friends pick vegetables in the fields all morning, and I was still really trashed from the chemo. (In the master plan, I would be feeling fine... it being, like, ten days after the last treatment and all. In reality... I was headachy and hot, the station was starting to get on my nerves, and a wickedly deep exhaustion was starting to set in.) More passengers were now crowded into the terminal. Women with small children looked like they were already about to lose their minds. An older woman in a neck brace wheeled in pile of lumpy, disjointed bags and luggage.
Roger persuaded me to try to lie down and get some rest on the bench. Having checked the board and my Amtrak app one last time, I managed to sleep for about 4 minutes. Then the wafting cigarette smoke outside and the worry that something would appear to change the story in one of my information streams woke me up.
We decided to decamp to the truck. For some reason, I stubbornly wanted to stay in the station, with some weird fear that something interesting would happen in the station that I wouldn't know about instantly by using my phone. But, it was hot. The single oscillating fan in the corner of the huge station was not doing the trick. And Roger didn't want to lie down on the bench like I was, assuming (with a fair amount of logic) that when we both woke up we'd be stripped to the skivvies, all our possessions gone, and our heads on a stack of Amtrak timetables. (I was nervous just going into the bathroom alone after one encounter in there with a woman who was standing by the sinks, lifting up her shirt and staring down at her flat belly. We were the only ones in there and as I peed I wondered... is she pregnant? Is an alien going to burst out at any moment? What is going on here?)
So we moved to the truck. Pushed the front seats back and used our pillows for comfort. Much better. Roger set his alarm for 12:30 and was able to start dozing but I became distracted by the drama going on in the car beside me. There were two people in there, like a woman and her grown son, both sucking massively and obsessively on cigarettes. (Don't get me started on cigarettes and the tobacco industry.) He was on his cell phone, talking to his girlfriend I assumed, from snippets I caught. He would periodically get out of the car and walk around, and I noticed his arm was in a cast. I watched them like I'd watch a dream--exhausted, leaden, and unable to wake up.
There was a lot of activity in the parking lot, a commingling of homeless/crazy people with sleep-deprived/going-crazy waiting passengers. It was like Sacramento was really coming alive now that the clock had passed midnight.
On a whim I decided to do a search on something like "Amtrak delays" and found that there is an entire website devoted to Amtrak delays. Not a good sign. I opened it up and... scrolling through the various tweets (all ending with some variation of #AmtrakFail), I see something that perks me up and makes my stomach drop at the same time.
Fatal accident in Oakland, northbound Coast Starlight train #14. Train still being held at the scene.
WTF?
W?
T?
F?
Sure enough. I googled several sources. There had been a fatal accident. Some guy had run his car underneath the train and it ground to halt six blocks later. Preliminary news stories indicated a probable suicide. Whoa... this suddenly did not sound easy, or short, or ... you know... fun or romantic any more. We were waiting for a train that had just killed someone.
Bad.
Bad bad bad.
I told Roger the news, then got out of the truck and went back inside the station. The homeless and crazy people had become emboldened. They were starting to openly solicit, and the muttering seemed to be louder, coming from multiple
people at once.
The woman at the desk was absolutely willing to talk about the situation, but couldn't give me any definitive news about when it would actually arrive. No, it had not yet moved from Oakland. Once it moved, it would be here in two hours. No, there was no way of estimating when it would be able to move. We were all stuck in the uncertainty.
I went back and updated Roger. The earliest it could get there at this point was well past 2 a.m., and there was absolutely no way of knowing if that was remotely accurate. Roger intoned that we'd be waiting there until the sun came up. I said I thought that was overly dire, but of course I didn't know anything either. We weren't getting along particularly well at this point, to tell you the truth. I felt tired to the point of nausea, Roger was exhausted, and there was nothing for us to do but sit there, and wait.
At this point, I became somewhat autistic. Having only the internet and my phone apps as a source of reference, I started absolutely obsessively checking the Amtrak app and scanning for more news. Periodically, I'd go back inside the station (now crowded with the undead) and check the board to see what its version of reality would be.
As I went deep into the dharma of the railroad timetable, I started cross referencing the published schedules against the Amtrak app to try to distinguish the difference between the reality (of the app and the station times) and estimation (of the timetable), between theory and practice. I noticed that every station has its arrival and departure time listed as the same minute (which is beautifully condensed and elegant technical writing, but of course can never match with reality.) This meant every departure was at least two minutes later than estimated, two minutes that they would gain (in theory) while traveling to the next station.
I also realized that it was totally futile to keep looking at the estimated time of arrival in Sacramento as the farther away you got from the actual stopped train, the more extrapolated and mushy the numbers would be. Instead, I had to find the last station that had hard dates and times (as opposed to estimates) and then move one station further up the line, to the station that had the next estimated dates and times. That station (which happened to be Jack London in Oakland) would be the station where the train was stuck. As soon as those times turned from estimates to actuals, our train would be on its way.
So I checked that status, oh, about every ten seconds. At about 1 a.m. we started looking at other options. What if got a refund and flew to Seattle? I looked at all the flights available at such short notice and there was nothing good. The flights would cost about $900 total (which would have been covered by the refund from the train tickets), but somehow $900 for plane tickets routed through Denver and Phoenix and leaving at 6:15 in the morning was just not nearly as enticing as the train travel we had envisioned. Plus, I'm very reluctant to fly yet because of the possibility of my arm swelling up with lymphedema. After looking at the prices and the schedules and considering the possibility of causing a lymphatic fluid event... we just couldn't do it. We thought about driving 16 hours each way... and just couldn't do that either. It was either give up Seattle and the conference altogether, or tough it out. And our ability to think coherently was diminishing with every passing second.
Then we had another thought. If this train was three or four hours late departing Sacramento, then it would be three or four hours late arriving in Seattle, right? Which means we would arrive sometime after midnight the next night, the amount of time past midnight as unknowable as the amount of time that we still had to wait, which would mean we'd spend a good deal of our day off trying to recover from getting there. The options were getting less and less clear and more and more unpleasant.
At around 2:00 am we gave up being in the truck and relocated back into the station. By this time the full zombie apocalypse was under way. The kids were screaming or (worse) just staring into space and keening. The nicely dressed woman who had been dropped off by her son had a brow furrowed with pain as she sat by her nice luggage and periodically rubbed her hand through her hair. There was very little distinction any more between who was a passenger and who was local. Everyone by this time was homeless; everyone by this time was crazy.
We asked the guy behind the counter what the situation was. He didn't know a lot more than we did, but he said he'd make some calls. A few minutes later he called my name on the loudspeaker to get us to come back to the window. They were just now starting to take the car out from under the train. He estimated that would take 30 - 40 minutes. He also said that it would take two hours to get from Oakland to Sacramento. So, conceivably, we could be on our way as early as 4:45. That would be the optimistic scenario.
We said we'd check back and went outside to the back platform where it was a bit cooler and there was a breeze. The woman in the neck brace was sitting on a bench with her lumpy bags and baggage, talking to herself. The Amtrak employee we'd just talked to was now sitting on a luggage moving cart, smoking a cigarette... biding his time like the rest of us. We found an empty bench and looked at the back yard of the train depot: the empty platforms, the promises of journeys yet to come. We felt nothing any more. Except maybe a deep desire to never hear another Johnny Cash song ever again.
I finally said the words. If it goes past 5 a.m., we're going to scrub the mission. We were both sorely disappointed on many levels and it was inconceivable to me that I would miss the conference that I had worked to hard to prepare for. But the show might have to go on without me. It was possible that I had found, finally, one of my absolute limits.
We went back inside and checked the board: 4:45.
I checked my app about fifty times.
I checked the board again:5:02.
Five in the morning. We were now looking at two more hours of doing this, at the absolute minimum. It was like falling in love with someone you were sure you'd spend the rest of your life with, and then fighting all the time over really stupid stuff. Or really big stuff. But after awhile, after all the soul grinding, plodding through, agonizingly painful moments with this person, it just becomes finally oh so clear: it's over. You just can't do it any more. And the worst part of all of it is the losing of the dream.
All the fantasies we had conjured up had to be dismantled. There would be no more harmonicas wailing the blues, no more gracious porters, no more observation car reveries. We would not see the Puget Sound glittering in the sunlight from the deck of a ferry boat. I would not charm the dozens of presenters into booking Gilbert and Sullivan into their well-funded theatres. I would not have great train stories to tell my co-workers (at least no stories that involved actually being on a train.) We would not see a train; would not smell that creosote smell of the ties; would not look out on the world through a hypnotically moving window.
It was clear, absolutely clear, that we were done.
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