On the road, traveling Zen

In my incarnation as an English teacher, I often misquoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose central philosophy, I believe, was, “Anticipation is greater than realization.” In a few cases in life, this is not so. Meditation practice offers fulfillment where expectation once resided. When that’s so, it’s very cool and very special. I am on the close past end of such an extended situation. I am grateful for it.

I’ve traveled the U.S. passenger rail system since I was a small child, when we would grab a train from Green Bay to visit my mother’s sister and her family in Chicago. I went on to do trains to New Orleans (yes, that one), Cincinnati, Denver, St. Louis, upstate New York, Kansas City. I had never gone all the way cross-country, though I’d planned that to no avail a couple of times. Recently, I had the chance, and I took it, to travel the famous train The Empire Builder from its origin point at Chicago’s famous Union Station, up the Mississippi, cross-cutting Minnesota and North Dakota, along the upper border with Canada, through the Great Plains, the upper Rocky Mountains, Glacier National Park, the Columbia River Basin, the Cascade Mountains, and in the shadow of Mount Rainier, to Seattle, Washington.

I bookended the trip with Greyhound rides to and from Chicago and nights downtown in Carl Sandburg‘s City of Big Shoulders. In the Pacific Northwest, I rode Puget Sound ferries and stayed at Bremerton, right at the ferry dock on beautiful Puget Sound. Although I rode in the lap of today’s rail system, I used the chronicles of Lewis & Clark as guiding points.

A few columns back I wrote of “taking my consciousness for a walk.” As I began journaling on this trip, I kept coming back to it and to the things I’ve learned since my last grand trip.

Take each step as if it were simply leaving the front door to walk to the bus stop. Don’t feel impatience. Patience really is its own reward. Move slowly and deliberately, within the bounds of my limitations. Don’t bump my head, fall down steps, even stumble. Don’t slip while cutting an apple and cut my finger. Sleep when I need to. Eat just as if I were at home, excepting I don’t have a stove and refrigerator. Eat healthy. Read the maps and preparation guides, not obsessively, but enough to get a sense of where I am and where I’m headed. Pack just right for a trip where I have to haul some luggage at times. Use bungee cords. Don’t lose anything, not even my sunglasses. Keep to the budget.

Harold’s Chicken Shack, Wabash Avenue, Chicago, next door to Buddy Guy’s Blues Legends Club. Be friendly, but don’t be unnecessarily forthcoming. Where do I get that? Are they making me wait because I look like I don’t belong? Then I eat the best $6 fish dinner imaginable.

My sense of style is expanding.

Looking at Grant Park, peaceful this late September evening. I would have been here in August 1968, if I hadn’t been behind other bars. So perfect now, so perfect then. But the skateboarders, people walking dogs, the fountains, belie the tear gas of 40 years ago. The Grand Ballroom, Ritz Hotel (no, I am not staying here)…What events has this giant room seen? Tycoons, politicians, the regal, all real and all just a story in my mind. Union Station, beneath the huge marble steps, recalling The Untouchables movie…Heels of boots clicking across the shiny floor. Broad wooden benches, worn by the masses. The retired 30-year Navy admiral I meet, who says, “The United States serves two purposes and has throughout history: Destroying things and building them back up.” Later I hear him arguing over this with a young marine who’s had too much beer.

Rumble, juggle back and forth, rumble, I remember how to walk on a train. Kin-hin on the train at all hours on the 46-hour trip. No bed in cramped quarters but the best seat on the train, between the dining car and the Sightseer Lounge, all across the country.

A lone oak on the Great Plains.

I really know now, that grand song, “…amber waves of grain…from purple mountain majesties…” It really, really is this way.

All the many train riders, seasoned, just the right kind of funky. They keep the first class passengers apart from us. Many of my fellow riders are gray-haired, sporting full backpacks, but also little children, one but eight days old, wrapped up and asleep on the rumbling car.

There are many of the Amish, Mennonite, and Pennsylvania Dutch persuasion. They wear stark, uniformed clothing, with the women covered as much as in Orthodox Islam, and the men, all with the same haircuts and beards. Most speak a language sounding like Dutch with each other. One languid afternoon, in the Mississippi River Valley, a teenage boy plays an old-time waltz on the harmonica. It’s the most exquisite harmonica I’ve ever heard.

Out of the Big Sky Country of Montana…The brown waves of wheat and beans giving way to the Aspens of the great mountains. Waterfalls and deep rugged valleys, skirted by miles of sharp small gray rocks. A lone bull at dusk in the flat plain below. Rusting farm implements and houses looking abandoned but not. The winds keep forests from growing here. Salt flats, salt ponds, salt lakes, brought to surface by hundreds of years of the rain sucking water from the surface and bringing up the salt.

Pike Place Market in Seattle, where one can get everything from the finest fruit and fish to every bauble imaginable, as well as a massage, fortune telling, and palm reading. The art, the music, the fragrances, beyond expectation. It is an American bazaar in the best way.

So many people, all here on the train, not driving, not flying. The guy returning to his native New Orleans after “not making it” in the Northwest. The 400-pound man who is “a friend of the Amish.” The gentle couple from Ontario who look like aged bikers. Matt the traveler, who seems to have been everywhere and done everything. They’re committed rail travelers. They seem to value the “going there” as much as the destination. I’ve not traveled with a breed like this anywhere else but on the train.

This North America. This is such a big and lovely world, a world among worlds, everywhere from rusty back alleys to snowy mountain tops. Half a continent moves on the window of this train car.

Yet in my meager compassion, I struggle a bit with attitude and judgment. I see people jostling for some kind of traveler’s upper hand, a better seat, butting in line for food. Some people wear their body odor beyond even the funky nature of the rails. I caution myself for my judgmental ideas and in some of the quiet moments, I remind myself that we’re all on this train together.

May from Ontario makes me as a meditator. Am I that obvious? She asks what the most common question is for the “Buddhist Adviser.” She tells me how she finds peace in her garden. Jimmy from New Orleans is wearing a “Buddha” t-shirt, as I do, and we connect.

I obviously am back to our corner of the world, via another stop at Harold’s Chicken Shack. I’ve taken my consciousness for a walk. And all the “Zen” personal counseling I gave myself in preparation for this trip really worked.

But imagine my feelings when, looking out my 9th floor hotel window in Seattle at the giant purple-pink-gray cloud heads moving east from the ocean, and light shining magnificently off of the volcanic top of Mount Rainier, the Space Needle in the center and the Cascade Mountains to the right – I sit at the nightstand and open the drawer to the Gideon Bible, and what do I see? Alongside Gideon’s Bible is The Teachings of the Buddha. It is a white hardbound book with gold embossed print on the cover. Inside, the basic teachings are along with the biography of Gautama Buddha. It is placed by The Society for Buddhist Understanding.

Home on the road. There were deer and antelope in Montana.

Kabhir-John Price can be reached at 920-729-0040 or 840-0186; 1340 Geneva Road #10, Menasha, WI 54952; menashafree@yahoo.com