As I grabbed my seat in Chicago I saw I had an aisle seat. Shit I thought I wanted that window seat. My seat mate was a 24 years kid from Saginaw who was heading to san Diego. His friends had bought a beach house and he was going to move there. With some friends. He was hoping to get into the medical marijuana industry, everyone's got to have a dream. He had a neck tattoo on him and I later saw he had a ton if tats . He said his tattoo artist loved him cause his skin could absorb a ton of ink. I had no idea what that meant. Probably what he meant.
I got up and made my way towards the observation car. I sat and watched as we left Chicago. We made our way through the west side into Cicero. Cicero had the distinction of being a city that Al Capone had violently taken over in the early 20s. As a reporter put it, it was the damn Wild West. Now it was your basic blue collar Chicago suburb. As we left the old suburbs we came into the newer suburbs that could of been the homes of any of the teens from a john Hughes film.
About a half hour outside Chicago we made a stop and a drunken loud couple got on. They where older, probably in their 50s . They where sharing a bottle of wine together. They where a little annoying but it was kind of nice to see two people enjoying each others company and actually having fun.
I looked around and noticed they're where a fare amount of Amish on the train. I remember taking the greyhound and seeing a whole army of them. I remember during my cross country bus trip, seeing them everywhere I went, even when I got on the ferry in Seattle . It was like they where stocking me. The Amish are pretty low key and usually keep to themselves. They're pretty friendly and usually end up dealing with a lot if random questions from strangers. This group I learned was heading to Missouri.
We where now in rural Illinois. We passed small farming towns that had seen better days. As I sat in the observation car watching the sun set, I could overhear a conversation about gun control between an older conservative looking gentleman and a young hippie white guy with white guy dreadlocks. Ill just paraphrase what I heard.
Older guy: "Teachers should have guns, you don't take guns away , you give them to people to stop bad people.
Hippie guy:" But don't you think if the guns in the classroom and the teacher leaves and the kid gets curious something bad might happen?
It went like this for a half an hour. I went to the snack bar and grabbed a sandwhich and a root beer. 9 freaking dollars? Christ ah what you going to do. I went back to my seat and sat down. A loud women in front of me was discussing about how warm it was in LA and how the damn cold was too much to handle. Well at least ill be getting away from the cold for a while.
After a while I got bored and headed back towards the observation car . See this is why trains are so much better than buses and planes. You can walk around and see differant things. Though the downside is no shower. I was starting to smell pretty funky. I needed to brush my teeth. I sat down and wrote as the sky turned into a dark blood orange color as it set on the prairie. As the darkness took hold I thought back on New York and the uncertain future that was before me.
Around 730 we crossed the Mississippi into Iowa.It was a smoke break and a good chance to get some fresh air. The train stopped and it was completely dark. You could smell the ammonia from the pigs out in the distant fields. A big haystack calhone looking guy stood smoking a cigarette . He talked about how the smell was worse during thanksgiving. He said in western Iowa the hog smell was worse. How guys would pass out from the fumes and fall in and drown in the giant tanks filled with the pig feces.
Man I thought what a shitty way to go. My seat mate said the worse way to go would probably be drowning in a deep fryer. Wow that's truly messed up I thought.
The big haystack calhone looking guy than told how his uncle had breed a dog to protect the sheep and how it had killed a badger.
Yup I wasn't in New York anymore. I got back on the train and hug out in the observation car. As I sat writing a hippie lawyer guy was talking to a girl about trans fats and going vegan. He said how the next generation of kids in America aren't going to live as long cause of the diabetes they all had. He was probably right. Than he said the UAE had a high case of it amongst the rich. He said he was in NYC met some guys from the UAE and said "You have type 2 diabetes don't you?".
I usually ask how's the weather. An older gentlemen approached the lawyer and asked legal advice about a problem he had with an insurance company. Than they got into politics. Diabetes to politics , got to love the train.
We pulled into Kansas City around 10pm. The conductor told us it was a hour break but do not leave the platform to get food from the Barbecue place a across the tracks. Damn there goes my plan.
I got out it was cold. I looked around. I could see the KC skyline in the distance. Union station in KC had once been one of the major transit hubs back in the day, but due to the railroads decline it had fallen into disrepair until about 15 years ago. It had come back. Of course being stuck on the platform I couldn't have a look.
In the distance I could see the WWI memorial. That too had fallen into disrepair. After an hour I climbed back on. The train headed off into the night. I tried to sleep. Around 2 I awoke as the train pulled into Hutchinson for a stop. For some reason I felt like I knew the place. Like I had seen it before. It wasn't until the next day I discovered it was where they shot the movie Picnic. Oh William Holden save me. Am I turning into Hal I thought. I hope not as I drifted off to sleep.
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