the empire builder, or, finding moments of patriotism in unexpected places

A month from today will be the eve of the beginning of our cross-country expedition. First we'll take the Lake Shore Limited north from Penn Station along the Hudson and on to Chicago, and then we'll transfer to the Empire Builder and head west across the northern plains and over the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Mountains and eventually to Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle.

It's funny, the spectrum along which friends' reactions have fallen, all the way from "I'd rather die," to "You only think trains are romantic," to "Well that's nice," to "Oh my God that sounds incredible!" I have to confess to vacillating between these a bit myself, and yet in the end I find myself being suckered in by the excitement of it all.*

The Empire Builder. It's a name that carries with it a certain old-school grandiosity, a romantic vision of American greatness and expansionism and fortitude and the conquering of western frontiers. It carries images of vast flat prairies and steeply banked curves through snowy mountain passes and sunlight seeping into the darkness at the edges of tunnels boring through mountains too tall to go over. It carries the lives and sometimes deaths of thousands of emigrants, Chinese and Irish Americans brought in to build the first transcontinental railroad. It carries, in my childish heart, the wanderlust of Charles Ingalls as he moved his little family from Wisconsin's Big Woods to Indian Territory in eastern Kansas to Minnesota and Iowa and eventually South Dakota, farming and hunting and furniture-building and laying down tracks for that first railroad.

I'm surprised at my excitement in taking this Empire Builder all the way to the Pacific Ocean, at this unexpected sense of pride in a nation I so often complain about.

The only other time I've really felt anything similar was six years ago, in April of 2004. Dave, Josh, Jill, Nate, and I had rented a car and booked a hotel room and drove down to Washington, DC to participate in the March for Women's Lives. We arrived early the evening before, went out to dinner, and then spent a couple hours wandering along the Mall, skipping and cartwheeling and holding hands and laughing and growing maybe a little misty-eyed as we gazed up at Lincoln, at the soldiers of Iwo Jima, at the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument, at the World War II memorial still under construction, at the thousands of names carved in to Maya Lin's death wall. To walk amongst such greatness and such heartbreak on the eve of protesting our own government, in a country that allows, that encourages, that in fact is founded on such protest, made me cry like a baby, surrounded there as I was by friends who'd gone all that way to march not necessarily because it was a cause close to their hearts, but because it was a cause close to mine.

These two incredibly disparate things, this train and that march, bring up similar emotions; emotions that I find somehow both inexplicable and gratifying, set even as they are in a more practical reality (76 hours on a train, NYC-DC drive in a car full to capacity with 5 large adults). Let me have my moments of romantic patriotism: after all, they do not come all that often.


* Along with what I like to think of as a healthy dose of practicality: Evan has been teasing me because I am already pondering which books to bring, which Trader Joe's snacks to pack with us, and looking for the perfect knitting projects to keep my fingers and mind occupied while looking out at mountains and cities and miles and miles of ghost towns and farms and nothing and nothing and more nothing.