I was a ticketed Amtrak passenger, the mysterious “Mister LaFano,” lame and alone, from Sunday March 24 thru Monday, April 1. The following are my observations of the world through which we traveled. [1]
The Trains
“Rod” Rodney Pascal is the Cafe Car Attendant who should serve ale and mead in Valhalla. He made the trip fun. We compared notes on Portland, where he used to like to bar hop. When I grabbed three goodnight beers, he said, “Sir, according to policy, I have to ask, are you sleeping car or coach?”
“Coach.”
“Then I am sorry to inform you that the limit is two, unless you are buying for two.”
I returned one of the Ultralights and paid up, always tipping.
He then, as I am drinking at my seat, is on the com, “Rod Pascal here, with his infamous and soon to be world famous bloody marys, and… ICE COLD BEER!”
“Prick!”
I drank the two beers and returned to Ron, who grinned, “You see, Sir, haling as you are from the brooding Northwest, I knew, that three beers would not be adequate, so have, through my nefarious means, guided you to a fourth appointment with Bachus.”
Amtrak employees have retired in large numbers. New employees are all eager and happy to have these unique jobs. The numbers of engineers have exploded, something that was at crisis lows the past few years. The trains are running on time to early, except when the numerous weather events intervene. The roughest ride is in the Ohio Valley where the freight traffic has destroyed the tracks.
The Pacific Northwest
I took the #17 bus too far, past the station. Asking the pretty driver if she looped back, she was nice enough to drop me just over the Willamette River on the wrong side of the bridge. It took me a full half hour to cross the bridge on crutches. It is a draw bridge. It was cold in the misty rain as I looked at the ‘safe to walk’ light. Passing onto the part that you can see though, 300 feet down to the cold gray water and crutching along, I realized, that it would take me a good ten minutes to get to the solid part of the bridge and wondered, ‘was the light still right?’
This high vantage on Union Station showed an expansion of homeless all around, in increasingly neat and semi-permanent shelters. The tents I passed around on the side walk, seemed to have been pitched by highly competent occupants. As the train pulled out of Portland, the same impression, had all around the city by car, on foot and by train, expanded: there are more homeless then in 2023, the population expanding steadily every year since it tripled in 2020. These homeless are twice as likely to have automobiles as in 2023, are thrice as likely to be living in campers, about ten times more likely to be keeping a clean camp, and are roughly twenty times more likely to be living in scrap built shacks rather than tents.
Vacancies are expanding.
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California:
In Sacramento, Davis, Martinez, Richmond, Emmeryville, Oakland, the homeless situation is identical to the Pacific Northwest, has expanded and altered in the same way. Vacancies are expanding.
Hayward, Fremont, Santa Clara and San Jose have not worsened, with some homeless that are trying to disguise their condition or use stealth camping. However, ominously, massive units of cheap rentals are being constructed. California does have the best graffiti. The town of Colefax in the Sierras seems a lovely place to live. The snow above around Donner’s Pass and down to Truckee was deep, and it was snowing on across all four states to Colorado during the passage.
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Nevada
Reno’s homeless population has doubled since 2023, returning to its 2022 levels. There are more semi permanent shelters. The desert was green and the wild horses throve. In the desert there were also numerous camps of automobile gypsies, never before seen by these eyes, a total new demographic. It was cold.
By night we were delayed by a freight train, headed west, with 45 Abrahms Main Battle Tanks. There were no US markings. These were painted tan and were numbered. The snowy desert sunsets were beautiful.
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Utah & Colorado
The trains board heading east in Salt Lake City at 4 a.m. the events in these two states have their own articles: ‘Kill You What’ and God Works in Articulate Ways. From March 29 thru 30, it was still winter, the desert frosted and the grass green as the rivers rushed with mountain mud.
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Nebraska and Iowa
The Northeast Plains of Colorado and the Northwest corner of Kansas were lost to the night as usual. But due to the five hour delay in the Rockies I was able to appreciate the poverty of small town Nebraska and Iowa. Here, I saw zero homeless. Yet the homed were often revealed to have no reason to leave their digs in search of poverty, it having found them where they sprung.
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Chicongo
Illinois seems well off in the rural farming sector and Chicongo as frightening as ever with its inhuman architecture. Thanks to some improvement in Amtrak policy, which seems to be related to the massive renovations at all of the busy stations, this asphalt ape’s stay was quite pleasant.
Two years ago, when this happened, I was refused help finding my hotel and wondered around in the rainy night with rucksack on fending off muggers. This last time, we were all loaded on a shuttle bus and taken to a nice hotel, called the Swissotel, with no H, where I bet that Brandrew Pate, utube stud, was hatched. This was mÕ½latto paradise, hot bitches wearing almost nothing and covered in bling, parading for fat golden skin princes brushed shoulders with upper middle class college athletes touring with their parents on Spring Break. This place screamed money, soulless, seething money!
We scum got our own line, as the Eastern European managers and security segregated the shimmering vampire class from us lowly livestock in our backpacks—we even had Amish men tramping in work boots in our party. The nicest bathrooms ever, a bed that an NBA player could have used as a yoga mat! Our food vouchers were not accepted. On crutches, the manager gave me a room right next to an elevator on the 4th of some 30 floors.
Returning to the hotel lobby in the morning, the bus driver, a black fella my age said, “Mah Man! Nice to see you again.”
We shook hands and he hunted for the rest of the passengers until we were all aboard. He gave us a nice monologue about not setting our luggage down as it might blow away. He also circled the Union Station and advised us on the safest access and egress for future events. People, including him, who held my head once so I didn’t crack it on the baggage panel while retrieving my pack, had been looking out for me, trying to keep up on the various bus and train parades on my crutches, staff and passengers.
Armed with my $40 food voucher, I made my way, with 7 hours to kill, in the great maze of construction hive cages, as this Gilded Age monstrosity is re anointed with splendor. The great hall is done and it soars as if from a Roman Dream. Half the shops either refused the vouchers or were closed, leaving McDonalds and a local barbecue joint—to the latter I went.
Taxes on food in Chicago are 35%! Edible meat and vegetables that I was able to glean from under the mass of bread and potatoes for $30 amounted to 6 ounces of pork and 4 ounces of slaw. I gave my last $10 voucher to a beggar. The staff at Union Station, are 80% local Chicongoese and as sweet as can be.
The place was all a bustle, reminding me not to travel during spring break again. Looking for a place to sit with my food there were two small tables with three unoccupied chairs: one occupied by a slim woman of 65 and the other of a stout, dyke of 25. I chose the latter as to be less afraid of me, and went to sit diagonally from her, passing the old narrow-assed broad by. As I pulled out the chair, the older lady said, “Sir, you can sit with me.”
I said, “That’s, okay miss.”
“No, I insist, sit right across from me, please.”
Noting that this would place me between them, I turned to sit across from Granny, nodding to the dyke, who burst out, “Do I look that bad!”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that at all,” said Granny.
I raised my hands, “Ladies, my shattered self esteem has received a great boost, please, continue to fight over me—I’ll take it.”
They laughed and we all ended up in a three way conversation with me as the moderator. Women reveal themselves as so fragile as they travel increasingly alone. The old broad was a tough fourth generation western Montana woman traveling to New Orleans. The young dyke was a college student from Harrisburg, PA moving to Billings to live with her fem sugar mommy girlfriend. She is working on her masters in psychology. The old broad had some kind of degree as well. She asked me about my university and I laughed, “I’m too old and lame to snatch purses anymore, so I clean houses and pawn the jewelry.”
“Oh, well you have a very nice trip, sir,” she said as they held hands and walked off looking askance.
The Ohio Valley roared with lightning and thunder, gushing rain as the train raced through the night. The trains actually move faster in the hurried Midwest and congested East than they do in the wide West. Arriving in Pittsburgh at five and waiting for Rick, again, staff and passengers offered me help and kind words as I crutched along. When Rick arrived at 5:45, on Monday, April 1, I noticed that the old Amish guy, about my size, who had been on the same busses and trains for four days and five nights, was wondering about my fortune and who would pick me up, as he had seen me wander off alone in Grand Junction. He seemed concerned, and Rick noticed as we hugged and waved to him, the old guy waved and smiled, walking back inside.
This made me think of San Jose, of us two passengers and two conductors on one 6:18 train on Thursday. The lead man was six and a half feet and did warms ups and stretches on the platform, and made sure I understood the train layout and that there was a seat reserved for me downstairs. I asked him, “You played ball, right,” appraising his frame and figuring he was a pitcher or first baseman, these conductor jobs going to college graduates only.
He winced enough that I know he was once good at his game, looked far away into a past that was blind to me and said, “Yes, back in the day… my friend—you have a good day.”
Something positive lit the very air across this increasingly scary country for eight days and seemed to escort we some hundred misfits among you across it. When we 20 gained Pittsburgh, half headed to eastern Pennsylvania on the 7:30 train, leaving about five bound for D.C. aboard from among the 200 that came aboard in Emmeryville. I recalled the engineer, a new hire, who the ticket station lady said waved “like superman,” and was happy for his new job.
Half of the passengers had never taken the train, among them vacationing children. People snapped pictures, including a handsome Chinese kid constantly taking pictures of his pretty girlfriend, who posed like a model, batting her eyes comically. The lead of the two hissing engines rang into towering view some 15 feet above us like a mechanical monster, and a big, bearded man, built like an engine himself with a thick beard, hung from one bar with his left hand and saluted us like a Roman Centurian, smiling thinly, his blue eyes twinkling, like a young Santa as a psychotic gear head. To him some forty voices cheered and as many pairs of hands clapped.
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Notes
-1. “We,” becomes a word that joins even the most diverse persons together once humans who would never choose the company of one another have been herded together by those mirthless sisters Fate, Folly and Fortune.
