On the train, October 2002
I rode the Amtrak to Washington last week prepared to give some advice to President Bush on foreign and domestic policy but he was out hustling the party faithful for dollars for political cronies - old and wannabe - he hopes will jump up and salute when he sends a note to Congress. Any congressman who gets elected with the President’s help better tow the line least he or she be called on the carpet by the leadership and condemned as an ungrateful, miserable little shit. Since the President chose not to be at home when I was in the city I transported myself to the suburbs for four days. Life in the Washington suburbs is not comparable to life in South Carolina. It is all get up and go in heavy traffic and everything seems to cost more. During my stay a shooter was terrorizing whole communities from southern Maryland to southern Virginia. He or she had shot eight or nine people and killed seven or eight. There were more shootings while I was there. I was happy to be heading back to Charleston. My mother, before she died in the spring of 2002, reminded me I once said I would never live further south than Washington. I also said in my youth I would not smoke nor drink. Three plans that went astray. I did give up the smoking in January 1974. Actually I had quit earlier but started again in the winter of 1973 when I went to Saigon after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initialed the cease fire in Paris. Back to the Amtrak. Along the route between Charleston and Washington the train passes through innumerable small towns in South and North Carolina and Virginia. At one time when automobiles and personal transportation was minimal the train stopped at many of these towns but now limits stops to the larger cities. Passengers are expected to travel on their own to these stops to catch the train. Where the train does stop, and in between, looking from the window one can see shops and businesses closed, buildings empty and in some instance a ghost town appearance. Did these earlier businesses move to the other side of town, perhaps to a mall or out to the suburbs where they are more people? Or had the shops and stores dried up or been replace by Wal-Mart and Costco? Had the proprietors died off without any survivors willing to work the long hours necessary to make a small success of hardware, drugs or dry goods stores? What happened to all these people and where did they go? The homes along the railroad are largely what used to be called trailers but in today’s politically correct world are referred to as mobile homes. Some yards around these are littered with broken auto parts and children’s toys. There is an abundance of folding aluminum and plastic lawn chairs around trailers. Some of the sticks built homes are in need of repair, especially paint, but occasionally one is a pleasant surprise and model for others: fresh paint, yard tidy, grass cut and an American flag flying from the porch. Who are the people who still live by the side of the tracks, especially in the well-kept homes? It must take a lot of effort and hard work to keep a house neat and looking good alongside the tracks. The train rolls on and riders are as ignorant of the people who live along the tracks as they are of the riders. It would be nice to know if one of them was wondering who I was looking out the window at the same time I wondered about them. Would this be thought confluence?


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