The Long and Winding Road by George Ziemann This page last modified -- July 27, 2010 -- 3:00 a.m. Amtrak La Guardia was basically in Harlem, just south of 125th St. I had taken the bus past it getting from the East Harlem train station to Broadway. It would have been easier to get to (although taking the subway to Penn Station was pretty much a breeze), but when I was still in New Orleans, my Aunt Joyce had suggested, "If you've got the time, take a train instead of flying." While I had no idea at the time that I would even consider this, when I sat down the night before to make travel plans, I remembered her words, along with the that other advice that was still guiding me, "Everything happens for a reason." My first train ride had been as a local mass transit alternative to other ground transportation. I really liked it. I was certainly in no hurry. Why not? I did have one good reason to be hesitant about the train. Once upon a time, I was visiting friends in Lawrence, Kansas -- Steve Topping, the bassist from the first band I worked for, and his wife, Kathy. Early in the morning, just before dawn, Kathy was up feeding their baby, James. Since I was sleeping on the couch, this roused me at least to a semi-awake state. We chatted a little, but were interrupted when a train came roaring through. The train tracks were basically in their back yard, down a slight incline, so when a train came through, you couldn't help but be aware of it. This one seemed louder than normal, and grew into a thunderous crashing sound, followed by complete silence. A train had derailed. We went outside to check it out. The sun was just starting to rise, but the light was still dim. A cloud of dust filled the air. It was a passenger train, with many of the cars on their side and we could hear the cries of the people inside. It seemed like a scene from The Twilight Zone. Kathy was a medical technologist. She worked at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. The first thing she did was tell me, "You don't have any medical training. Do not try to go help those people. I'll get help." She went back inside, called the police and then phoned the hospital to tell them to send out a triage unit. Falling clearly under the category of total fucking irony, the town had planned a mock disaster drill for that very morning. Everyone was already on alert and prepared. They knew that something was going to happen, they just didn't expect it to be real. The response was fast, professional and extremely well-organized. We stayed out of the way, with our only real useful functions being to help news reporters hook up their tape recorders to the phone so they could play tapes through the phone and file their stories, and offer what little we knew from being there when it happened. So, while this was in the back of my mind when I made my travel plans to leave New York, the fact is that planes sometimes crash, too. But you never hear of anyone hijacking a train. I've already mentioned some of the advantages of a train -- room for a tall person to stretch, and if that's not enough, you can get up and walk around; you can bring your own food and drinks; the seats recline far enough to actually be restful without inconveniencing the person behind you. That was as an alternative to other ground transportation. But start comparing it to air travel and the list of differences grows -- everything about airplane flights is cramped, crowded, rushed and needlessly stressful. On the train, you don't get the silly "how to fasten your seatbelt" lecture. They didn't even have seatbelts. A lot of airline passengers stress out over takeoffs and landings. The train doesn't "take off" -- it just starts moving slowly. When it's going to stop, it slows down gradually. No drama. No tension. If you're a smoker, airports suck. It's not so much that you have to go outside to smoke, but you have to go through all the security bullshit again. First of all, there are no security checkpoints for the train. You don't have to empty everything from your pockets, let them x-ray your shoes and baggage, or get treated like a terrorist. Hijacking a train would be rather pointless. It's going where it's going. While the smoking cars are gone now, if you smoke, there will be stops where the train takes on passengers and you can step off the train and have a cigarette on the platform, since you're already outside anyway. Sometimes it's a quick stop and as soon as the last new passenger boards, the smoke break is over. But if the train is ahead of schedule, there might be 10 or 15 minutes to indulge your vice. You don't have to completely leave the station, run outside, grab a few puffs, then go back through the whole security nightmare. The biggest difference is the employees. Airline employees always seem to make an effort to be nice, but they're just as stressed as the passengers half the time. When you're on a plane, there is this great big routine of passing out the peanuts, taking drink orders, passing out the drinks, taking them away, put the tray up for landing, blah, blah, blah. None of that on the train. Either you bring your own food and drinks, or there are two options to get food on the train -- the club car (cafe car), with soft drinks, chips, snacks, hot dogs and burgers; or the dining car, which serves full meals. The limitations are that the club car will run out of things by the end of a long leg and the dining car is only open certain times. You might even have to make a reservation for the dining car. But it sure beats having everything shoved at you and taken away as quickly as possible. When you first board a train, there is a brief period when the Amtrak employees have to check your tickets, group you on a car with other passengers going to the same destination and get everyone situated. But even then, everyone I encountered was super friendly. If you had a question, they would answer it. Once everyone in your car had been dealt with, they would basically leave you alone for the entire duration of the rest of the trip. They don't ignore you, though. Someone will come through every so often and is always more than willing to provide service to you, from getting small amenities, telling you where things were on the train, answering general questions or just providing a minute or two of normal human interaction. No big fat rush. It's like Prozac in motion. The trip from New York to Toledo was going to take 12 hours. I was in no big hurry. I still had a lot to think about, still didn't know where I was ultimately going. The first four or five hours of the ride were relaxing and interesting, even if it was New Jersey and then back into New York (the state). The train goes places that the highways do not. It is decidedly more scenic and you see so much more than you possibly could driving or taking a plane. I rode a bus from Kansas to Toledo once. What you see out the window of a bus doesn't compare to what you see from a train window. I was sitting next to a guy who was headed to Erie, PA. For the first couple of hours we didn't talk much. I was fascinated by the view out the window; he was reading a newspaper. We did a little small talk but stayed kind of quiet for the most part. After the club car opened, we both went down and grabbed a snack and a drink. It was time for my new "make friends" personality to re-emerge, so I asked him what he did. Kind of amusing, in retrospect, because if someone asked me the same question, I would say that I was a musician and a writer, although neither of them could be described as a paying job. I guess it was somewhat of a pre-emptive strike. His response was that he had a regular job, but his consuming passion was that he was a record collector with a collection of more than 80,000 albums that he would take to trade shows to buy, sell or trade. What luck! I didn't even have to adapt to "normal" conversation. We were basically the same age, were fans of the same music and both knew it deeply. He knew who the RIAA was. We talked for a couple of hours, trading concert stories and general music conversation. I don't even remember the guy's name (it didn't really matter), but he was the perfect traveling companion for the long ride. The dominos were still falling. The most unexpected event of the ride happened in Rochester, NY, when a Border Patrol agent came through asking the traditional "What country are you from?" question. Living in Arizona for the last 20 years or so, I'm used to the Border Patrol. What was unexpected was that they actually are working the northern border, too. Even more surprising was what happened after he announced himself and started quizzing everyone. A guy sitting one seat up and across the aisle had been napping when the Border Patrol agent came on board. He was semi-awake but still resting his head on the tray table in front of him when he was asked his country of origin. The guy looked like he could be from somewhere in the Middle East. And he did have a slight foreign accent. I'd noticed earlier, but I'd also noticed the early-20s black woman immediately across the aisle and the two white women in the row behind her, one of which was probably in her mid to late 30s and the other one was probably her mom. All three of them were going to Toledo. So I had made some mental notes about the people around me. I hadn't just focused on this guy because he might be from the Middle East. I was just being observant. "What country are you from?" asked the agent. "I'd prefer not to answer that question." "What?" "I said, I'd prefer not to answer that question." The Border Patrol agent kind of tilted his head a little, then moved on and continued through the car, giving the rest of the passengers the little quiz. I fully expected that after he finished that task, he was going to come back and drag the non-responsive guy's ass off the train. But nothing happened. No tough-guy "must comply" talk from the Border Patrol agent. He didn't go get a couple more agents to encourage participation. He didn't even come back for a second try at all. Not so much as, "Come on, just tell me. I won't make you prove it or anything." Nothing at all. He just went away. So, while they do have Border Patrol check in the north, "I'd prefer not to answer that question" is an acceptable answer. Try that in Arizona and see what happens. It had been a hot weekend, and I was dressed appropriately. My only complaint about the train was that the A/C ran all night like it was mid-afternoon. I didn't have a long-sleeved shirt, much less a jacket. Ended up putting on an extra shirt, then wrapping my arms in another t-shirt. Still, I was cold all night. Toledo It was still dark when we passed Sandusky, Ohio. The train didn't stop there, but I recognized the Blue Streak roller coaster at Cedar Point when we went past, as it had lights along the length of it. I had spent one summer working at the park, so the outline of the Blue Streak was instantly recognizable. I knew we were almost at our destination. It was about 5:20 a.m. on Monday morning when we got to Toledo. While mass transit to Penn Station in New York had been no problem, Toledo's train depot is no Penn Station, thus revealing a disadvantage to taking the train into a smaller town. Had I flown in, I would have rented a car at the airport. The train station was in downtown Toledo. Not a rental car in sight. But surely there had to be a car rental place nearby. Walked outside that station and, of course, there were cabs waiting. I got in one of them and asked the driver if he could take me to get a rental car. "No problem. I'll take you to the airport." Having grown up in Toledo, I knew where the airport was -- about 15 or so miles west of the southwest corner of the city. Downtown was more like the northeast corner. I worried about getting jacked around by a cab driver in New York City and had been lucky enough to get an honest driver. The cab driver in Toledo had been honest enough, but a cab ride to the airport was going to cost about $50 or $60 bucks. "Uh, thanks, but I know how far the airport is. I'll just call someone," I told the cabbie, then got out of the cab and went back inside. Went up to the counter and talked to the ticket agent. There were other car rental agencies nearby, she told me, but they weren't going to open until at least 8 a.m. I hadn't really wanted to call anyone at 5:30 in the morning, but I really it had been a long ride already. I wasn't going to sit around an empty train station for another 2-1/2 or three hours. So I called my aunt Daphlene (aka Daph) and woke her up. She said picking me up would be no problem (I had at least called her while I was on the train to let her know I was coming). I told her to take her time, maybe have a cup of coffee or something. "We'll have coffee when we get back." She was there in about 10 minutes. When we got to Daph's house, she went to the kitchen make coffee and I was relaxing a little in the family room. I had managed to get some sleep on the train, but not very much. She came back with coffee and we sat down and started talking. My cousin, Mike, and his son, Mason, live with Daph. Mike got up shortly after I got there. I'm not even sure if Daph was done making coffee yet. We said "Hi," to each other, but he was off to work. I mentioned the need to take a shower and Daph said, "Go ahead. You know where everything is." A moment's thought revealed the minor surprise that I did know where everything was, despite the fact that I hadn't been there in at least 35 years. When I was a kid, I had spent a lot of time there. The family room we were in used to be a garage. I hadn't gone beyond it yet, but I knew the entire layout of the house. By the time I finished my shower, Daph was ready to cook breakfast. Generally, breakfast for me means a cup of coffee and that's about it. Maybe some toast or a doughnut. I kind of tried to beg off. Mostly, I didn't want her to go to the trouble of cooking for me. "Oh, come on. You've got to eat breakfast. Besides, Mason will be up in a few minutes and he'll want breakfast, so I'm going to have to cook anyway." Mason just graduated from high school. In fact, there were remnants of the weekend's party celebrating that event all over the family room, not to mention the back yard. The party hadn't been at Daph's house, but it's where everything ended up afterward. He's a football player and had been on the verge of getting a scholarship to someplace like Harvard (he's already in the Football Hall of Fame -- twice), but during wrestling season he had popped his hamstring, which made the Ivy League schools suddenly back off. Fortunately, it hadn't been torn, just came unattached, so doctors were able to repair it and he will recover from it. Mason will still be able to play football in the future, but he'll be going to Eastern Michigan next year instead of Harvard. Mason's a pretty smart kid and, even though the hamstring injury had been a blow to his expectations, it was a stark reminder that a sports career could end in a split second. So when he had to shop around for alternatives, he kept a focus on getting placed somewhere that he could get a solid engineering degree, as well as a school that would give him a chance to play football when he was fully healed. The real point of all of that is that Mason eats like the football player that he is. He did want breakfast. He's got a healthy appetite. It suddenly made my polite resistance ("Oh, you dont have to bother...") seem a little silly. Besides, Daph used to run a restaurant. She likes to cook. But there's a little more to all of it than that. Between the earliest I can remember and about age 9, Daph lived just a few blocks away. She was our regular babysitter. When I came home from school, I would go straight to her house until my parents got home from work. We moved to the south end of town, a little suburb called Holland, Ohio, and she moved to Temperance, Michigan, which borders the north edge of Toledo's city line. It's really almost part of Toledo, with only the imaginary line of the Michigan-Ohio state borders separating them. Anyway, even after we both moved, I still went to Daph's house on a fairly regular basis. So we've got a long history together. She's got four children -- my cousins Charles (aka Chuck), Kathy, Mike and Bonnie. Chuck is the closest in age to me and we spent a lot of time together as kids, too, needless to say. Chuck and I both have the same primary memory of Daph and that earlier house. This was back in the 60s, and you were still likely to get a spanking for being a rotten kid (Actually, I remember getting spankings at school several years after, from the gym teacher, who used a paddle with holes drilled into it for maximum sting). They had a willow tree outside, and when it was time to get your ass kicked, Daph would tell us to go to the willow tree and cut off a switch for her to do it with. "And if you bring back some little twig, I'll go out there and pick one." You just didn't mess with Daph. Daph's almost 20 years older than I am. I'm 55. She looks (and acts) about 60. You still don't want to mess with her, because she's still not afraid to physically kick someone's ass if she needs to. Or simply bop them in the head. Don't get the wrong idea, though. She's not a mean old lady or anything. She just knows how to stand her ground. The only reason I even bring all of this up is that those early memories of her as the babysitter (and the willow tree) somehow overshadowed the memory of how cool she really was. She never treated us like babies, even when we basically still were. In fact, she would always give us a fairer shake than Mom and Dad would, when it really came down to it. My aunt Joyce is pretty cool, too, as some readers have already pointed out to me, but we had just not spent the time together when I was younger like Daph had. Our time together in New Orleans at the beginning of the trip had been very good -- Joyce always opens my eyes to so many things. Daph and I had so many more things to talk about, though, and we spent almost the entire day Monday doing just that. My purpose in visiting Toledo, lest we forget, had been to see my daughter, Rachel and her baby boy, Zen, my first grandchild. I did get to talk to Rachel on Monday, but she was booked up for the day, so we made plans for lunch on Tuesday. I also tried to call a couple of old friends, with no luck. I did make contact with my brother, Ed, and a few other family members. Not having a vehicle actually worked in my favor at this point. I let everyone know where I was, but they had to come to Daph's house to see me. Not that it was a real big deal -- Toledo isn't that large of a city in the first place, especially compared to Phoenix, which seems to be about 60 miles wide these days if you include the appended suburbs. Monday was good, relaxing down-time. Daph shared a lot of "unknown" stories about the family that I had never heard before, including things about my Mom and Dad, neither of whom had ever shared any of them. Some of these stories were like missing puzzle pieces. Once I heard them, other things that I never quite understood suddenly made complete sense for the first time in my life. At one point, probably right after talking to Rachel on the phone, I confessed that I had been in Toledo in 2005 for Rachel's college graduation. It was bad enough that I hadn't looked up one single family member (I missed 14 years of Rachel's life -- the 2005 trip had been all about Rachel and I didn't want to have to divide the time between her and family), and I got away with it for the most part because Rachel had graduated from Bowling Green State University, which is about 20 miles or so out of town. I had spent most of my time during that visit in Bowling Green. However, Rachel's actual graduation party had been at her Mom's house. Rachel's Mom, Leah, lives in Temperance, less than a mile away from Daph's house. "You were less than a mile away and you didn't even call?" Fortunately, there aren't any willow trees in Daph's yard now. After dinner, Mike fired up his computer and left it on for me when he went to bed. I had already determined that I was going to have to go back to New Orleans to pick up the car. I still wasn't in a hurry, though. The train still made the most sense. I wasn't really anxious to book the next leg of travel at that point. It was more just an exercise to figure out what the departure an arrival times were going to be, check the price, just get a general idea. I figured that when I was ready to go, I'd just show up at the Amtrak station and buy a ticket. You can do that to buy a ticket to Toledo in New York on a Sunday afternoon, but getting to New Orleans required a stop in Chicago and getting a train ticket from Toledo to Chicago during the week isn't quite that easy. Everything was booked up. The first train with available seats didn't leave until Friday morning. The price was definitely cheaper than flying, so I looked at the possibility of getting a sleeping accommodation for the Chicago to New Orleans portion. This appeared to almost double the price (an extra $212), but when I clicked for more information, it was revealed that when you took a sleeping car, $106 disappeared off the base fare. The price also included meals in the dining car. It had cost about $15 for a hot dog, some chips and a soda on the trip from New York, so I figured that three full meals probably was at least a $60 value. This meant the sleeping car (first class train accommodations) would really only cost about $40 more than coach in the long run. Not a bad deal at all. There was one berth left for Friday. I took it. This meant three more full days in Toledo. More to Come...

Page 1 On the Road to New Orleans Page 2 New Orleans to Westport, CT Page 3 New York City Page 4 Amtrak to Toledo Page 5 Toledo Page 6 Chicago