October 1 3 4 7 8

11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

22 23 24 25 26 28 30 31

October 22

The train is pulling out of Portland, after my two day stay here at my mother's condo. The train I am riding on is called "The Cascades," and operates four times daily between Portland and Seattle. The train is paid for by the states of Oregon and Washington and features smaller rail cars with a single level. The cars are short, shorter than the older trains that Amtrak runs for commuters in the east, but still comfortable. There is a little less footroom than on the Superliner cars. The café car is called the Bistro, and in its ceiling is a map of the route at night, with little lights for all the cities and towns.

Two days ago my Coastal Starlight train pulled into Portland five hours late. It was night and we saw the city from across the river, and then we crossed the bridge and we were in the great stucco station with the "Go By Train" sign on the clock tower. I got off the Superliner train, and this would be my last ride this trip on the double decker Superliner cars. The Superliners are a bit like train ocean liners. They were built for comfort and long distance, with spiral ship steps and small cabin restrooms, but many of them. They have seating up and down. Seating for seniors or those with mobility issues is on the first level, tho they have to go up the spiral ship stains if they want to get to the dining car or café car.

I got off at the train station and walked over a few homeless people on my backpack way to the Chinatown Max station. The Max is Portland's light rail system, and I got to the stop just as a train pulled up. There was great social conversation on the train, and a woman was knitting, and I had all of four stops to go to get off. Because I was riding all within Portland's "Fareless Square" area, I did not even have to buy a ticket for my ride.

In the last couple days I have ridden the Max train several times, and the Portland Streetcar, and buses. You can buy a whole day pass in Portland for $3.50. That is all you pay for unlimited rides on the system.

The Portland Streetcar, which opened an extension earlier this year, operates modern European-built tram vehicles on twin parallel one way streets and unites the center of Portland with its growing south riverbank and the foothill neighborhoods of Northwest Portland. The streetcar also runs thru the Pearl District, a former trainyard built into dense Euro city because of that transit line.

I got out of the hostel situation and stayed with my mother in Portland. She moved there last year, and has nearly given up her car. She walks all the time; she walks faster than I do. We took a racing walk up to visit my sister and her husband and their young son, and then we took the bus back.

In the newspaper I read about a new Portland transit project. The city is building what they call a tram, but which sounds more like a gondola. This will connect the Portland Streetcar with a campus on the cliff above the south riverfront. The tram will be a car riding on a cable above the city, a transit vehicle in the sky, a ride up on a steel cable fixed in the air.

Portland also has a four lane bus mall in its downtown. It only goes a few blocks, but it allows downtown buses to pass, and staggers the stops. Stops for various parts of the city, Northeast, southeast, are grouped by stop. Although the rail vehicles are very popular, Portland still has an extensive bus system with very good frequency on some of the lines. Within four blocks of my mother's house there are a number of transit routes, including the Max line light rail and at least four bus routes that I can think of.

This morning I took a bus on Broadway to get to the train station. The bus let me off just a few steps from the station building. I sat down for a while in the station and then I got up to stand in the seat assignment line. These trains are so popular that it seems like these days they always assign seats. There have only been a couple times on this whole infinity trip where I have been given a seat assignment. Usually I have been completely free to choose my seat.

The Cascades train I am on now has route tracker information on the multiple video monitors in the car. The screen shows on a map where we are now and the estimated arrival time. The map zooms in and then zooms out and updates the current time and the estimated arrival time as we go, as we speed up and as we slow down. Then the map clears, and the movie "Bewitched" shows on the screen. I look up now and then because Nicole Kidman is so hard to not look at, but I do not watch the movie.

This Saturday morning train to Seattle is full and I have a seatmate. I was assigned an aisle seat, so I am unable to do any window animation. We are now crossing one of the many sets of bridges over the Columbia River and arriving at the first stop, Vancouver, Washington.

October 23

It is a wet morning in Seattle. The spiders are all caught out. The mist has turned their nets into intricate raindrop pearl necklaces. The sky is grey and the neighborhood is silent.

Yesterday on the train to Seattle I talked to my seatmate, Steve. He takes the train from Portland to Seattle almost every weekend in the fall to see the Seahawks play football. He gave me his window seat because he often takes this trip and has already seen the journey so many times. He said that the train is the only way to travel.

I thanked him for the window seat and taped the low fog and the valleys and the fields. I looked out at the waters of Puget Sound as we passed beside it on the way into Tacoma. We looked by the bridges and the islands, we looked out at the gray water as the sun rose in the sky.

In Seattle I am visiting my old college friend Rob, who I visit almost every year. He lives in a small house on a hill above the part of Seattle called Ballard. On a clear day you can see the Olympic Mountains, but today is not a clear day. Drips of rain hang on all the power lines and spider nets. I got to sleep on a comfortable futon on his living room floor.

Yesterday, Rob and I walked up the steep hill from his house to Phinney Ridge to have pizza. The sidewalks are so steep that ridges are built into the pavement to help you walk up. Later, Rob and I and his girlfriend Sandy toured three wineries in the Seattle area. We took a winery tour, and then went to tastings at the others. We rode around in a car, of course, because we were way out in the eastern Seattle suburbs. I have lost my vow of purity on this trip, tho I have been carfree for such a long stretch now.

October 24

I caught the Cascades train from Seattle to Vancouver this morning. Once again I head into new territory that I have never before seen in my life.

I am familiar with the Portland to Seattle train because I take it almost every year when I visit family in Portland and visit friends in Seattle. This is the same train with the same cars, but this is the once a day train from Seattle to Vancouver in British Columbia. Back to Canada I go.

The fog is thick this morning. The train glides alongside Puget Sound. The Sound goes on and on. Its soft waves blend effortlessly into the thick gray sky. Sometimes you can see the faint outline of the bottom of an island. Sometimes a ship will take a dark form in the bend of white glow in between sky and water.

Yesterday my friend Rob had car trouble. He tried to start his car in the morning and it would not start. The rain fell in mists and he spent a couple hours outside looking in the hood and trying to get it to work. He took out a thick manual that did not seem to help a bit. I sat in his house and read a book. He called his girlfriend and said what was probably on my mind. He told her that I was thinking, "these fools and their cars," and he was not far from being exactly right. But I kept my mouth shut. I made no audible gloats, but I was more happy than ever that I never have to deal with car troubles. I have never owned a car, and I am very glad of that fact.

He finally did manage to start his car again after fretting about it all morning long, but who knows if he would be able to start it again if he should shut it off. He had to fret about how he was going to get to work tomorrow. There is no bus that will take him to his workplace. Rob kept the car running until we could take it somewhere. Our old college friend Dan came by with his truck, and Dan helped Rob get his car to a car doctor. That night we walked up the hill again to the small bar with the tall Cathedral roof. There are dozens of local beers on the ascending chalk board, tho the bartender had to stretch up real high to erase one that they ran out of.

Our train will soon leave the waters of the Sound and head inland, but later we will see the waters again before making our way into the city of Vancouver.

October 25

Yesterday I caught an early bus in Seattle to take me to the King Street Station downtown. That bus was full of drowsy people, and I was one of them. I sat down at an open double seat on one side of the bus's twist. It was an articulated bus and there were a pair of seats right inside the accordion. I grabbed for the pole that connected bench to ceiling as I sat down and felt it was a little loose. A little after the bus took off, its tires hit a bump in the road and the whole pole fell down. I set it aside, behind the seat in front of me as everybody looked back to see what was the clatter.

That ride led me to a bus stop about a block from the train station. I walked the dusky sidewalk to the lights just going out, by a traffic island full of people waiting for another bus, or just waiting.

King Street Station has been evolving these last few years of my visits to Seattle. At first it was all 1960's modern, with flat walls and tile ceiling. It looked a little like the bus station train stations that so many of the resettled train stations I have visited look like. But then a wall came down, and there was a Greek temple column behind it. Over the years, wall after wall has come out to reveal the older station that had been covered over fifty years ago or so because somebody had lost their eyes for such beauty. The station is undergoing a slow restoration, and the ancient detail and the balcony and the stairs are showing thru, a little more of its lost found again every year I visit.

After a beautiful train ride along water and valleys and between mountains we rode into Vancouver by the back way, by the rail way, by the yard way. We were a couple hours late due to heavy freight traffic, and the train staff apologized profusely this time.

Vancouver must be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It is not necessarily beautiful for its architecture, which is one set of rounded or flat glass towers after another, but it is beautiful for its setting. Along water and between mountains, it dazzles the eyes from its sides and its heights.

This morning I took a long ride on Skytrain, Vancouver's elevated light rail system. The trains operate without drivers, all in the timing and all in the mechanism, and glide on concrete pillars above the city, tho they go underground downtown and at a few stations.

The trains run fast and frequently, and I rode the train out over a breathtaking bridge over the Fraser River. I watched the dawn on the train, and rode a much more full train back into the city. I drew the faces of the people, silent and secure for their commute into the towers.

Vancouver, like San Francisco and Seattle, operates a network of electric buses powered by overhead wires. The buses have a slightly old-fashioned feel to them and come down the street with bright red fronts. You can breathe the air behind them and not get sick for the electricity makes them emission free, and surprisingly silent.

Vancouver is a city of walkers. I was never walking in the city without fellow pedestrians to share my stride. Vancouver is dense, with half a million people living in the small walkable downtown area, but it does not feel overwhelming. This is in part due to the practice of retaining one and two story shop buildings on the main streets and building apartment towers behind them. From the street, you feel a sense of small city, but if you step back you see the gleaming towers of metro-luxe.

There is an older part of town called Gastown, with some hundred year old buildings, but it is all a tourist place. There is little else that goes on than shops of collectibles. Along the water there is a giant pier convention center, and another one under construction with jackhammers like headaches on the bay. At the tip of the island is the gigantic Stanley Park, the city's great oasis, with sculpture and with immense redwood trees. I walked thru the falling leaves here, past a field of crows, among many other park walkers.

I had barely more than a day in Vancouver. My eyes were filled with tears because the stay was so short. Across the street from my hostel, a film shoot was going on in an apartment building. There were cranes set up with big screens of white and lights. They were making it the same time of the day all the time for the window of one apartment.

I went to the Vancouver Art Museum and toured the exhibit of Picasso prints and sketches. I had to draw some of his faces. I cannot resist the urge. I can never resist that urge.

The entire top floor of the museum is devoted to local artist Emily Carr. I showed up in time for the tour and I was the only one interested, so I got a private tour. I loved her creamy fir trees, and knew that I would be seeing them on the trip ahead.

Late that afternoon I went to the Canadian Pacific station after one short Skytrain ride. I had bought a day pass for $8 to ride the buses and Skytrain of Vancouver.

I sat in the station and then got in the line for coach passengers. The sleeping car passengers had their own waiting area with outdoor patio seating and music.

The Via train that I am getting on will take me from Vancouver to Winnipeg. It will be the last stretch of train of my odyssey. It is Via's "Canadian" service, the flagship of its system, and it only runs three times a week.

The train itself, the cars of the train, have a decidedly retro feel. They are beautiful brushed steel cars with long indented stripes, and domes coming out of the tops of two of the cars like from the streamlined thirties. The gentleman across the aisle from me tells me he rode in the exact same train cars in 1957. He is a photographer and he is on his way to Churchill on the Hudson's Bay to photograph polar bears. He shows me some of his wildlife photography, the eagles that he snaps just outside the window of his house in Victoria.

I chose a seat near the emergency exit, which I did not realize, but not long into the ride one of the train car attendants fills me in with the details of its operation. There is a sealed hammer near the window, and you operate the emergency window by taking out the hammer and smacking the window broken. I was also instructed in how to operate the doors of the train car, in case of emergency. It is a simple task, you turn this and then you turn that.

The two train car attendants stand in the middle of the car and make their announcements there with their own lung voices, rather than into any speaker system. One attendant is a tall and big man and the other is short and skinny. A couple from Winnipeg that I talk to later come to call them Penn and Teller, and that's how I think of them. When the couple told the attendants that they reminded them of the comical magicians, the short small man said that he was not talking for the rest of the trip. That would be Teller. He has a gelled swoop of hair up on his forehead like a slight unicorn horn.

The car attendants on Via, at least so far, seem much more hands on and friendly than the Amtrak attendants. But that does not include the car attendant/historian on the California Zephyr who lit up our ride with his history announcements more than a week of continent before.

We will soon be passing thru the incredibly beautiful Fraser River gorge, but the sun has set and it is fully dark now. I will see nothing of it. All I see of Vancouver's east side is the lights of it. The train got a late start out of Vancouver, but now it is speeding up into the darkness. Tho our departure time was an hour and a half ago we still do not seem to have left Vancouver proper. I still see many pinpoints of light and stacks of wood and other commodities out my window. I also see rain drops on the glass. It is a peaceful rain. There is something so comforting watching the rain out the train window but being dry inside on your retro Via coach seat.

October 26

While loading into the train yesterday I started talking with Tina, from Sydney. Because we had been seated in separate coach cars, we did not meet up again until later in the lounge car. We had grabbed, in our own cars, the last two reservations for the second call for dinner. We had also sat in the emergency exit seats of our own two trains, and each had gotten the instruction in window bashing.

We talked about our travels in the lounge car and then at dinner. She is on the third month of a year of traveling around the world. She had quit her job of twenty-five years because she felt there was something better in life for her, and had left her home and put all her possessions in storage. After North America she will visit Europe and South America but still go back to Australia for the holidays.

Today starts the last official day of my rail pass, tho my rail trip does not end until tomorrow, when we reach Winnipeg, so I unofficially get eleven hours of travel free.

The crew of the dining car is very welcoming when you come in for dinner or whatever. The service supervisor is also the wine steward, and serves only Canadian wines. Deserts come in the price of the dinner, and when we got our cheesecakes I was amazed that the presentation includes the word "Via" spelled out in syrup on the plate. I did not have my camera, but Tina took a photo of me and my ornate desert.

Last night we checked out the dome in the lounge car. All we could see out of the windows was the dark night, was blackness, but we decided to get up early the next morning to be sure to get good seats for the views of the mountain we would be passing thru and would be able to see once the light was in the sky.

After breakfast of oatmeal (she called it porridge) and muffin in the dining car, we got our seats in the observation dome to watch the sun come up to paint the mountains. The observation dome actually sits above the top of the cars, so you can see all the way to the front and the rear of the train from it. You could watch the whole train snake around at curves, you could see the mist rising up from the engine. You could look out above all that streamlined silver steel, you felt a little like king or queen of that train up there in those soft seats in the slightly cooler air, up the streamlined narrow steps. There were windows at the sides and windows that curved into the narrow ceiling. The observation dome has nearly unobstructed views in all directions, and could give you nothing but outstanding vistas, no matter what terrain you were traveling thru.

The rain from last night was over with. The mountains were holding on tight to the clouds, but the clouds were too clever, and were slowly escaping back to the sky.

The dome car was like a happy family. We were a community on hand for the views. Everybody was talking to each other, and some of the travelers who had taken this ride before told me when and where to get my camera in place to get some great views of this, or a great shot of that.

The train went just by pyramid falls, a lovely waterfall with a huge triangle of rock in its center. The train slowed down just as we got there, and the friendly man in back told me exactly where to stand to tape it.

We passed between snow capped glacier-holding peaks on our way to Mount Robson, the highest point in the Rocky Mountains. I was told that on most days it is shrouded in clouds, and that you rarely see it all the way clear. And so far this morning the clouds have been too much for the sky, so I did not give up all hope, but just a lot of it.

The gentleman who sat down next to me explained that he had had a stroke some time ago and could not say certain words. He could say "this thing and that thing" but could not say the words identifying them as anything specific, but he could write down the words, and he wrote them in my sketchbook. He was on his way to Edmonton and he had worked as a sleeping car attendant on the passenger train line that used to go from Vancouver to Calgary. That line no longer operates.

This man who could not say its name pointed to one snow-capped mountain, and I understood his pointing to mean that this was Mount Robson. But that mountain was perfectly clear in the sky, and some other people who traveled this route before, looked where he had pointed and doubted that this mountain, so easy in the sky, was the one that is usually so cloud-shrouded. But after not long it was clear that this was Mount Robson, and it was absolutely clear in the sky, and we rounded it so long that I could both tape and draw its faces as we passed them by, all multiple perspectives in one set of pen scratching.

It was white with snow, it was marked thru the snow with grey horizontal striation lines. For a while the clouds curled around it and then let go. The sun had a clear shot to light it up like spotlights. We oohed and ahed as it stared in our up and down view. And then the scenery continued just as awe-inspiring, all the way to Jasper in the Rockies, which was our next stop.

People in the car talked about my drawing, they talked about most everything once we had left the tallest mountain. The couple across from us were from Denver. They said they were comparing Canadian Rockies with their own Colorado Rockies.

The gentleman with the stroke explained with my pad of paper to read his lips that he worked on the train in the 1960's. That train route thru Calgary on which he worked followed the route of the original Canadian transcontinental railroad. That line was completed to Vancouver in 1885. The line we were riding on was built early in the 20th century as a competing route.

The train pulled into Jasper, its houses and its fir trees. The trees looked just like the ones Emily Carr painted.

We got off the train for a break and I said goodbye to my train mate Tina, who was getting off the train to smell the mountain air for two days before continuing her descent to the east and on to Toronto.

I drew the train and the mountains outside the Jasper train station, an early twentieth century lodge made of round river rocks and round river logs.

When we got back on the train, we were given a close up view of a dozen bighorn sheep who were grazing right beside the tracks. I love those curling horns.

Now I am back on the great metal train of Via's western route. The man sitting the seat across from me chats about the train he will catch in Winnipeg. That train goes up to Hudson's Bay, and is the only way to get to those towns in the permafrost. There are no roads that go up on that route.

It is fun to twist and weave down the hallways of this train. Between the lounge car with its activity room and the dining car we have to walk thru a sleeping car, and I get little glimpses into the curtain rooms and fold up beds of the berths and the rooms with doors with their own seats that fold up into beds for the night. I even see the door marked "shower" for the sleeping car passengers.

I have been sleeping and riding in coach. I scrunch myself up fetus-like on my two seats to get my night of sleep.

The Via staff even give the coach passengers a little pack with earplugs and a wash cloth and some eye patches to make the night of seat sleeping a little easier, quieter, cleaner, darker. I have slept fine on the train, tho I feel dirty from traveling so long without a shower.

When this train slows down it makes groans like whale calls. And even in Canada we have to slow down and stop for freight trains.

October 28

The train sped across the flatlands and rolling hills of Western Manitoba yesterday morning. My rail pass had expired on midnight, hours ago, so I was riding my last free eleven hours on the train. I sat in the brisk air of the observation deck for one last time. I was watching the sun rise and rise barely over the southern horizon.

The flat was no match for the mountains in audience admiration, in audience participation. The crowd in the observation deck was no crowd, was scattered and quiet, was two or three. But the flatness that went on and on had its own moving majesty. It was such a line, it was such a forever, it was such a land of haystack and of monotone that it hit me as well, it made its rubber stamp impression on me in my throat and in my faintness.

The night before I had watched the Roman Polanski film "The Pianist" on the single TV in the activity room. We filled all the chairs in the activity room, in the dark train corridor, and aimed our eyes at the TV screen. There was an extra speaker for sound, but it was cackling, so the train's activity director had to turn it down, had to turn that extra sound off, but we could still understand Adrian Brody, but we could still read the lips of Nazis.

The train's activity director announced the movies before hand, standing on the floor of the coach and raising up his voice. He also held matches of bingo and of video games. As the movie played, he handed each of us a small cellophane packet of crackers. Did he know this movie? Was it his intention to hand us the crackers just before the scene when the father of the family buys an expensive caramel and divides it up a piece for each member of his family as they wait on their possessions for the freight train that will take them to their gas death?

After the movie I went up to the observation deck to check out the rumor that you might be able to see stars from it but I could not see any stars. Either there were clouds or just too much scattered light on the dome windows bouncing to see any small sun dots. I started talking to a man who had just gotten on the train in Edmonton. He was just beginning to ride his brand new North America pass just as I was riding the last shreds of mine. He buys a North America pass every year, or has for the last four years, and travels like I did, stopping a day or two at cities on the route but mostly traveling to take the train, for that experience. On this trip he would be going as far south as Florida, he would be going down then back and west. He was going to be getting off of the train just past midnight to stay a couple days in Saskatoon, to stay in a hotel. He was retired, so it was easy for him to find a whole month for a pass every year.

Then the morning came. My last morning of smooth sound train. My last morning of my best train ride ever. I watched the last of the landscape from the dome car. I watched the last of the train ride from my coach seat. Winnipeg sprang up on us quickly. It was a flat city after all the flat wheat fields. Its building seemed close but also strangely stretched away from us. As we rode up on it in the train it seemed to be a city stretched thin on silly putty, once a city tight and close but imprinted on brown and then extended.

I got off the train in Winnipeg. I went down the escalator into the loading area of that city's Union Station. I was feeling a little sickly, a little scratchy throat that I found out later was due only to a canker sore on the back of my tongue.

Winnipeg had already past fall and gone straight to early winter, and as I left the beautiful beaux-arts station I walked down the boulevard of Broadway with all its sticks of trees. The city's leaves were already long gone, already raked into black trash bags. I breathed the cold air of late morning, the breath of dry winter, the calm before the snow.

Winnipeg felt so prairie, so flat and spread out in comparison to the close forest of Vancouver. I walked a long walk to the hostel, and left my bag there to explore the city.

Winnipeg has a bus-only transit system running both older and newer low floor buses. Fare is $1.85, the cheapest I experienced in Canada, but I bought ten rides, a sheet of stamps, for $18. Transfers last only one hour and fifteen minutes. There is also a free bus called the Sprint that operates between several downtown locations. I soon found myself easily riding the system. Most of the major bus stops have route schedules and maps on the posts.

I walked over to The Forks, Winnipeg's downtown park at the intersection of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. It was built on land that was once train yards, and the remaining brick buildings had been turned into various attractions, a festival marketplace, a children's museum, a restaurant, a small museum devoted to Manitoba with farm equipment and old photos.

I walked across the Red River to St. Boniface, the French Quarter of the city. There I marveled at the grand ruin of the St. Bonificae Church, which burned in 1968, but the front and side walls were kept as stone carved skeleton and a new modern church was built in the lower back of the old one. The ruins framed a courtyard as an entrance to the new squat building, and I watched a wedding party gather in the blank wall doorways for their wedding picture making.

Between downtown and the French Quarter is a new pedestrian-only suspension bridge. In the middle of the bridge is a restaurant that you can only get to on foot.

One of my hostel roommates has a cold, and his coughing gave me a night of restless sleep, so I booked a room at the Holiday Inn downtown for tonight. The Holiday Inn is actually directly connected to the bus station, from which I will take my leave of train traveling, of traveling itself, in the morning.

Last night, as I was shaken by the coughing that earplugs could not mask, I dreamed of train rides, of riding up the stark mountains just east of dreamville St. Paul, of watching other trains back up perilously to the end of a track at the end of a gorge just to give the passengers a good view of the chasm. I dreamed of mountain rock, I dreamed the faces of other imaginary, of patched together train passengers, my friends in sleepy electric, my new pals in forgettable dream images. There was a swirl of story going on there, a new train ride only rotating in my brain of restless bed.

Today I visited the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and I was happy to find a sculpture by Zadkine on their rooftop sculpture garden.

I have drawn very little today. I am running out of drawing energy, tho I love the grand Chicago style office buildings of Winnipeg's Exchange District, where many turn of the century buildings stand with few modern ones between them, tho there are various parking lots. I am writing this in a restaurant in Winnipeg's Chinatown, just north of the Exchange District. After dinner I will climb such century office buildings with Harold Lloyd. I will next be going to the Winnipeg Cinematheque to watch Harold Lloyd's 1922 skyscraper climbing comedy "Safety Last." You at least will know it from the clock's minute hand, from which he hangs in the famous photo far over the streets of 1922 Los Angeles.

October 30

Last night I returned from my trip, my infinity, my odyssey. I woke up in my hotel room and enjoyed my stretched out condition there for barely a half hour as I got my last things together and walked to the elevator, and checked out, and walked down the back door that took me right inside the crowded bus station.

There were so many people there, and I feared the bus would be quite full, but most of the people there were greeting people getting off of another bus. I checked in at the ticket window and they put my name on a list for crossing the border.

I got on the bus and watched the last of Winnipeg pass me by. We crossed its single four lane ring highway, and then we were in farming country.

After an hour, we were at the border. The bus was at the border for almost two and a half hours.

Back at the Winnipeg bus station, I had talked briefly with the mother of a young Latino woman who was setting off for Memphis. Her mother wanted to know if her bus ticket was all in order. The whole family was there to send her off on her voyage.

Of the seven people on the bus, three of us were sent right thru to the waiting area after just three or four questions. How long were you in Canada, why were you there, what is your job. The other four passengers had to go into the questioning rooms.

On the train, the Customs agents got right on the train and questioned you at your seat. On the bus you get off with all your luggage and go inside the customs building. The face of George Bush was on every wall, that great, slightly baffled, slightly flip Afred E. Neuman smile of his from every frame. Next to the bathrooms, he was paired side by side with Dick Cheney, as if Bush was the symbol of the women's room and Dick was the symbol of the men's.

The three of us who went right thru were soon joined by one of the other four. She was a young social worker from Winnipeg who had to go into a questioning room. She explained to me that just after she got in her seat in the room the custom's official put on rubber gloves and for a moment her mind drifted to thoughts of cavity search, but instead the agent just went thru all her luggage. The official looked thru all her things. She was just going down to Fargo for the weekend, but, as she told me, "I pack like a girl, so I brought along three of everything I need."

The bus was supposed to take us to Grand Forks, North Dakota by 11:30 so I could catch a bus from Grand Forks to Minneapolis that left at noon. The border was still an hour fifteen minutes from Grand Forks, but as the clock stretched its morning arms past eleven and then eleven thirty, six of us were now sitting down in the waiting room, but one bus rider, the young Latino woman, was still in the questioning room. The whole bus was waiting for the Customs agents to finish with her.

I do not know what went on in that room. I can only guess. My fantasy story was that she was going to Memphis to pursue a singing career. She wore a flashy white suit that almost reminded me of late Elvis. My only thought was that a white suit was a bad choice for a three day bus journey. When she emerged from the Customs room and joined us on the bus, she held her head up high, but the bus had to turn back to leave her in the small Manitoba border town, to leave her in Canada, before we could press on into the U.S. The U.S. would not take her.

Because I missed the bus in Grand Rapids, I rode this same bus on to Fargo where I transferred to a more crowded Greyhound. The Greyhound only made three stops between Fargo and Minneapolis, and got me home pretty much at the same time as the other bus would have.

On that bus with blue floral seats, I got a taste of long overland bus travels. There were people there whose bodies had bled completely into bus seat. Some riders had been on the bus for two days, and had two days yet to go. They lived for the next smoke stop, where they could get off the wheels and huddle in some shelter to breathe in tobacco, or just take a step. When they stood up, you could slightly smell the change in odor of the whole place.

When I got off the bus in Minneapolis, I walked out into Halloween party night. I walked behind a group of people all costumed up. A man asking for money revealed all Halloween identities as they passed by him and his outstretched empty cup. "There's Hans and there's Frans and there's Heidi, and there's Backpack Guy." That last one was me.

I did not have American change for the Minneapolis city bus to take me home, so I went to the Hiawatha Line station to buy a machine ticket, but the machine would not accept my $20 or my credit card, so I went to a sandwich shop and bought a sandwich and got enough change to take me home.

I caught a bus and saw my city changed, slightly but enough, by progress and by weather, although I was happy to see that, unlike Winnipeg, it was still fall here and there were still yellow leaves in trees and not just bare branches.

What struck me as I got off the bus and walked the three blocks home was how empty the sidewalks were. I walked those three blocks all alone, the first time I have walked alone for days and days.

I was soon back in the door of my house and I hugged my honey. Unlike Odysseus, I no suitors to slay, only cautions cats to pet.

October 31

I took a trip in the shape of an infinity sign. I made that sign across the top of North America by train mostly, and by a little bit of bus. I crossed the continent, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster. I walked up and down the train aisles as the countryside came and went.

I saw so many things for a moment as they went by the windows. I turned and missed seeing many other things. Whole states went by in the middle of the night. All I saw of them was the color black and some pinpoints of light that revealed to me only mysteries.

This is how a non-driver saw this country, and how I saw some of Canada. This is how I traveled, from city to city, wherever the train stops and goes. These are the things I discovered about places, about people, about walking and riding and me. This is my Infinity Transit Odyssey, the journey I made and my eyes and ears to take it in.

I found out many things along my way. The conclusion I came to was that almost every place I visited had a stronger pedestrian culture than my own home town of Minneapolis. When I got off the city bus in my neighborhood to walk those last three last blocks of home, I walked alone. It was maybe the first time this happened in over a month. I saw no other people walking. By the bars at the corner, I saw somebody walk to his car.

I saw the kindness in public transit all along my journey. I saw the way that people pull together, I saw the "Sorry, this bus is out of service," signs on the front of the out of service buses in Vancouver. I saw the kindness of bus drivers when I did not know how to use the local farebox, put the card in this way or that way, put the money where and how fast, how to flash your pass, and all.

I saw that I could get around, by train, by bus, by bicycle for one day, but mostly on foot. How my feet can carry my whole month on my back, how I can get along with a few things, and how few things you do need to get along when you have to walk beneath them all, and their weight, day by day.

I found how trains were the most enjoyable, the most social, the most efficient way to cross long distances, whether cross-country or cross-town. They are efficient, tho the cross-country trains are by far not the fastest way. They demand acceptance of them, they want you to pass your time, they want time itself. They do not deny the space and the places, but in many cases there is not a train to take you, but there might be a bumpy bus to shake up your guts and get you there too.

November 1

Sloppy Books

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