October 1 3 4 7 8

11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

22 23 24 25 26 28 30 31

October 1

In Philadelphia, there are many streets where you still see the rails embedded in the concrete and the overhead wires still in place, but no streetcar runs on that street. It did maybe fifteen years ago, but they stopped it running, even tho the infrastructure remains. The streetcars were pulled out and replaced with buses, but streetcars have a romance and a smoothness, and a class to them.

Streetcars can rise you up while buses always seem to pull you down. A streetcar can make you feel like an emperor while a bus can make you feel even more of a peasant. A streetcar or a train has a howling dignity that smelly belching buses are too drunk on gas to share.

This morning I took off more time to shoot in the subway. My intention was to go to the tunnel near University City. In this tunnel, streetcars that run on several West Philadelphia streets go underground near downtown, where they run in a subway.

When I got there and shot a streetcar on the street, a transit officer drove up. I pulled out my camera, but did not start taping until a streetcar pulled into view. I raised up the camera as the streetcar approached, and just after I taped it going by, the officer told me that I could not tape the trains at all. I disagree with him, but I put away my camera and said nothing. I took out my sketchbook to draw the scene instead. I went back to downtown on the next car that pulled up.

I love riding subways. That creosote smell as you descend below the sidewalk. The heat underground, the grease, the tile. The permanence, the history of it. The roar of the approaching train. The metal screech of it going thru the tunnel. The brightness of the lights in the car surrounded by the underground darkness all around you on the ride. The flash of passing lights, the glimpses of stations you pass by on your way to yours.

I especially like the Broad Street subway line. I catch it at 15th Street, where it is one level lower than the blue line, which looks much newer. The orange line, the Broad Street Line, is a little grungy. In the 15th Street station, the white tile is stained grey, such an ancient grey. The tile patterns are broad and blocky and ornate, with the name of the stop spelled out in careful tile. There are separate tracks for local and express trains, which means large stations, which means parallel platforms, and sometimes confusion, like the first time I rode and did not understand why two trains were going in the same direction.

After the closing party of the conference, I came back to the hotel on the blue line subway. Tomorrow morning I will take that subway line back to catch my train to New York.

October 3

After one last early morning subway ride, I walked into Philadelphia's grand 30th Street station. This train station is a massive cathedral city beautiful temple. It is a fierce tribute to the public transit user, dignified, overwhelming. Its ceilings are nearly as high as heaven, and detailed with squares and squares and columns and filigree.

I struck up a conversation with a Philadelphia real estate attorney who was catching the same train to go to New York for Sunday afternoon, for brunch and a walk with a friend. What a life that must be, to be able to ride the train to the big city just for a Sunday afternoon.

I drew a few train animations, but did not film them on that short ride. I saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan thru the houses and churches of Jersey City. Then we descended into a tunnel, and that is how we crossed the river and entered New York City.

I was going to be staying with a friend who did not live very far from Penn Station. She was not going to be around until about 7:30 or so, and my train got in at a little after 11, so she advised me to put my backpack in a locker in Penn Station and do my thing during the afternoon, and connect up with her in the evening.

Penn Station is the opposite of 30th Street Station. It is a warren of tunnels underneath Madison Square Garden. There are fast food restaurants and newstands lining the soulless passages, and harsh dead light. Occasionally embedded in the wall is an incredible stone figure. My guess is that these friezes were saved from the original Penn Station, a temple to public travelers that was demolished long ago.

After wandering this warren in search of a locker for a while, I asked a security guard. He said that there were no lockers in Penn Station for security reasons. I asked him if he knew somewhere else nearby where there would be lockers, and he said there were no lockers for security reasons.

My pack is not horribly big, but it is big enough, with a week's worth of clothes and books and paper and toiletries and a jacket and sweatshirt, which I had to stow because the weather was too nice. I lugged that bag on my back out into the streets of New York. I was not exactly sure what I would do with it, other than sweat a bit under its weight.

I eventually overcame my heavy load panic and came upon the plan to see if I could check it at the Museum of Modern Art, and just spend the afternoon there.

I walked over to the Lexington Avenue subway, and descended with my big pack. On the subway train, a mariachi band played guitar and accordion and rhythm. When I came up to the air to the street and the city again, there was a giant market in the middle of the street. I walked up the market for a couple of blocks before turning and hauling over to MOMA.

I was so glad that they took my backpack at the coat check. I spent the afternoon looking at great art and watching a movie and enjoying the space, the new space just recently re-opened.

The movie theatre in MOMA is in the basement, and close enough to a subway line that you could hear and feel the trains rumbling by.

When I left MOMA I took the subway down to Union Square. On the subway train, two dancers performed their hip hop dance in the middle of the train car. They were leaping and jumping to their boom box beat and they use the whole open floor of the train, which cleared up as the riders turned to audience and made the train car a theatre in the round.

I went to Union Square to hang out for a couple hours with my big backpack. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the big city and my big load, and just needed a place to sit. There were reports that police were stopping people with backpacks. Backpacks are what the London subway bombers wore, and a backpack was what I was lugging around.

At Unions Square, the war protest was going on, and many other people were just sitting or performing. I could sit back and draw, and feel myself melt a little into the crowd.

I had turned off my cell phone when I went into MOMA and only now remembered to turn it back on. There was a message from my friend. She left the message an hour ago. She said that she was going to be in town for only a short time. She had to catch a train to Washington, D.C. for work that night. I called her back and caught her before she left. I rushed up the six blocks to her place, and had about a half hour to talk to her, and for her to show everything about her apartment to me. Then she had to catch a cab to the train station.

That quick visit with my old friend left me now alone in New York. But the upside was that I now had a real nice apartment in a great location all to myself for the next day.

I went to another movie that night. This one was also in a basement theatre close to a subway line. The theatre rumbled every time a train went by.

Monday morning I woke up ready to tackle New York City. I walked around Gramercy Park and then up to the Public Library so I could check my e-mail, but the library was closed on Mondays, so instead I visited the lower East side and then the site of the World Trade Center. I walked to Times Square burning with advertising and had to spin around to see it in 360. I took the subway around, and then took a bus over to Electronic Arts Intermix to watch some early works of guerilla video.

After shooting some animations on the windows of my friend's apartment, I am sitting here writing and thinking about going to bed early tonight. I had a full New York day, seeing the sights of the city and feeling so comfortable compared to my backpack day yesterday. I feel myself falling into the rhythms of this place where pedestrians rule the streets, where they are so prevalent and important.

I remember my first visit to New York. I was in college then, and it hit me hard. I had grown up in Montana, where everybody drove for everything, and I had always felt so alone in my walking and in my decision to not drive. But here was a city where pedestrians ruled, where pedestrians were aggressive, where pedestrians had their way.

Now that I am here, I really realize how cars have made me a timid walker. I am usually careful that there is not one car coming before I cross a street, even if the light is in my favor, but in New York, pedestrians just haul into the crosswalk. They have power in numbers, and one walker heading out to beat the light will cause others to jump the gun and populate the painted stripes, even when cars are still trying to get thru. Pedestrians here are aggressive, as if they knew they were the best, as if they knew that they rocked the world, which is so true.

Anyway, now it is time to get ready for tomorrow morning. I take the train to Montreal.

October 4

I have found Vermont Public radio on my old headphone radio and am listening to Ravel as the train winds thru the reds yellows and orange of upstate New York autumn. Beside the train is an abandoned telephone line, the deeply colored poles leaning this way and that among the enveloping trees. The wires that used to carry calls from aunts and cousins to friends and fellows are sometimes strung tightly from one pole to the next, while sometimes they fall to the ground and leave the next pole completely disconnected from the line.

We are sailing along the west edge of Lake Champlain in the train, navigating between the cliff rocks and in and out of short tunnels. There is the red of autumn sumac, there goes the white arrow of a shedding birch tree. Below it all is the blurry blue of the peaceful lake itself, interrupted now and then by a white sailboat.

This morning I took one last New York subway ride up two stops to Penn Station. I packed my clothes in my pack more tightly this time and mailed off one more packet of paper from the conference so that my backpack did not seem too heavy.

Our train left New York in darkness, passing thru the long tunnel two floors under Manhattan. The view out my window was rock while the other side looked on the Hudson River, but that was more than made up for by this part of the ride, where my side looks down at the lake while the other side faces the rock of the cliff.

When I first turned on my radio, I first found a commercial station. After music they had an ad self promoting their contest for free gasoline. That was followed by an ad for a car. I guess I do not miss commercial radio all that much. That little listen was one piece of car propaganda after another.

I am seeing the nation without a car. The pace may be slow, but I am seeing so much. All those abandoned telephone poles are trying so hard, but they no longer stretch wires and messages from point to point. They just stand among the trees and wait for their decay.

October 7

It has been raining all day as the train sweeps thru the green fields of eastern Ontario. I started out in Montreal this morning, slowed down a little by my Montreal cold. After a busy day of tourism, exploring the city so wonderful and new, I felt a sore throat. The sore throat slowed me down slightly on yesterday's Montreal tourism, and now my cold had settled down into a runny nose as I make my way to Toronto, as the train moves along. In Toronto I will spend this night.

The rain is making rivers down the window. The rain is following diagonal courses that veer off more horizontal as the train speeds up and fall down vertical when we slow.

The Via train I am on now – Via is Canada's national passenger railroad – has huge windows for the view but less footroom than the Amtrak trains. The train is crowded because this is the beginning of the weekend of Canadian Thanksgiving.

We are going at a steady forward pace, not slowed down by freight train hesitations like we are so much in the U.S. We are going steady because we are riding on Via's rails, and not having to share them with the freight-first freight railways.

A server went down the aisles at the beginning of the ride just like on an airplane, and the tray tables are stowed in the arm of the seat rather than on the back of the seat in front. The view out the window is green to the horizon and then grey above it. It is a simple abstract painting with that diagonal river drip down the center.

I had three great nights in Montreal. The hostel had small rooms. I shared the room with two other men. One of my roommates was Adrian from Tijuana, Mexico. He was in Montreal for a year to study Graphic Design. The other roommate was Flourent from Munich, and he was seeing Canada by car after finishing up with a short consulting job in Cleveland. My cold helped me to sleep soundly, despite some loud snoring.

The first night I was there I sat in the hostel's common room and an older man from Quebec City attacked me for visiting Montreal for only two days. How can you see a city in two days, he stormed at me. That is so American, he said to me, and I figured he was attacking the whole U.S. and I was the stand-in.

I bought a three day pass to get around on Montreal's subways and buses. The Montreal Metro system is beautiful, all 1967 design with huge stations that continue on underground into their neighborhoods. These underground corridors are often lined with shops. The Metro makes a circular route around the city which makes it very useful for getting around easily and fast.

The trains run on rubber wheels. When a train starts off, it makes an electric sound that reminds me a little of a hunting call, three clear notes that almost sound like the beginning of the alien communication in Close Encounters. I hid my camera in my camera bag to try to get some video of the subway. Just the lens was peaking out. Most of the video will not be usable, but some will.

I was already feeling tired on Wednesday and rode a packed bus to see "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," at a very nice basement three-plex on Avenue du Park. Last night I went to the Cinemateque Quebecois on the UQAM campus. They had a collection of recent animation from Slovakia which I watched in their theatre. Before the films began, I wandered thru their exhibition area. They had a display about the history of animation, from film toys like the phenakistiscope to computer animation. The exhibit featured cells and illustrations and examples of some of Norman McClaren's animation tools from the Film Board of Canada.

On Wednesday I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. It was one of the darkest art museums I have ever visited. I was happy to see a short animation by William Kentridge playing in a gallery, just as I had seen another of his in an art gallery in MOMA in New York. I explained his working methods to a curious lady who wondered what that film was that we were looking at.

I walked thru the streets of Montreal, where everybody walks. The citizens of Montreal are so fit, and it must come from so much walking. The Metro trains and stations were packed; this city is not so huge, but people here use mass transit in a very serious way.

On my first day I walked up into Mont Royal Park, the park around the small mountain that overlooks the city. There were tangling paths that ended at beautiful views, and then I took a city bus down from the mountain.

I spend a couple hours sipping tea on Avenue Prince Arthur, which runs as a pedestrian only street for a couple of blocks. When a car started down the street by mistake, some old men sitting next to me swore at it in French.

I love the mix of language here, and I try to hear out the French around me for comprehension. I went to the World's Fair park from 1967 and marveled at the Buckminster Fuller dome and the giant stabile of Alexander Calder. I drew buildings and people, and how the people share the space and how the spaces make the people.

One Metro station entrance was donated by the city of Paris to Montreal. It is one of the great art deco station entrances that you will find all over Paris.

Also in one interior corridor I found a piece of the Berlin Wall. I watch window washers and I walked some more, despite the weary from my cold. On my tired last day I rode the funicular railroad up to the top of the Montreal Sports Station that had been built for the 1976 Olympics. From there I looked down at the city of apartments and people.

When our train from New York to Montreal went thru customs, there was a young woman from Brazil sitting in the seat across from me who got such a grilling from the Canadian customs. She had a face as eighteenth century as the statue of liberty. On my second day in Montreal I saw her again, on the street, walking in the direction opposite of mine with all the other pedestrians, just a glance of her, walking by me. She looked so proud and settled and home.

I fell in love with Montreal, if you could love a place after only two days. The rain today made my leaving so sad. The whole sky cried just for me.

Before the radio reception ran out, I heard that we would get up to 25 mm of rain today. I like the way that sounds. Millimeters. I can imagine the level moving up tick by tick as drop after drop falls.

October 8

I got into Toronto last night too late to really see the city. When you get off the train you descend an escalator and wind up in the train gate area, which is a subterranean space right under the trains. You can hear the rumble of the trains right above you, you can look at the columns that stretch up to the ceiling and hope that they are strong enough for trains.

I went into the washroom, where on the wall was a diagram that told how to properly wash your hands in six steps. Also in Toronto, I saw a bicycle rack that explained to bikers that in order to lock your bike, you must attach your lock to the post. Detailed explanations seemed to be one of the keys to Toronto.

When I got into Toronto it was dark and still raining. It looked a little like Chicago to me, but as I made my walk to the hostel I saw one of the Toronto streetcars gliding by on the metal street rails. It was lit up and it was long and it had a look of its own, of that city, of crazy modern.

After checking into the hostel, I walked around Yonge Street, the main strip in the city center. I eventually ended up in the big downtown mall, Eaton Center. At least it was dry inside there. Then I took a short ride on the Toronto subway, which has an entrance in the mall. I bought a token for $2.25, and it was a tiny silver penny, flatter than usual pennies. I put it in the turnstyle, and I was in the system.

The Toronto subway is much less flashy than the one in Montreal. The stations are plain concrete and short, and a little divey. I only saw three stations. They run the same stainless steel silver cars used in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and who knows how many other places. They do not use the futuristic blue missiles that run in the Montreal system.

I read from a book I got at the mall in the common room of the hostel before going to bed. The dorm room I was in had ten beds in all. It was already dark when I got there, so I had to get ready for bed with my small flashlight.

I had somewhat fitful sleep because I needed to get up early to make the train to Buffalo. When I did get up to take my shower I found a guy sleeping on the bathroom floor. I stepped over him to wash up.

I was actually quite glad that he was sleeping in the bathroom, for, by the time my shower was finished he had made his way up from the bathroom floor and down the hall to the dorm room and his bed. From there he was talking in his hungover sleep, cursing something or other, probably his headache.

I got a last couple views of the Toronto streetcars before I went to Union Station. The rush for Canadian Thanksgiving was still going strong, so the train station was crowded. I got there early enough to get a place near the beginning of the long line. This guaranteed me a window seat.

On the train, I watched us pull out of the station and directly underneath the CN tower. It was a sheer needle pointing straight up to stab the thickest clouds. We skipped between the trees not far from Lake Ontario, and wound around its coast to Niagra Falls. Canadians got off from stop to stop and slowly the train emptied as we headed thru lake autumn and back to the U.S.

As we crossed the gorge just past Niagra Falls I could see the spume of the falling water on the horizon, but I could not see the falls themselves. I look down at the curling rapids far below us as we inched across some kind of fabulous bridge. The water I was seeing, the water just below us, had just fallen over the falls and put on a show for the tourists and other travelers along the side of the falls, or who had gathered in the viewing boats.

We had a long wait for customs on the border and I fell in and out of sleep and the book I was reading. Then the train started off to Buffalo.

There was to be a considerable layover in Buffalo. The train got in there in the early afternoon, and then the train I needed to catch that would take me to Chicago would get in at nearly midnight. I figured I would leave the station and hang out in downtown Buffalo, and look for the Lewis Sullivan building there, and ride their single light rail line, and find some independent restaurants for lunch and dinner, and see another city on the short, for just a bit.

But downtown Buffalo came and went and we were still on the train. We kept on going and my heart kept sinking. I had to glance backwards as long as I could to savor the ornate hundred year old office buildings of Buffalo's core. I had a looping look at them from the moving train window, and that was all.

When we finally pulled up the train and stopped and got out, what we got out at was a tiny bus station building far away from the center of the city. It was not the station that I had forseen and planned around, and here we were in the middle of Buffalo nowhere.

The train station was far away from the city's center. We got off the train at the edge of the edge of suburbia. I walked into the small station and my heart sank. First I noticed that there were no lockers. Then I noticed that there was nothing out the windows but metal storage buildings, but grass and not one rooftop.

It was one thirty in the afternoon and the train to Chicago was due near midnight, and there was nothing around this small railroad shack but tall grass and metal store sheds.

I asked the ticketmaster what I could do before the Chicago train came in and he suggested that I go to a local mall. There was a once an hour bus that would take me there in ten minutes, and I could watch a movie or something there.

I checked my bag and decided to do that, but I also imagined myself slowly going crazy all alone in the mall all afternoon. I had no real social connections since I left my roommates in Montreal, and I was badly needing some kind of real connection to humans.

At this time there were two other people waiting in the station. They had gotten off the same train as me and looked like they had a similar story. They had set their big backpacks down on chairs and were looking for clues in the signs on the walls, but they did not look like they were happy at all about this, they looked a little bewildered, in fact.

I went up and asked them if they were catching the train to Chicago, and that was indeed their story. They were pretty disgusted that the place they were in was so isolated, and what were they to do.

I told them what the ticketmaster told me and they checked their bags and rode the bus with me to the mall. I asked if they minded if I hung out with them and they said I was welcome.

They were Maxie and Claudia, two women from Germany, from Saxony, part of the former East Germany. They were friends were who traveling together. Maxie was a law student and Claudia was studying architecture. They had been to New York and D.C. and had just left the hostel at Niagra Falls. They were going to Chicago to spend a few days at a hostel there and then they were both to fly back to Saxony to go back to school.

We got off at the mall and studied the mall map so we could find our way to the food court. We got our late lunches, and sat on the metal chairs and talked about things. I had studied some German in high school, and got to use some of it, particularly with Claudia, whose English was not as advanced as Maxie. Maxie had just spent the summer working in the U.S., and her knowledge of the language and customs was fast and easy.

We went to the movie that they wanted to see, and then we tried to find a sit down restaurant for our dinner, but they all had long waiting lines, so we went back to the food court to eat and talk some more. It was early in October, but so many places were already selling Halloween items. It was Friday night at the shopping mall and there were so many people, all of Buffalo must have come here to show their faces as we walked and explored and conversed.

As nine o'clock rolled by walked out of the mall air to wait for a bus to take us back to the train station. We looked at all the neon of the suburban Buffalo shops as we rode the ten minutes back to the small brick building.

When we got back there, we found out that our train was running 90 minutes late, which meant we had more than four hours yet to wait at the train station. But there was entertainment for us here at the train station.

A railroad fan club was there. There were a lot of men in the station, and I wondered a little about it but I think I was still in a daze hearing about that extra hour. But I realized that something was up when the man using the washroom when I came in left on the sink shelf a ham radio. I walked out and gave it back to him and he thanked me.

The club was in session, and it had taken over the train station. We sat in a corner, and watched them work.

The club was a group of middle age or older men, some even wearing "Niagra Railroad Club" jackets, almost all of them had the tall black and orange ham radios with their antennas sticking as far out as possible. They were listening to the train dispatchers, and had the volumes up so we could hear them too. They were listening for dispatches that would tell them when a train would be going by this station. When the train came by, the walked out of the station light and into the outside cold night to watch the train pass by, boxcar by boxcar. They made notes of what freight railway it was, what it was hauling, and any other thing they might. Then they went back inside to debrief the passing and keep warm and talk about everything else, local gossip, local news anchors, and sports.

I talked with one of them for some time and he was a kind of newby, but knew enough to tell me about a train club in St. Paul that I might join up with if I chose. I sat for a while drawing Maxie and Claudia and the train club, trying to make a single picture that told the story of that night, and the freight trains passing out the station window. Sometime while I was drawing the train club left. Claudia was sleeping on the waiting room chairs, and Maxie showed me her journey photos on her small digital camera.

Our Amtrak train did pull in, just about when they said it would, and I am on it now, somewhere between Toledo and Chicago. The three of us found seats right at the front of a train car, and my seat had just a tiny sliver of window to my side and a bright light above me to light the door and light my sleep. But I still slept a solid night, rocked back and forth by the motion of the train. In my dreams the doors between the train cars opened and closed to let in the cold air of the tracks, and the clack of the steel wheels on steel rails. The rails dipped and bowed, producing waveform patterns that turned into Z's and into night houses and the lights in pretty buildings and the trees like brush to polish the hair out of the clouds. I woke up to a blue sky and orange bands of sun after two solid days of continuous grey overcast skies and disappointment dampness. The quiet activity of the train goes on around me, and I sit with my sliver of window, and the rays of sun that light my pen.

After a while I go with Claudia into the lounge car. She talks about the gothic cathedrals of Europe while I tell her tales of the gothic skyscrapers of Chicago, in whose forest we will soon be standing.

October 11

Sloppy Books

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