The last place I might think would inspire any sort of nostalgia is the Amtrak East Coast service. Some of the views on the New York-Washington route are pleasant enough, but most of it is that kind of slightly depressed urban or suburban that tends to be created by trains in this country.
(It seems to me that in other countries, the value of real estate around train lines doesn’t drop as much. But I suspect that places like Japan and Denmark rely more on their rail networks, and have less real estate to work with.)
But for me, I realize, these routes still have a kind of romantic overlay on them.
The first time I took the Northeast Corridor, it was to visit colleges. I took a week during my junior year, got on the train, and traveled from Washington to Boston, getting off regularly to take campus tours and ask questions about roommate matching and AP course credit (the kinds of things that really seem to matter when you’re in high school). When I was a student, I’d take the 4:10 a.m. train from Richmond, which got into Philadelphia about 5 or 6 hours later. Because I drew some very bright lines between my high school and college lives, those trips became small epics, my own little Odyssey. It was too perfect that it started in darkness and ended in light: not even the worst writer would dare commit such clumsy symbolism to paper. Which shows that train schedules aren’t great fiction.
So it was easy to see train as a passage from one life to another- from one I was fairly obsessed with getting away from, to one I was trying hard to invent. It was also the way I got up to the archives in Cambridge, where I did my senior thesis work. I preferred the 11 p.m. train, which got into Boston with time enough to get to Cambridge, stop in a diner on Kendall Square for breakfast, then get to the MIT archives right when they opened. Of course, it was mainly a way to save the cost of a night’s hotel, but I rationalized it as an expression of professional dedication. (I guess my habit of treating working trips as extreme sports goes way back.) The research itself was very interesting, but the thesis was also a means to a bigger end: admission to graduate school, a Ph.D., and eventually an academic job. I wasn’t just a traveler; I was a journeyman.
But the strongest memories that this route calls to mind are romantic- or rather, ones that involve thwarted romances, which over the long run probably yield more vivid and lasting memories. In particular, my freshman year I fell into a brief romance with a woman I’d met at Princeton (SEPTA to Trenton, NJ Transit to Princeton, then the Dinky into campus). Though that particular episode ended badly, through my college and graduate school years we’d see each other every now and then. Part of me thought we’d eventually end up together, but it never worked out: we were both very focused on our work, always lived in different cities, and never managed to be out of relationships at the same time. So while we stayed unusually close, we never jumped off the cliff.
Which didn’t stop me from trying, off and on for about eight years. There was an entire dissertation chapter that I essentially invented as an excuse to spend a week in New Haven. That was probably the most extreme example of my concocting trips whose appearance of casual coincidence masked a hope that this time, I could tilt coincidence just enough in my favor.
But while it was one of those relationships where it seemed like no time had passed since the last time we’d been together, it never jumped from that alternate time to real time: if it was always a special part of my life, it was also always separate from the rest of my life. At some point, I realized that the idea that it would become anything more than what it already was was losing its grip. Then I moved to California, she got a postdoc at a med school on the East Coast, and that was that.
That chapter eventually became a rather good article. It was about women’s work in scientific expeditions, and much of it compared two two wives of nineteenth-century astronomers. One became a key player in her husband’s very successful expeditions, while the other went on expeditions but spent most of her time pining for a man with whom she carried on a decades-long affair. Her husband was no saint, either. It was a pretty dysfunctional relationship.
I’m sure it was all just a coincidence.
