For most folks who travel by train there is a disconnect between the trip and what’s going on outside the window. But as far as I am concerned it makes the trip almost necessary to grasp just how beautiful and wonderful the natural world of the US is. In many written pieces about the trip I have read how boring the Midwest landscape is. My reaction to that is how insensitive the writer must be to what is going on out there. After coming across the plains of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, you get an idea of how rich the land is with plantings, of stories, of how rugged the land really is and how it never gives up its riches without a struggle. The little towns that used to be the life’s blood of the nation of small farmers now fall apart under the noon day sun. And it’s not just one but many. Some that rejoiced with the coming of the railroad and fortune now are nothing more than empty store fronts and a depot that stands empty and forlorn. The latest train goes by without a hoot or hollar and its after breeze pulls at the aging clapboards of the old building. The land scape that we just passed through was just beginning to become a mature green with late spring. The fields were just showing green from the late plantings and still the big tractors were out there with last minute hustle to finish the job with corn and beans, beans and corn. To the deserning eye could tell the difference between shoots of corn and shoots of beans. The fields were planted right up to the fence line right next to the railroad right-of -way. Contrary to the stories, the land is not flat and boring but it undulates and the further west you go the greater the undulation, variation and vegatation. On a train moving through this county you can see how it changes from county to county, state to state. How over the eons nature has performed magic and the people who tend the fields have just nuged her along just a bit.
The land tells stories about what it has done and what has been done to it. Almost every time a time zone changes ( because of the Railroad) so does what the land looks like and feels like and what is going on both on the surface and underneath it. A time zone is invisible, there really is no dotted line running down the face of the land that says its a hour earlier than before. But there is a palpable difference for those who notice. The more westerly you travel, rain is not your friend or even your acquaintance. Your partner in the fields is what is under the fields in big prehistoric lakes. Big skeletal arms become your partner turning the fields green. Then there are really no liquid friends. The ground is rock, stone, left overs from ages back before there were rail roads, men and women to run them. The stories that land here tells are about upheaval, up thrust rock going up, rock going down and only the most tenacious of plants hang on, so twisted and blasted to be out of some sweat soaked dream. the survivors still green, the departed white and skeletal. This land is even colored differently, pale red and creme, layered like some kind of mad cake. What grows here has character and shows its here for the ages. No harvest here, no cash crop gone at the end of the season. The only temporary things are animals and the people who tend the animals, their buildings and things. Here the rails come so close that you can almost reach out and touch the red rocks, the skeletal branches. Now you are moving slowly because it’s a hard climb up grade, only 2 percent but for the train that’s enough for a struggle. Slow orders up to the summit.
billybobrailcom 