Fresh Air Fiend (16 page)

When people in London said "the North," they meant Manchester or Newcastle, but for me north always meant Scotland, because I had that feeling of being on an island. One of the many oddities of subdivided Britain is that one of the northernmost regions is called Sutherland—so it was for the Vikings, for whom it was south. When I took a train, I never had a notion of crossing into Wales, or into Cornwall or Scotland; it was just more stops and smaller stations. The tribal warfare of Britain, with its teasing and its injustices, its enduring aggression and its sense of grievance, is something I regarded with a detachment I had learned in observing the Baganda and the Acholi quarrel in Uganda.

After a time we moved from Dorset to London, but I never lost the feeling that I was a castaway. As a foreigner, I was determined not to die in Britain and be buried in a gloomy churchyard under a blackish dripping yew tree. One day I would sail away. I never guessed that I would leave alone, feeling as portable and insignificant as when I arrived. I landed in Britain on November 4, 1971, and left on January 19, 1990. The years that these dates enclosed were among the happiest as well as the saddest I have ever known: joy bordering on rapture, misery at the very edge of despair.

I knew I did not belong—no foreigner can in Britain—nor did I want to. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the experience of being at once alien and anonymous, like The Man Who Fell to Earth, a Martian who looks like everyone else. This condition seemed to me to epitomize the writer's dilemma. But on an island of such unselfconscious literacy and library-going, it seemed natural to be a writer. Because of a writer's peculiar attitude toward money, he is an oddity in the United States, but not in Britain.

I was always a taxpayer but never a voter, so I had no sense of belonging, of supporting a political party, or even of being an English resident. My home was a house in south London, on this island of Britain. I often felt physically uncomfortable or socially constrained, and yet I was intellectually freer and better appreciated than I ever felt before or since. I was never entirely at home in Britain, but I never had a sense of being unwelcome. Seeing people on the street, I used to think:
You are home and I am not.
I constantly prayed:
I don't want to die here.

After eleven years in Britain I grew restless. To gather more experience to write about this island, I set off to circumambulate the coast—on foot and by train and bus and boat. When
The Kingdom by the Sea
appeared, with all its breezy generalities and affectionate mockery, the reviews were robust—British literary journalists practice harmless cruelty—yet the fuss meant my book was taken seriously, and so was I, because I still lived there. What American Anglomaniacs don't understand is that the British will listen to the opinions of almost anyone who lives on the island, but generally speaking, if a writer doesn't live in Britain, they will have no interest in his or her opinions. When I left the country, ceasing to be a resident, I lost my nitpicking license.

One day I made a list of all the things I liked in Britain: bread, fish, clouds, beer, country pubs, clotted cream, flower gardens, apples, newspapers, woolen cloth, radio programs, parks, Indian restaurants, amateur dramatics, the Royal Mail, the trains, and the patience, modesty, and politeness of people.

"Look thy last on all things lovely, / Every hour," I used to murmur to myself when I lived in Britain. I loved paddling the coastline of Wales in my kayak, cycling from London to Brighton, hiking the South Downs, listening to a symphony concert in the Royal Festival Hall, visiting one son at Oxford and the other at Cambridge.
What luck,
I thought.
I have planted my family here and it has flourished.

After I left, I looked back and saw that to a large extent England had made me, but not in the way I had imagined. I had resolved to be frugal, and living among frugal people I had not lost the habit. I saw how the difficult path had rewarded me. I began to cherish, and still do, times of adversity and disappointment and hardship. And I began to understand what hardship is. It is not, for example, the long, arduous road over the Tibetan plateau from Golmud to Lhasa, which I have traveled; it is the almost eighteen years I spent on the South Circular Road, which is almost indescribably depressing—and who's interested? Hardship can be a lively subject, but nuisance is something that no one wants to hear about.

Britain is beautiful, but Britain can also be bleak—not ugly or picturesquely dangerous, but with stretches of enormous monotony that seemed to nibble at my soul. The heart-sinking housing estates by the motorway in Huddersfield; the look of my children's pale faces among all the others in the schoolyard of their primary school; the crowded bus stops, sadder for being orderly; the bleakness of certain reaches of the Thames at low tide; and nothing I have seen is bleaker than a drizzly winter afternoon in Catford—brown sky, gray bricks, black street. But I never regarded that time as failure. It was reality, an opportunity, and my discomfort made me look more closely and gave me something to write about. Then I moved on and closed the book on it.

I
WAS SITTING
in the sunshine in the last car of a train heading west, feeling utterly baffled, and thinking,
I have never been here before.
It was not just the place (early morning in the middle of Colorado); it was also my state of mind (blissful). I was grateful for my good fortune. To think that riding a train, something I had done for pleasure all my traveling life, had been improved upon. In the past, what had mattered most in any long train journey through an interesting landscape was the motion, the privacy, the solitude, the grandeur. Food and comfort, I had discovered, are seldom available on the best trips: there is something about the most beautiful places having the most awful trains. But this was something else.

My chair was on the rear observation platform of a private railway car called "Los Angeles," formerly part of the Southern Pacific Railway. My feet were braced against a brass rail, and the morning sunshine was full on my face. I had woken in Fort Morgan, and after a stroll in Denver had reboarded to have breakfast with family and friends in the private dining room of this car: orange juice, home-baked blueberry coffee cake and muffins, scrambled eggs and fresh juice and coffee. Then the morning paper in the private lounge, and finally settling myself in the open air on this little brass porch as we started our climb through the foothills of the Rockies. An hour out of Denver it was epic grandeur, moving past frozen creeks, pines, and rubbly hills, destination San Francisco. I was very happy.

From this position on a train, eye contact is possible, and as we passed through Pinecliffe, in Gilpin County, a woman stopped at the level crossing, stuck her head out of her car, and waved at me, making my day.

"Anything I can get you?" This was George, the steward, holding the rear door open. "Coffee? Cookies? More juice? Hot chocolate?"

There were four armchairs and a big sofa in the parlor just inside, and off the corridor, four bedrooms, two with double beds, and hot showers. Farther along, the dining room and the gourmet kitchen, and beyond that a big long Amtrak train, the
California Zephyr,
pulling us on its usual route from Chicago to San Francisco, via Denver and Salt Lake City.

As for the rest, I was ignorant. Happiness has no questions; bliss is not a state of inquiry. Whatever squirrelly anxieties I possessed had vanished a long way back, probably soon after we boarded in Chicago, or else at Galesburg. Bliss had definitely taken hold as we crossed the Mississippi, because I remember standing right here on the rear platform and gawking at it, the chunks of ice gleaming in the lights of Burlington, Iowa, on the distant riverbank, the clattering of the bridge, the sense that I was in the night air, hearing and seeing the water, and smelling it too, this damp winter night, the marshy muddiness of the great river.

 

We had left Chicago the previous afternoon in fog so thick that airline passengers had turned O'Hare into a gigantic dormitory, and departing flights were so thoroughly canceled that there was a slumber party at each gate. The fog was news, so I was excited just slipping out of it. I glanced from time to time at the Amtrak route guide, which gave helpful information. We passed Princeton, Illinois ("Pig Capital of the World"), and Galesburg (associated with Carl Sandburg, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and "Popcorn was invented in Galesburg by Olmstead Ferris"), then through Monmouth (birthplace of Wyatt Earp). But all I saw were dark houses, dim lights, and the vast midwestern sky, and here and there a small nameless town, not noticed by the guide, and a filling station on a side road, or a bowling alley, or the local diner filled with eaters.

It is easy to understand the envy of the traveler for the settled people he or she sees, snug in their houses, at home. But I could not have been snugger here in the private railway car. Thinking of the days that stretched ahead, all of them on rails, I was put in mind of Russia, of long journeys through forests and prairies, past little wooden houses half buried in the snow, with smoking chimneys. It was like that, the size of the landscape, the snow, the darkness, and the starry night over Iowa.

After hot showers, we assembled for predinner drinks in the parlor and toasted our trip and talked about the train.

"This was the car that Robert Kennedy used for his campaign in 1968. He made his visit to Los Angeles on it," Christopher Kyte said.

Christopher was the owner of the "Los Angeles," having bought it some eight years ago and restored it at great expense to its former glory. It had been built and fitted out at the height of the boom in the 1920s, and finished just in time for the crash in 1929.

That Robert Kennedy had used it, and made whistle-stop speeches from the rear observation platform, was a solemn thought, but it had been used by many other people—actresses, tycoons, foreign royalty. Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson had made hundreds of trips on it, between Texas and Washington, D.C. It had seen drunks and lovers and millionaires. It was not a mere conveyance, any more than a ship was—people had spent a part of their lives on it.

"Los Angeles" was for weeks at a time Christopher Kyte's own home, one of the mobile aspects of his California-based company. A humorous, self-mocking fellow, whose innocence and innate good will made his humor all the more appealing, Christopher reminded me of Bertie Wooster. He was especially Woosterish when he was in his double-breasted dark suit, recalling a scandalous episode, with George the steward at his elbow, helping with a name or a date. George was Jeeves to his fingertips—efficient, helpful, silent, good at everything, eighteen years on the Southern Pacific. "I've looked after Tom Clancy," he told me. He was as kindly as Christopher, and it was a wonder, given their dispositions, that the company made any money at all. But it has more than prospered.

Nostalgia is not the point, nor is it the glamour of an antique railway car. The idea is comfort, privacy, forward motion. It is a grand hotel suite on wheels, with gourmet food and fine beds, and a view of the Great Plains, and any stopover you like.

"I'd like to spend a day skiing," I had told Christopher a few weeks before we left on the trip. I knew we would be traveling through Colorado, Utah, and snowy parts of California. "What if we stopped for a night somewhere in Utah?"

We decided on Provo, about sixteen miles from the narrow, snowy canyon in the Wasatch Range where Sundance is located. That would be our second night.

"We'll drop you in Provo," Christopher said. "A car will meet you at the station. Stay at Sundance that night and ski the next day. Then meet us at the station in Salt Lake City, and plan to have dinner on board. The chef will have something special."

Meanwhile, the Iowa plains were passing and we filed into the dining room for our first night's dinner, six of us around the table, feasting on pot roast, braised southern style. The conversation was enlivened by a mealtime quiz of guessing celebrities' real names (significant answers: Reg Dwight, Gordon Sumner, Malcolm Little, Bill Blythe, Newton McPherson).

That night the
Zephyr
pulled "Los Angeles" through Nebraska, from Omaha ("Boys Town ... is west of town") to Benkelman, near the Colorado border ("one hour earlier if going west"). But I was still asleep in Colorado. I roused myself around Fort Morgan, in the high plains, and a little later watched people gathering for the National Western Stock Show in Denver, just next to the tracks—cattle, cowboys, stock pens—the year's big event. I got off to buy a newspaper in Denver, and soon after, in the clear bright day, I was sitting on the rear observation platform in the sunshine for the long climb through the foothills of the Rockies, amid the pines and aspens.

 

Snow and cold drove me inside around lunchtime, and soon we came to the small town of Winter Park, not far from Fraser (which "proudly calls itself 'the ice-box of America'"). That afternoon we had a long snowy ride under the steep pinnacles of shale in Glenwood Canyon, to Glenwood Springs, and where the rock was uncovered it was the color of honey in the fading daylight. Skiers got off the train to make their way to Aspen and Vail. We followed the course of Spanish Creek, which flowed toward the Colorado River.

"Who has been your oddest passenger?" I asked Christopher over dinner as we clattered down the canyon.

"Most of our people are wonderful," he said. But he was smiling, remembering.

There was once a man, traveling with five strangers, who showed up in the dining room one morning stark naked, just as someone was saying "Pass the sausages, please." The naked man was five foot four; he weighed three hundred pounds. This was not a welcome sight at the breakfast table.

"You have no clothes on," Christopher said to him.

"I always eat breakfast like this," the naked man said, and began to sip his coffee while the rest of the diners averted their eyes.