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Quote of the Day: Travel Writability
The Zephyr’s timetable is engineered for thrills: it’s nearly midnight by the time you pass into Nebraska, so you sleep through the Great Plains, provided you can sleep at all. But to locate the sublime in a darkened tallgrass prairie bookended here and there by flour mills is what separates the real romantics from the wannabes. I watch it pass, forehead pressed against the window.
– Meaghan Garvey, “Passengers,” County Highway vol. 2, no. 4 (January-February 2025)
How many trips have I pressed my forehead against the window? Many, minus one: the one that was the bus ride either from Chandigarh to Simla or from Simla to Wildflower Hall. The number of things I don’t know about India is likewise enormous, but in the autumn of 1980, I could confidently assert that hair pomade was very popular in that part of the country. Ick. I kept my own head off the glass. But Miss Garvey is speaking of train trips in the U.S., at least two on Amtrak’s Chicago-San Francisco line over at least the last two years, and I am consuming them—indeed, all of County Highway. Thank you, @godlovingwoman, for your shout-out for this publication, which I keep forgetting I got a gift subscription to because—even though it looks like a newspaper—it comes out bimonthly.
Travel writing may occupy a stable niche within it. That is, at least to me, quite unexpected. Does travel writing even exist anymore? I haven’t seen the New York Times travel section in decades, and only with difficulty ascertained that there still is one. I mean one that is so bold and so confident that it receives, or at least considers, content from people who first go, then come back, then—in the fullness of time—write about it. (In point of fact, it is unenthusiastic about such material: the automated e-mail I instantly received said, “Thank you for writing to The New York Times Travel desk. Because so many people are sharing their questions and experiences we are unable to respond individually, but we’ll be in touch for more information if required. If you have an idea or confidential tip for a travel story, please let us know here.” A confidential tip? Huh?)
But back to County Highway: The quoted piece checks all the boxes for traditional travel literature. Fellow passengers who don’t make much sense? Got ’em! The author wisely declined to engage these guys in anything like argument or even logic. But that is another box to check: just quote the people you meet rather than tell us how you tried to change their minds or even pass judgment on them. It was enough to hear out the guy who was homeless because he said the Feds took his house because his brother had been convicted of terrorism and tyranny [sic], but who also said he’d soon be getting $10,000 every two weeks [sic] because he’d finally got the documents for his inheritance [sic] in order. I’ve never met anyone like that. Although, like the author, I have, on a trip, met someone who’d just got out of prison. In very small quantities, the only kind you get when you yourself are in motion, I can aver, and I think the author would too, that meeting such people is really inspiriting.
Something I can’t aver—but I’m happy if someone else can—is how capable and colorful Amtrak personnel are. I never found ’em that way at all. But then, it’s been a generation since I’ve been on Amtrak. The author’s descriptions reminded me, and here is an immensely obscure reference, which I think she’d like, of Mason Williams’s own paean to Greyhound drivers. I once saw a book of his. I think it was titled Flavors, which I see now was published in 1970. Sounds about right—as did, I think, his best-known (or only) single. It’s hard to say what exactly Mason Williams was.
To the extent the author comes close to sweeping conclusions, well…I agree that Europeans really are “constitutionally underprepared for the American railway experience.” I agree because I had found all Amtrak passengers bizarrely disoriented, but also because Europeans don’t get much of anything about America. But these foreigners are loving this trip as much as she is, so there’s no acidity to her appraisal. She has a nice passage about another guy from overseas:
“I find it amazing that Utah exists,” says a Brit in tiny shorts with a cheerfully manic demeanor. He’s been hiking through the Southwest wilderness since June and is only just reacclimating to human contact. I know just what he means though – riding the train in Utah is like riding the train on the moon.
Never a big consumer of travel literature, and having scarcely been a producer of it either, I think only now that it is or can be the best example of journalism. It has people and places, and to some extent events, though its timeline is the writer’s, and its trajectory is geographical rather than historical or political. It’s a lot to ask because it takes a lot of time, but before anyone tries to become a reporter, he should first show himself a travel writer. County Highway looks the perfect place to trace this sort of career path!
Published in Journalism
This is only the second issue I’ve got, but I’m already wondering if County Highway will someday overlap Coast to Coast AM. No UFOs yet, but I sense we’re this close.
This issue, and the first one I got, had articles by Tama Janowitz. This is the only writer I’d ever heard of before…and then only because the person who gifted me County Highway had, over a third of a century ago, gifted me SPY. And on one issue of that was Tama Janowitz. Around New York City, way back in the day, she was, apparently, a thing. In this issue of this periodical, there is just faintly a Jewish-American-Princess-in-darkest-New-Mexico vibe, but despite the ramblings about tarantulas crossing the road (honey: they do that) and also the possibility of a helicopter evacuation (honey: not in the 2-seater you saw, not if the passenger is unconscious and needs to be held up by the pilot), the article is still very likeable. This stuff fits in.
I rode Amtrack once, from Kansas City to Trinidad, CO. We left KC about midnight, and I thought I’d be able to sleep while crossing Kansas, but no. The air conditioning was broken and I cooked all night.
I click on a lot of bicycle touring videos on YouTube. Once in a while I come across one that I enjoy watching to the end. If there are a couple of such videos, I might end up subscribing to the channel. Yesterday, on one channel that I might have been ready to unsubscribe from in one of my periodic fits of unsubscribing, a woman from France who writes good English subtitles took her mother on a short tour to visit some of the places of her earlier life. She gave her mother a chance to describe some of her life’s story and how it connected to places on their tour. That was too scanty a part of the video, but it was enough to make watching it worthwhile. I enjoy reading people’s life stories here on Ricochet, especially if they connect to places one might learn about or even visit. I’ve been known to follow as best I can on Google Maps and Streetview.
One of my great-great-grandfathers was meticulous about recording the dates and sometimes the exact times of family events: births, deaths, marriages. But he recorded nothing at all about where these events took place. I want to know where!
BTW, I appreciate getting your opinion of County Highway. I had once taken a look at its online presence, probably in response to the same thing you saw by @godlovingwoman. And I think I follow the editor on Twitter. But I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Mike Jensen and Marne record the Zephyr’s daily stops at Fort Morgan, CO on YouTube, one going west and the other east. They are strangely addictive.