Great Escapes 2008: The Empire Builder

Unfortunately, the dining protocol on Amtrak makes some people uncomfortable. Seating in the dining car is in the traditional railroad style, which dates back more than a century. Since seating is limited, every effort is made to fill each seat, which means that unless you are traveling in a party of four, you will be eating with someone you do not know.

The prospect of dining with a stranger terrifies some, I know, but it can also be the most interesting part of the trip. I once met a Neil Diamond impersonator who was studying to be a Buddhist priest. On another trip, I met a large woman, decked out in red, white, and blue, who was running for president because she was “feddup” with our “gummint,” and she was “gon’ do sumpin ’bout it.” She was crazy, but also sort of inspiring. On my last trip, I met a lady on her way to her fiftieth high school reunion, where, I was led to believe, she was going to continue an illicit affair she had been having with her high school sweetheart for half a century.

Dining with such folks and collecting their stories is part of the fun of train travel.

On my most recent trip, I met a doctor who let me know that there is a thriving jazz scene in Fargo, a health-services worker from Duluth who had forgotten why he ever moved there, and a retired schoolteacher from LaCrosse who told me more than I’ll ever want to know about the Order of the Eastern Star, an offshoot of the Freemasons, that, according to her, is the largest fraternal organization in the world that both men and women can join (a fact Googling seems to confirm)—though I’d never heard of it before. Exactly with whom one ends up dining is entirely the luck of the draw, of course, and I have run into a few social misfits over the years—but I’ve had enough unexpectedly interesting conversations in the Amtrak dining car to recommend taking the plunge to anyone.

After breakfast, I like to get a large cup of coffee and head to the lounge car, which has floor-to-ceiling windows and a glass roof so observers can take in the vast panoramas that are such an elemental part of train travel. I deliberately don’t bring anything else with me, because the scenery from Red Wing to Winona to LaCrosse, a two-hour portion of the trip, is the most spectacular part of the journey—and that’s enough.

Winter isn’t usually the best time of year to sightsee in southern Minnesota, but plenty of snow fell this year, and in early March there was still a foot on the ground, blanketing the landscape all the way to the horizon. In the fields, row after row of corn-stalk stumps poked through the snow in orderly ribbons and the bare trees etched their bleak beauty into the sky behind them. Lake Pepin was frozen solid, a vast slab of white with silver contrails of windswept ice shining in the sun. And everywhere I looked, it seemed, bald eagles were carving lazy circles in the sky. I saw four eagles flying over the Mississippi River near the train station in Red Wing, three more outside of Winona, and a few more here and there along the way, for a total of twelve bald eagle sightings in less than two hours. From my perch in the Amtrak lounge car, I also saw several wild turkeys, a number of deer, and a four-legged creature ambling across a frozen pond that looked an awful lot like a wolf—but, I’ll admit, was probably a dog.

Such sightings are an everyday occurrence for the Empire Builder staff, but are nonetheless exciting to those of us who spend our days in an office cube. While I’m looking out the window, I also like to entertain myself by listening in on the conversations of people around me. The writer in me says I’m doing it for “research,” but it’s really just old-fashioned eavesdropping. Still, one hears some amazing things. I jotted down these quotes from my latest trip:

“I don’t know where they found the body, but the head was gone. They had to identify it with, like, fingerprints.”

“Justin is a turd—a big, fat, ugly turd.”

“He keeps his coke stashed in an aquarium with a snapping turtle. He slides a board in when he wants to get it.”

“Zombie attacks always happen in little towns like these, then they move on to the city.”

“I’m an actor. That’s all I can do. It’s the only thing I can imagine doing with my life.”

“I’m the same way about music.”

“Righteous.”

“Yeah. And girls.”

People-watching is, of course, the other great sport for train enthusiasts. Trains seem to attract people who are slightly odd, or in some cases extremely odd—and from where I sit, the odder the better. In St. Paul, before even setting foot on the train, I had seen a woman with a lime green feather boa around her neck, a kid with skeleton-hand gloves, a guy dressed in full hunting camouflage, an old lady with an eye patch, and a family of five who were all wearing Brett Favre jerseys.