Homeward bound

The Amtrak adventure that just... keeps... giving...

If all goes well today, I should be home in a few hours.

I’m so ready. I’m ready to sleep in my own bed again. I’m ready to go hard in the kitchen, four burners and the oven all cranking at once. I’m ready to resume my polar plunge and sauna ritual at the lake in Newton. I’m ready to be back in my office at Harvard, working on science and attending seminars and journal clubs. I’m ready to wear different shirts, a different pair of pants; ready to winterize with jackets and scarves and mittens. I hope the snow is ready, so I can get in some cross-country skiing before the cold lets up.

I think this will be my last travelogue-style post of the trip. I’d like to follow up with another post of reflections, lessons learned, etc. (I’m telling you this so that I’m accountable.) From there, the blog will transition into post-trip mode, and who knows what form my posts will take.

But for now: back to the travelogue.

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Since my last post, my mood has been up, down, and up again.

As the train approached New Orleans last Friday, I was buoyed by the enthusiastic response that my Infinite Woods teaser was receiving here in blog-world. I feel your energy, readers!

My “up” phase of mood continued to build during a whirlwind 36 hours in New Orleans. I was hosted by Adam, an old friend from high school back in Illinois. We had a beautiful Saturday to work with — sunny and in the 60s — and Adam planned a perfect 15-mile biking tour of the city, with many stops to keep hunger and thirst at bay. At brunch, we shared a $24 crawfish omelette mainly for the blog tie-in, and I had some of the best jambalaya of my life from a very average-looking corner store.

Our first stop was at this coffee shop with a very on-brand name.

We mostly rode our own bikes, but when we hit the Audubon Park, Adam took the e-bike for a lap. Adam thought it was fun, which is high praise: one of Adam’s passions is to drive very fast in very nice, very loud cars, and I wasn’t sure the virtually silent 250-watt Bosch motor on my Tern Vektron S-10 would cut it for him. After biking alone this whole trip, it was a pleasure to finally share both the bike itself and the joy of biking with a friend.

Just a big man on a small bike, zooming around on the park paths.

Biking on the levee path, with a train of oil tankers passing by.

For the sake of completeness, I’m going to describe our evening as well, although it has essentially nothing to do with the themes of this blog. After our bike adventure, Adam and I donned “fun” outfits (Adam: sweeping purple cape, Zoro mask; me, making do with my limited wardrobe: short orange running shorts, white linen shirt), and lined up to watch a very raunchy and politically-charged parade called Krewe du Vieux. I’m keeping it PG on the blog, so unfortunately there can be no pictures of parade floats.

This kitty was raking it in at the parade.

We then segued to a party hosted by the heir to an Australian butter fortune. People call this man “The Butter Baron”, but not to his face. Guests entered the party through a large white double gate, which opened into a verdant courtyard in the space between two houses, both in the baron’s possession. A mermaid was swimming in the courtyard’s pool; a live band played from the balcony of the back house. Several attendees referred to the atmosphere at the party as Gatsby-esque. I swear I’m not making any of this up.

Huge shoutout to Adam for showing me a good time, as always.

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I’ll admit, I didn’t get a ton of sleep Saturday night. Even though I hardly drink, the general bacchanalian excess of New Orleans definitely got to me, and I was in a foul mood on the train platform on Sunday morning. The trip from New Orleans to New York City would be my longest Amtrak segment yet, and I’ve been feeling more and more homesick; I haven’t slept in my own bed for over 6 weeks now. I’m not camping any more, so all my gear just feels like a lot of weight to lug around. My bike, in particular, weighs about 50 pounds, and while boarding the train in New Orleans, as I lifted my bike into the cargo area, I heard a “pop” and felt a sharp pain in my right wrist. Uh oh. I think it’s an ulnar sprain; I definitely have physical therapy in my future.

So, as I sat in my train seat — bleary-eyed, homesick, newly injured, looking down the barrel of a 36-hour train segment that offered little prospect for bodily rejuvenation — it was clear that I had entered a “down” phase of mood. Then, two unrelated events turned things around: 1) my mom offered to upgrade my Amtrak fare to a roomette for this segment of my trip; and 2) I met a pair of long-distance e-bikers who write a climate blog. (I’m sorry, what?)

First, a tribute to my mom: Ma, I can’t thank you enough! Once the upgrade was confirmed over the phone, I was ushered through the labyrinthine halls of the sleeper car and shown to my roomette. Having a roomette feels like having a berth in a spaceship. It’s a small space, approximately 3.5 feet wide, 6.5 feet long, and 8 feet tall. Amtrak claims that two people can share one; I’m not sure about that, but the roomette is absolutely crammed with cleverly engineered features. There’s a fold-out sink, fold-out table, two chairs that combine into a lower bunk, an upper loft bunk that raises and lowers, cubbies for luggage, outlets, an intercom speaker, thermostat, reading lights, six windows with curtains, and countless switches, levers, and buttons that call to mind a 1970s conception of the future. There’s even a toilet in the roomette, which I thought was one convenience too many.

Peering into my roomette from the hallway. I slept in the upper bunk.

Stretching the legs on the lower level. The toilet and sink are to the left.

My main gripe about the roomette concerns the fold-out sink. The flow of water is controlled by binary on-off levers — one for hot and one for cold — and water only comes out if you’re actively depressing a lever, meaning you’re automatically down a hand when using the sink. Even worse, the pressure is set to “firehose”, so the water comes out with such velocity that when it hits your free hand, or your toothbrush, or the metal bowl of the sink, it ricochets in all directions and soaks everything in the vicinity. I would pay a lot of money to see an Amtrak instructional video on how to use that sink in a dignified manner, because I’m positive it’s impossible.

“Houston, the water pressure is a problem.”

Anyway, in all seriousness, having the roomette made an immediate, huge difference in my mood. I closed all the curtains, climbed into the bunk, and conked out for a four-hour nap.

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I’ve written previously about how, throughout this trip, kindred spirits have seemed to just manifest themselves into my life. Well, the serendipitous meetings have continued with the case of Michael and Jenny. They approached me first, before boarding in the train hall, complimenting my bike and peppering me with inside-baseball e-bike questions: How many watts is the motor? The weight without battery? They had already checked their e-bikes onto the train, but I could tell they were legit just from their small mountain of well-worn Ortlieb panniers. Game recognize game!

We lost each other during the rush of boarding, but caught up again in the aisles of the train, tripping over our words in an ever-intensifying realization of kinship. Michael asked me, “So is it because of climate that you don’t fly?” I replied that although I do fly, I’m still climate-motivated. I was waffling internally over mentioning my climate blog (self-promotion still does not come naturally to me), when Michael said, “We write a blog, Carbon Stories. It’s climate stories, as seen from a bicycle.” Jenny smoothly handed me a contact card with the details of their blog.

Clearly, we had even more to talk about than I had first realized. But the adrenaline of boarding was wearing off, and I was fading fast. I excused myself for my nap, and by the time I woke up, my new friends had read my entire blog and littered the comments section with encouraging and informative comments. We had agreed to meet for dinner in the cafe car, which was coming right up, so it was my turn to dig into their blog.

There is a wealth of incredible content at Carbon Stories. Early in the blog’s history, before Jenny started joining him on trips, Michael would post frequently while on the road, travelogue-style, with accounts of bike mishaps and serendipitous meetings (sound familiar?) But recent posts are more epic in scope, one per bike trip, and contain well-researched deep dives into environmental issues that are tied to the places he and Jenny ride through, such as coastal erosion and sustainable shellfish harvesting in Prince Edward Island, or the irrigation challenges of ranchers in the drought-stricken southwest. Interspersed throughout the stories are Jenny’s beautifully detailed and hand-illustrated character portraits of folks they meet through their travels. Michael and Jenny are both deeply artistic humanists — before retirement, Michael was a theatre professor, and Jenny worked on Broadway — and their blog blends these sensibilities with a passionate engagement in climate and environmental issues and a serious dose of athleticism (they carry spare battery packs so they can ride up to 100 miles in a day). They’ve been at this together for the past five years, with the goal of taking a trip every other month. Did I mention they’re retired, each with grandkids? To say I was inspired is an understatement.

At dinner, three hours of fellowship flew by. From my perspective, anyway, I felt that we were basking in mutual recognition, astonished by each new dimension of overlap between us. It was clear that I was in the presence of sages, and I was green. For all the mistakes I had made on my trip, they had solutions. Jenny has perfected the art of bringing fresh, healthy food on the train, which she generously shared with me. I have the reputation of being a bottomless pit at mealtime, but Michael could keep up. We had just polished off some peanut butter and rice crackers when he busted out what looked to be a pound of chocolate, and said “This chocolate is gonna rock your world. The weight in the saddlebag is worth it.”

When our train stopped in Washington, DC, Michael and I geeked out over the swapping of the engine from diesel to electric (outside of the Northeast Corridor, most Amtrak trains are diesel-powered). Michael asked the conductor if any of the $66 billion earmarked for Amtrak in the Inflation Reduction Act will go toward further rail electrification, but the conductor didn’t think so. “We’re barely keeping this equipment running as it is. That will mostly go toward track maintenance and expansion.” This conductor clearly didn’t think too highly of Amtrak upper management: he had just finished graffiti-ing “WASH ME!!” on the side of the newly-conjoined electric engine. (At first, I thought he was inscribing our point of origin, in Washington, DC, but it turns out it was a message for the higher-ups.) “It’s disgraceful how dirty this shit is…” the conductor muttered as he walked away.

The rather dirty electric engine after getting hooked up to the rest of the cars.

Michael, Jenny, and I continued to hang out throughout the trip to New York City, and we’re already talking of doing a trip together at some point in the future. I feel blessed to count this remarkable pair as new friends.

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There’s a reason so many classic movies are set on trains. A train is a world unto itself, full of nooks and crannies, history, quirky characters, a caste system of “haves” and “have-nots” (due to my roomette upgrade, I briefly became one of the “haves” on the leg from New Orleans). This is all true of an airplane, as well, but most plane flights are too short to allow much of significance to unfold. A long-haul train trip has room for a whole plot.

As much as this trip has given me, I think I’m just about ready for this plot to wrap up.

—Jake