“I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do when you find yourself up there.”
Fred Allen
I don’t like traveling anymore. That’s why I’ve been in Maine for 30 years and have only left once. Well, we go to Boston every few years, but that’s not really traveling— as in going to Tibet, Paris, London or Toledo, Ohio. I don’t want to do that.
I’m terrified of flying in those narrow metal tubes that keep getting lost in uncharted waters. Turbulence is one thing, but vanishing and never being found again is another. I grew up with stories of Amelia Earhart, thank you very much. No more traveling.
I traveled a lot as a child, but it wasn’t like first class with Rose Kennedy and her kids. It happened because I had worn out the patience of the people where I was. I promised She, who loves traveling, that I would not keep repeating stories of my childhood, but I have to here to make my point about traveling.
My mother, widowed at 49 years old, was in a jam. She had begun a new career as a nurse trainee, and I had begun mine as a preteen pain in the butt. I was like a painting or piece of furniture she adored, but had to give up because there was no room for it in her new small apartment. But our two volatile personalities soon clashed, and so began my journey into the lives of members of the family, mostly brothers who, returning from the war, had married and settled across the country.
At an age when most kids are growing up on four square familiar blocks, my life on the road began.
First stop was Seattle to live with a no-nonsense slightly boozy, war hero veteran brother and his wealthy wife. I went by train and then, on various trips back to Mom for visits, by bus. You had to travel by bus back in the late ‘40s and ‘50s to truly appreciate the horror. You had to rent a pillow for 25 cents, and the bus stopped at every tank town in America. You met a lot of fun, weird, sweet and nervous people busing across America, but populist humor wears thin once you spend what seems like four days crossing Kansas.
The train wasn’t so bad. You got to eat in a swell diner and the food was good.
The conductors and waiters took a liking to a 12-year-old boy traveling alone. They were all black, and because I had grown up in a virtually segregated Irish Catholic all-white neighborhood, they were the first real black people I ever had conversations with. It was an early and rich education, the kind you don’t get in classrooms.
On my first train ride from St. Louis to Seattle, I would take my book into the men’s lounge car, where old white fast-talking salesmen hung out in a cloud of talcum powder, cigar smoke and bay rum cologne, telling naughty stories and dropping quarter tips into the hands of “extra polite” black men. Pullman memories last a lifetime.
Years later, full of nostalgia about those early days, She, who loves traveling and would ship out tomorrow even if she was carried over the shoulder of a Sherpa, talked me into taking the new all improved Amtrak to Los Angeles to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t, but the trains surely had.
No more white linen table cloths and silverware. Dinner is served on trays full of plastic gears. It’s like riding in a bumpy movable Wendy’s.
Going down to Boston on the train once a year is fun, except for other people’s kids. Miniature humans in a playground trapped behind Cyclone fences is one thing, unleashed with food and drinks on the narrow aisles of a rumbling train is another.
The joys of good Boston seafood and wine, strolling Newbury Street on hot summer nights, and the passing parade of beautiful strangers has its joys, but as I approach late middle age, it’s growing tiresome. I travel light. She likes bringing her big golf-cart-sized 50-pound suitcase, which I have to maneuver through the crowds at South Station as she zips ahead, eyes ablaze with the excitement of traveling.
But now that summer has discernible features, I’m looking forward to fish and wine in Camden, and the marinara-soaked meatballs at Petrillo’s in Freeport, only 58 minutes away. I can hear the whistle from the new Amtrak as it pulls into Freeport now. Sometimes a tear forms, but I wipe it away.
All aboard the Prius.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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