I love riding on trains. There’s something about that quiet little lurch the car makes when the motor kicks in and the car pulls out of the station. It’s like you’ve just been unplugged from the world.
I grew up in Washington, DC, and in the old days the Amtrak ride from New York to Washington was a particular favorite of mine. The train rumbled through darkness for a few minutes, then came into the light among those strange New Jersey marshlands that lie just south of the city. The bar car would open around then, and I’d go back and buy – if memory serves correctly – two cans of Ballantine Ale.
Gradually, the alien landscape of water and reeds gave way to towns and suburbs. Sitting back in my seat, I’d catch a glimpse of a dog in a backyard, a couple talking – or arguing – on a street corner. Little moments of ordinary life -- pretty one second, ugly the next – all of it flashing by like something on a movie screen. Something I could see but no longer had anything to do with. Something that couldn’t touch me.
I’m not the first person to have enjoyed drinking on trains, of course.
Right here in New York, thousands of people head to Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station each weekday afternoon and grab a little of that trains-and-booze, free-of-the-world-for-a-moment magic. The writer John Cheever put so many of these drinking commuters into his stories that the figure has become a kind of archetype of the drinking life.
Those stories of Cheever’s seldom ended all that happily. The trouble with the train-and-drink plan is – like all attempts to escape the world via alcohol – they have a parabola shape to them. You go up, up, and away for a while… then, like a failed Wright Brothers flying machine, you falter and head back to earth. For Cheever’s characters, that back-to-earth moment would often coincide with the arrival of their train at their home station. Back on solid ground, with the whole rest of the evening to deal with.
My magical Amtrak voyages tended to end the same way. As New Jersey gave way to Pennsylvania, that free feeling that those initial two beers gave me started to fade. I’d have to go back to the bar car to get more, and by the time I got off the train in Washington I was either drunk or hung-over or a queasy combination of both. The journey was done, and so was the magic that had hovered over the beginning of it.
Today, I still like train rides, and that trance-like, free-of-the-world feeling they can give me. But when I get off at my destination, I don’t have to feel like the journey is over anymore.