Willie Lincoln's Obsession

My grandmother is a very religious woman, and yet she always tells me that, when she gets to heaven, she intends to ask the Lord a few sharp questions and point out a few clear flaws in His plan of creation. When she says this, I know that she is talking mostly about the many marvelous ways the human body manages to malfunction. She has seen more than her share of disease in her eighty years of life, and buried a husband, a son, and her own mother after long and debilitating illnesses.

I sometimes share my grandmother's desire ask questions about God's plan for creation. But the questions I would ask are of rather a different stripe. Standing before the Infinite One, I would probably be more likely to ask about why the human memory functions--or, often, doesn't function--the way it does.

My mother and maternal grandmother both have difficulty remembering to take things with them, and I seem to have inherited this trait. Five days out of six, I get to the elevator in my building only to realize I have forgotten my passport, a book I need for class, or some similarly essential item, and am forced to go back for it. Yet I am able to remember a vast amount of totally useless information: the words to Manic Monday, the last line of Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, the exact crossing street of a now defunct Circuit City on Broadway in Manhattan.

And I recall with crystal clarity something I once heard about Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie. At least, I think his name was Willie--the one who died of typhoid fever while Lincoln was in the White House. Willie apparently had a fascination with railroad timetables. He would pore over them for hours, even at his tender age (I can only surmise from this that, in a time before the Disney Channel, children had rather less to amuse themselves with, and rather longer attention spans).

I think of Willie Lincoln occasionally these days, because I have developed a bit of the same obsession. I have decided that, whatever comes of my graduate school applications, I am going to leave Russia at the end of June and do a little travelling in my own country. Either this will be a prelude to school or a much-needed chance to recharge before I settle on another place in the world to go and teach the Third Conditional. But one way or another, I am determined to see some sights in my own country I always used to tell myself I couldn't afford to go see.

When I come home at night, I often sit down at my computer and start looking at Greyhound and Amtrak routes and schedules, trying to decide what I can afford and piece together where I actually want to go. I am pretty well settled on doing a lap up and down the East Coast. Most likely, I will be returning to America by way of New York, so the first question for me is whether to head north or south first. I want to see Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore at the very least, but I also have hopes of making it on to Washington and, possibly even on to Richmond or Charleston. I'm also giving some strong consideration to heading out to Chicago and, in my wilder moments, I indulge in thoughts of going as far as San Francisco.

All of this leads to questions about how best to get about. I had always known that service on Greyhound and Amtrak was often unbelievably slow, but until I started delving into the timetables in earnest, I had not realized just how slow. New York to Boston is a full four hours; New York to Philadelphia, two. But what really amazes me is how long it would take to get from either Boston to Chicago or from Chicago to San Francisco, without resorting to an airplane. I was delighted to discover that a one-way ticket on Amtrak from Boston to Chicago is only $83--but the trip is nineteen hours and involves a two-hour layover in Albany. Oy.

Chicago to San Francisco is even harder to believe. The trip aboard the California Zephyr (apparently one of Amtrak's more popular routes, since it passes through amazing scenery not easily accessible by car), is a full 53 hours. By my calculations, this is an average speed of a little over 30 miles an hour, if that. Moreover, the trip doesn't even get you all of the way to San Francisco, but only to a town near it called Emeryville. From there you need to transfer to the BART or a local bus to get into San Francisco proper.

All of this makes me hope that the Obama administration will put some serious money into developing high-speed rail. Having had the delightful experience of an overnight train to Moscow, I find it hard to believe there is no comparable service between any two major cities in America. I can easily imagine a Los Angeles-Seattle line, or a at least a New York-Chicago line, catering to weary business travelers. Get on in the Windy City at midnight, catch a few Zs, and wake up in Penn Station.

Greyhound seems, if anything, worse than Amtrak. Aside from the Bos-Wash corridor, there seem to be few trips on Greyhound that don't involve numerous transfers and layovers. Greyhound has apparently cut back on its service to small towns--no more stops in the middle of nowhere to pick up a single passenger--but still the service looks deplorable.