Riding the rails showed my sons the nation’s character

By Christopher F. Rufo | Commentary, The Free Press

On a train from Seattle to Los Angeles, they learned what the road cannot teach: intimacy with strangers, the weight of history, and the beauty of time slowed down.

“Pop! Pop! Pop!”

A sunburned man named Jeff jabbed a finger in the air, imitating the gunshots of the Oakland gangster who had once peppered the door of his tow truck with bullets. Years ago, Jeff had worked as a contractor for the Oakland Police Department, where he towed cars from crime scenes in the most dangerous parts of town. I watched my two oldest sons, a teenager and a kindergartner, hang on his every word as the waitress served us lunch.

Characters like Jeff were not uncommon on the Coast Starlight, the train my sons and I took earlier this summer, which runs down the long stretch of territory from downtown Seattle to the Art Deco terminus in Los Angeles. The route passes through all three West Coast capitals and, over the course of 35 hours, one can watch the landscape shift from city to forest to farmland to beach.

At our home station in Seattle, we piled our bags into one of the train’s sleeper cabins—miniature hotel rooms with fold-down tables and metal bunk beds—and felt the Coast Starlight pick up speed. We got our bearings in the café car, made a reservation for dinner, and found three seats in the observation car, which is encased in glass. The passengers chatted freely and the scenes passed through the window: the small towns and stations; the Oregon forest at dusk; the strawberry farms in Watsonville; the coastline after Pismo.

For a number of years, I have taken my kids on trains, ostensibly as a method of travel, but more deeply, as a way of learning a bit about the world. Most families travel by car, where they are all alone, or by air, where they fight through terminals and bristle at any intrusion. But the train is a social affair: Shared spaces and long stretches of boredom breed intimacy, and, as I have learned over the years, all of the passengers are ready to spill their guts.

The rail lines are the archetypal American way of travel. They conquered the continent, and everyone who rides the train carries with them a small residue of that destiny. They are going somewhere, chasing something. Some of these dreams, as we would see on the Coast Starlight, are desperate: scoring methamphetamines, escaping one’s past. Others, firmly middle-class: selling an RV, going to Disneyland, closing a business deal.

And that is precisely what I wanted to show my boys: The entire American spectacle can be observed from stop to stop. The secrets of the heart can be uncovered with a single question: “Where are you going?”

The first night, we sat down for dinner with a wealthy retiree who was dressed in a green blazer and who, after ordering the salmon and a glass of wine, told us about his life. He was drafted into the Navy in the final years of the Vietnam War, and, after he got out of the service, climbed his way through the investment banks of New York City.

The man told my boys about mining Haiphong Harbor and firing eight-inch guns across the North Vietnamese border, which, everyone understood, would do nothing to change the outcome of the war. He also recalled the night he made partner at Morgan Stanley, when, after the promotion ceremony, the boss took the 25 new partners into a room and revealed the unvarnished truth. “You’ve given up nights, weekends, birthdays, kids, and marriages to be one of us,” the boss said. “But I will tell you the truth: The average tenure for a new partner is 4.5 years.”

He didn’t heed the warning. As a partner, he worked 100-hour weeks. And sure enough, he neglected his family. He got divorced. He let go of his house in Connecticut. At one point, he said he had “turned into an ATM machine.” He described his former colleagues, who later betrayed him, with bitterness.

Since then he had built another life, with a woman in Tucson, Arizona—a former beauty queen, now his wife—who once had a premonition about a flight disaster; hence, his presence on the train.

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