Go East, Young Man! (part 5)
looking for my roots in all the wrong places
After thinking that eastern Montana would never end, I reached North Dakota, which looked like the same state, just with a different name. I was truly on "train time" now — napping on the smooth sections of track and waking up on the rough ones. I was beginning to be concerned that when I got back home I would be unable to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time.
At one point we passed what seemed like miles and miles of sunflower plants — each one leaning toward the sun. I wondered if they all pointed east in the morning and swung around to west in the afternoon. Gradually the boring flatness gave way to equally boring farmland, with a block-long town appearing every 10 miles or so. I was really looking forward to getting off this train and walking around in a real city, with multi-story buildings and people.
As it was getting dark, I got up to roll out my sleeping back for yet another nap when I noticed a bright glow on the eastern horizon, which could only mean that we were finally coming up to Minneapolis. After riding for almost two days I was more than ready to pack up my gear and have the scenery be still as I moved along, and not the other way around. What I wasn't prepared for was the routfinding involved when riding trains in this part of the country.
On the west coast the rail lines were laid out in more or less an orderly fashion of east-west and north-south routes, making it pretty easy to figure out which way a train was going, but here they were radiating out all over the place, reminding me of photographs of the webs that spiders wove after being subjected to LSD. I was too tired to negotiate my way over to South Saint Paul at night so I found a quiet spot in some freightyard and settled down for what I hoped would be a prolonged sleep.
After a blissful sleep I woke up at 4:00 am, rolled up, and was on the move at 4:30 with the early light in August. I left my cardboard stash for the next tramp, and started on a walking/bussing tour of the Twin Cities. The phrase "as the crow flies" had absolutely no meaning for me, as the bus routes seemed to go nearly to where I wanted to go, then mysteriously veer off on a tangent, which called for a "transfer", a small slip of paper that seemed to complicate the act of riding a bus enormously.
It was a good thing that I had all day to get to the yard in order to continue down to Iowa, because that's about how long it took before I reached the South Saint Paul Chicago & Northwestern yard and flopped down by the river to wait for my train. Here I was on the banks of the fabled Mississippi River for the first time and I was deeply un-impressed — there was a sewage treatment plant on the far bank and the near bank was riddled with the carcasses of dead carp, which, in the burning August sun, had developed an aggregate odor even rivalling that which wafted over from across the river. On top of all this the water was the color of chocolate milk!
It took a bottle of wine and the effects of the heat and humidity to embolden me to jump in the water, but it did feel good after several days of travelling, even though it felt like a hot bath in someone else's bath water. Getting out, by the time I patted myself dry with my t-shirt I was again soaked in sweat from the extra humidity adjacent to such a large amount of water. Fortunately it was now getting close to sundown, and the unpleasantness of the hot day was slowly replaced by the unpleasantness of hordes of huge mosquitoes. My God! How could anyone want to live here when in California there's no humidity, no mosquitoes, it fucking COOLS OFF AT NIGHT, and the rivers are clear and cold...