11.19.16 Me and my shadow #8980bookoftravelers

11.18.16 Blue sky belies the bitter cold of this morning in the heartland. I didn’t bring a coat on my trip, so I shiver on the platform in my sweatshirt, cursing myself for planning poorly. This evening, I’ll arrive in Chicago and then transfer to the City of New Orleans train. I feel guilty for being at peace on this journey, knowing that the country is in such turmoil. But I tell myself that this is only a temporary respite. And of course, it is.

11.17.16 Meals in the dining car work like so: if you’re in a sleeper car, an attendant comes around mid-morning and takes reservations in half-hour increments for parties of one to four people, and you’re handed a little slip of paper with the time & number of your party. At the appointed hour, an announcement is made over the intercom inviting those holding reservations to appear at the threshold of the dining car. If you’re a party smaller than four, you will be seated at the next open table, leading to unexpected social adjacencies. Those adjacencies seem antithetical to our culturally and ideologically silo’d digital lives; I begin to wonder, perhaps quixotically, if the train might be a salve for our national wound, bringing us into unmediated conversations where we can once again see each other’s humanity. #8980bookoftravelers

11.16.16 This is Union Station, Los Angeles. I’m halfway through my trip, about to board the Southwest Chief bound for Chicago before zigzagging down to New Orleans on my way home to Brooklyn. Tonight’s train is delayed by several hours, so I entertain myself by making a list of the activities that each passenger is engaged in:

• 1 woman peeling an orange
• 1 man reading a magazine
• 1 man doing crossword puzzles in a paperback book
• 1 child doing math homework, presumably geometry, with a metal ruler.
• 1 woman scrutinizing an Amtrak ad for railroad-themed cocktails available aboard the Coast Starlight
• 1 man wandering the waiting area with a rolled up newspaper in his hand. He periodically beats it into his other hand as though it were a billy club.
• 5 people watching an interior decorating show on a flat screen tv built into the wall.
• 34 people looking at smartphones.

11.15.16 This is the Parlor Car of the Coast Starlight. It’s an attempt, I think, to revive or at least make reference to the glory days of train travel, when there was a sense of luxury baked into the railroad. There’s something poignant about an institution—on the brink of financial collapse and cultural irrelevance—that nevertheless makes gestures like the ones you see aboard the Coast Starlight, where you’ll find wine tastings and movie screenings. I abstain from the amenities, choosing instead to watch the rolling hills of California along the corridor where I was born and later lived as a teenager. #8980bookoftravelers

11.13.16 “If it wasn’t for the hippies, we would still be in Vietnam”, says Kent, whose military haircut and downturned mouth belie the softness of his politics. We’re in the homestretch of the Empire Builder’s westward route, now out over the Columbia River. We had a signal problem in Spokane which set us back two hours, but the unanticipated benefit of this delay is a magnificently eerie sunrise, veiled by thick grey clouds over the river. In a few hours, we’ll hit Portland and I’ll hop off the train for about twelve hours. #8980bookoftravelers

11.12.16 Somewhere in North Dakota. A smoke break early in the morning where I got off the train to stretch my legs: cold, desolate, a single car parked at the station. I think it was at this stop that a British woman accosted me to complain about having been served two wet bagels in the cafe car. “A bagel ought not be soggy”, she opined. “It ought to be toasted.” I mean, yeah. #8980bookoftravelers

11.11.16 On Thursday, I transferred to the Empire Builder, which climbs northwest from Chicago up through Wisconsin and Minnesota, then heads west, nearly hugging the Canadian border. My first night on that train, I woke up disoriented and unable, in the absence of a phone, to figure out exactly where we were. But there was a beautiful terror in surrendering to the not knowing. I opened the curtains of my sleeper car and saw the wind farm pictured in this photograph. I sat and stared at it for a good long while, then fell back to sleep. #8980bookoftravelers

11.10.16: The first leg of my trip was on the Lakeshore Limited from New York to Chicago. I met a wonderful couple from Montpellier, VT who told me about their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela last year, and about their first date to hear The Messiah at Carnegie Hall forty years earlier. I also met a pediatrician who was afraid of flying. She told me I was the second musician she’d met on a train; the first was Neil Young, with whom she’d had breakfast on the California Zephyr twenty years earlier. She said he was a doll. I woke up somewhere in Ohio and took this photo with the camera I’d bought at Best Buy on the day of my departure, having decided to leave my phone at home. #8980bookoftravelers

One year ago today, I left New York to explore America via rail in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. I met dozens of extraordinary people along the way, and had what I can only describe as a truly transformative experience. Three weeks from tonight, I’m gonna sing songs I wrote about that trip at BAM. I would be very happy to see you there or at future shows in LA, Ann Arbor, and Paris.