Touching column from the Travel section of the NY Times

September 4, 2005
Father and Son, 5, Share a Journey and a Memory
By WENDELL JAMIESON
WHENEVER I told someone I was taking my 5-year-old son, Dean, on the overnight train to Chicago, I heard the same words in response: "He'll remember it for the rest of his life."

Then I'd hear stories. Everyone, it seemed, had taken an overnight train as a child and remembered very specific details, like lights flying by the window at night, or eating in the dining car with all the plates bouncing around, or stepping out onto a station platform in the South and feeling that first press of humidity just before dawn. (The colleague who told me that last one said he could still feel the warmth of that morning if he closed his eyes.)

I wanted to give Dean that kind of a memory of travel. By the time he's my age, there may well be no overnight train on which to take his own son. But he'll be able to share the tiny details that his brain chose to separate out from the rest, to polish and to keep new.

Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited leaves Penn Station in New York at 3:50 p.m. and travels north along the Hudson before swinging west through Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, south along Lake Erie and then through northern Ohio and Indiana. Its scheduled arrival time in Chicago is 9:30 a.m. A sleeper for an adult and child, with all meals in the dining car, was roughly $800 for the round trip. Dean quizzed me for weeks beforehand, asking whether our compartment would be bigger or smaller than the elevator in our building and whether there would be a television in it. I told him that there wouldn't, and resisted the urge to buy a portable DVD player. We'd be going in late June, so it would be light out until 9 p.m., when he'd go to bed, I reasoned - plenty to see out the window. We packed some games and a few toy dinosaurs.

At Penn Station, we went downstairs to the platform along with the crowd; the train was fully booked. While most went one way, heading to coach land, we joined a far smaller tributary bound for the first two cars, the sleepers.

Our compartment was actually smaller than our elevator: two seats facing each other next to the window, a little legroom. A heavy metal chessboard folded over our laps. It was hardly luxurious, but it was very clean and there was a certain functional appeal to its design. Dean got excited when he saw that there was a television, but the porter said it had long ago stopped working, if it ever had. He wasn't sure.

We did have a small toilet beneath a lid that doubled as a countertop, and a folding sink. Having the toilet there seemed a little weird to me: it was perfect for traveling with a 5-year-old, but I couldn't imagine any other situation where its intimate presence would be anything less than hugely awkward, even when traveling with a spouse.

Soon the Lake Shore Limited was rocketing along, and the window, as planned, provided plenty of stimulation: graffiti in Manhattan, a wedding party posing for pictures by the Hudson, West Point, bridges. After Albany, where the train changed locomotives, we went to the dining car and ate with a woman taking her granddaughter for a weekend in Syracuse. "Isn't that fun, sleeping on a train with your dad," she said to Dean. "You'll remember it for the rest of your life."

Dean was excited to find the compartment transformed for sleeping and happily climbed up into the upper bunk. He fell asleep in minutes, but I didn't: every vibration shot up from the rails, and when the train came abruptly to a stop outside Utica, I felt my body's momentum continue forward.

It became evident the next morning that Amtrak's long-distance schedules are approximate. We spent a good deal of time shunted onto sidings watching freight trains roar by. No one on the crew seemed the least fazed when the train was still outside Chicago at noon, two and a half hours late.

"Daddy, when are we going to get off this train?" Dean sobbed, pounding his fists on his seat as we inched by hellish-looking oil refineries outside Gary, Ind., before shuddering to a stop for the 100th time. He had been patient until the moment the journey's scheduled 18 hours and 40 minutes passed. At least we were on a train and not a plane: we could move from car to car, chase each other up the corridors.

Chicago, when we got there, was fun for both of us. We looked at dinosaurs in the Field Museum, toured a U-boat and a coal mine at the Museum of Science and Industry, spent the night at a downtown hotel where Dean discovered room service.

Then it was back on the train. I was a little worried that Dean might resist such a quick return to the rails, but we settled right back in. Our little compartment had become somehow familiar, even though it was a different one, in a different car. The television still didn't work.

Coming and going, our experience with crew members was mixed. Some were genuine and enthusiastic, especially the sleeping-car porters and the dining-car staff, who greeted Dean by name whenever he bounded into their domains. But others seemed perpetually annoyed that anyone was on their train.

The first day, when we came to the cafe car on a get-acquainted tour of the train, the man behind the counter snapped, "We're closed" and then turned away.

"It's O.K., we don't want anything," I told him. "We're just taking a look around."

"I said we're closed - you can't come in here," he said, his back to us.

I wanted to say, "Hey, I paid $800 for this damn trip and you are going to be polite!" but I didn't want one of Dean's train memories to be that of his father getting into a fist fight.

This is a danger of taking a trip mainly for the purpose of remembering it: you fear the smallest slight will last forever; you feel a subtle tinge of panic every time things threaten to go wrong, as they inevitably do. But the slights fade: we'd been back for two weeks, and I'd completely forgotten about the cafe car confrontation when I found it buried in my notebook.

I suppose this is a cliché of travel: you forget the bad times, you remember the highlights. Does that adult I know who remembers the bouncing plates also remember whether the food on them was any good? Or that colleague who can still feel the heat: does he enjoy humid days now? I'm writing this in the middle of one, miserably, and I can't imagine he does.

On our last night on the train, we were seated with a couple from Swindon, England, who had flown to New York and then taken the train to Milwaukee for one night just to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Having once traveled from New York to Philadelphia to see Elvis Costello, I knew a little bit about serious fandom, although not that serious, and we hit it off. Dean did his best to follow along, but finally he got everyone's attention when he announced, "I'm so tired my legs hurt."

We went back to our compartment, palms against the sides of the corridor to keep our balance, and Dean changed into pajamas and scampered gamely into his bunk. I stood in my socks on my bunk so I could be up there with him, and we chatted about the events of the day while I scratched his back. Outside, the lights flew by. Then he was asleep.

I lay down on my bunk with my book, but I thought of Dean - the way he had shushed the table, the somber tone he had affected to share the news of his aching legs.

I'd remember it for the rest of my life.

WENDELL JAMIESON is an editor on the metropolitan staff of The New York Times.