(If you haven't already, please scroll down and read parts 1 & 2 before reading this post.)
August 12, 4:30 p.m., in north central Montana
Even though we afforded ourselves the luxury of a private sleeper for this excursion, we still interact with lots of other people, including multiple attendants who enjoy banter with passengers, fellow travelers in the cafe lounge and observation deck, and meal partners in the dining car.
Since the dining car always fills up, couples are asked to sit on the same side of a table to make room for two on the other side. Last evening over dinner, we met two fellow empty nesters who, just like us, are journeying to places they haven’t been and mixing in visits with adult children. We shared breakfast with a Mennonite farmer and agricultural missionary to Senegal and his Senegalese companion. At lunch, we chatted with a brother and sister, one a senior in college and the other a senior in high school, who are on an adventure before little brother leaves home for school. These long train rides are designed to encourage lots of mingling between people who don’t know each other, which is another feature of train travel that recommends it above driving, riding a bus, or flying.
Building relationships, even for the short term – even for the length of one long conversation – is not the domain of extroverts (which I most certainly am not). It is as basic to our humanity as eating and sleeping. We are made for each other. The creation account in Genesis – as prelude to the long divine history of covenant-making – teaches us that none of us is capable of reflecting the image of God all by ourselves, but only as we live in community with others. But this God-given potential, which is also a necessity if we are to mature into our potential, requires practice and intention. Before the digital age, before television and radio, social practices and customs developed our social muscles from an early age. Most people learned things like manners, courtesy, social graces, and even the art of small talk (which, as I learned in my days of rural ministry, is actually a bit of a dialogic dance that, if pursued well, leads to big talk about important things). The best entertainment consisted of storytelling and shared music (which was all “acoustic” and unplugged before anybody knew anything different).
Now, the ideal of “letting each child develop naturally” has become a dereliction of familial and communal duty. Left to ourselves, we do not develop naturally. We need help. We need each other in order to grow into the people God made us to be. It’s a simple thing, but the clearly communicated expectation on this train trip that passengers will interact with each other is a good, if small, way to exercise a vital part of our humanity. It’s unfortunate that, for many, this is the exceptional experience of a vacation. It isn’t really exceptional at all, and it’s not “getaway” behavior. It is a vital to our common humanity and is stripped from our normal everyday lives only to our common peril.
August 13, 9:30 p.m. in Seattle, Washington
Our train got further and further behind as it meandered through the Pacific Northwest. No tracks are dedicated to Amtrak, which must defer to passing freight trains. More experienced train travelers tell me this route in notorious for being late. We had hoped to see Glacier National Park from our window, but by the time we passed it, sunset and dusk had both passed.
This morning, we both woke up as the train was pulling into Spokane, Washington. (We have now been to Idaho for the first time, but since we were asleep the whole time we were there, does it count?) The ride through Washington State was magnificent. We entered progressively narrower gorges cut by the Columbia River, Chumstick Creek, the Wenatchee River, and Nason Creek, winding between peaks that rise to more than 8,000 feet in elevation. (Unfortunately, the full majesty of the mountains was obscured by a thick sand-colored haze of smoke resulting from wildfires to the South and East, but the forest scenery was stunningly beautiful.) Cutting through Wenatchee National Forest, we passed through five tunnels, the last of which – the 7.8-mile-long Cascade Tunnel – is the longest in the United State. After barreling through the middle of a mountain in total darkness, we emerged onto a winding route above Stephens Pass on a rail bed built into the side of the Tonga Range. The slope was plainly visible between the tall pines, revealing the impressiveness of this engineering feat. Occasionally, bridges crossed streams splashing down into the col far below.
Not long after emerging from the Cascades, we reached Everett and turned south, putting us directly on the eastern shore of the Puget Sound. By this time, the sky was blue again, though still hazy. The opposite shoreline was only barely visible, and the Olympic Mountains beyond were completely hidden.
We arrived at King Street Station in Seattle just before 2:00. We took a taxi to Chihuly Gardens, the magnificent glass art exhibition. After finding our housing – a very nice studio apartment just six blocks from Seattle Center, where the Chihuly exhibit is located, we road the monorail into the center of town and walked through Pike Place Market. We enjoyed a marvelous grilled seafood dinner at a cafe overlooking Elliott Bay, then walked down to the Waterfront and visited several enticing shops. After we made the return trip on the monorail, we decided to take an evening stroll up to Kerry Park. The ten-block walk from our quarters was good practice for walking in San Francisco. We must have gained several hundred feet in elevation, but the reward at the end was worth the effort. The view of the city, the Space Needle, and Elliott Bay is breathtaking. We were there until after sundown, when the city lights brought even more magic to the panorama.
August 14, 8:00 p.m., in Seattle
It’s been a full day. This morning, we walked from our apartment in Upper Queen Anne to a local donut shop for breakfast, then all the way down to Pioneer Square, where Seattle was founded as a city. Pioneer Square is both a particular spot and a district where many of the buildings erected after the great fire of 1889 are still standing. We didn’t expect to find the Gold Rush National Park, but it turned out to be well worth the time we spent there. Housed in the old Cadillac Hotel building, which was renovated after being damaged by an earthquake, the museum tells the story of how Seattle grew into a major city after gold was discovered along the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory. With the help of aggressive pubic relations by a local newspaper editor, Seattle became the place to begin the journey north in hopes of becoming rich. For most, this was a fool’s errand, but Seattle was transformed forever.
After leaving the National Park, we returned to the Pike Place Market, where we stayed long enough to have lunch, then took the monorail back to the north side of town to visit the Pop Culture museum and the Space Needle. I had hoped we could see Mt. Ranier from the Needle’s observation deck, but the haze has been stubborn to lift. The elevator operator apologized that we wouldn’t be able to see the Olympic Mountains or Mt. Ranier, but “hey, it’s wildfire season, so what do you expect?”
The limited view didn’t diminish our experience. Just over a week ago, renovation of the Needle was completed. The new attraction is a revolving see-through glass floor two levels below the observation deck. It replaces the original floor of a revolving restaurant. Martha and I had to talk each other into mustering the courage to walk out onto the glass, 500 feet up from street level. But we did. We eventually circled the needle twice, and were quite pleased with ourselves for doing so.
After dinner at a local pub just a few blocks away, we headed back toward the apartment passing through Seattle Center – former grounds for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, for which the Space Needle was built. The area is now a 74-acre park and cultural center that houses multiple museums, an arena, the ballet and opera, and a food court. In the middle is the International Fountain, also built for the World’s Fair. Its 20 spouts shoot water at varying heights, and are programmed to accompany recorded music. As the fountain sprays, children and adults frolic in the water. Martha and I sat on a bench facing the fountain and enjoyed both the programmed show of water and music, and the spontaneous entertainment of young and old children enjoying the splashes.
Seattle is a very clean. Even in Pioneer Square, an older and more depressed section of the city where homeless people gather their belongings around sculptures and park benches, there is very little stench or stray trash. In addition to being clean, Seattle feels relaxed. I noted today an almost complete absence of the anxious hurry – the pressure to “hang” with the pace – that makes time in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston so exhausting. And it was interesting to me that here in what might fairly be described as the digital capital of the world (home to Microsoft and Amazon), the decor at both the donut shop and the pub we patronized was lots of books – not just a few here and there, but floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books. Maybe that’s all printed books are anymore – just decor. Or maybe they provide needed warmth; a comforting reminder of tactile reality, of the corporeal existence that is as essential to our humanity as our spirits.
The haze – whether due to wildfires or just the usual fogginess of the Pacific coastline – robbed tourists like us of iconic postcard views, but if all we did was recreate PR images on our cameras, what would we really have seen? In a day-and-a-half, we’ve experienced a bit of real Seattle – the modest cafe where I ate the BEST salmon and shrimp – sorry, prawns- I have EVER eaten; the yarn store in the Pike Street Market where Martha immersed herself in colors and conversation; the old part of town with its proud late nineteenth-century architecture; the intergenerational water party at an artsy fountain in the shadow of the Space Needle. Oh, and one other gem: a fascinating shop dedicated entirely to selling of all kinds of maps. A WHOLE STORE full of maps – highway maps, relief maps, trail maps, maritime maps, topographical maps, and globes of all sizes and vintages. Like printed books, maps are going by the wayside in the digital era, yet here in the digital city there’s a business that thrives on selling them.
A lot of life is missed in our image-driven culture because we are so concerned to capture or place ourselves in the perfect picture. We are beholden to pre-conceived images of success, happiness, or even (ironically) authenticity, and expend huge amounts of energy trying to fulfill those images for ourselves. This approach to life is at the root of consumerism, whose principal vehicle is any medium that mass-produces images. Our spiritual problem today is not materialism, which is attachment to material things. It is consumerism, which is attachment to the images that owning material products are supposed to help us achieve. Of course, they never do, so we live in a throw-away culture. A material item becomes trash, not when it ceases to be useful, but when its sheen wears off. When it is no longer new, it’s time to replace it. That’s the only way to keep up the image, and that is the heart of consumerism.
Of course, it would have been nice to see Mt. Ranier from the Space Needle, but I hope Martha and I are doing more than consuming the landscape as a product that produces the perfect picture. The mode of transportation helps. The journey from place to place is a moving place. The experience is not a series of snapshots. It is the totality of the journey.
©2018 by J. Mark Lawson
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