In this time of lockdowns, face masks, travel bans and future dreaming, I just started re-reading Paul Theroux’s, The Old Patagonia Express.

Full disclosure: to escape Covid-19, I’m writing this from a picnic table in a campground in a small village in the French Pyrenees.

Not telling you where I am. Sorry not sorry.

In this travel book, published at the end of the 70s, Theroux manages to get from Boston, USA to the bottom of the Americas almost entirely by train.

Good luck doing that in the 21st century.

The whole seat61.com summary of train travel from Mexico south fits into one measly web page.

Sad face.

The executive summary for Mexico at seat61:

“Mexico used to have a good train service linking all major cities, using restaurant cars, sleeping-cars and observation cars, many inherited from the USA.  Sadly, the Mexican government pulled the plug on almost all long-distance passenger train service some years ago.”

Oh no, Mexico!

But back to Theroux. Even before he gets going on his train odyssey, he has this to say about air travel:

“An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston—but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport.”

Tell us what you really think, Paul.

His book—as you may have guessed by now—is about the trip itself, not the destination:

“The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.”

Unfortunately, for most people—even those who take trains today—the trip is seen as an inconvenience endured to get from A to B, and these people couldn’t care less that their trains have windows to look out of. Also, countries with high-speed trains end up with high-speed snob citizens that turn up their noses at the very idea of taking a slower train, anywhere, anytime, anyhoo.

I digress.

The good news when it comes to Theroux’s book is that the trains he took in the US still exist today, and—for better or worse depending on your DNA—are just as slow as they were in the 70s.

His first big leg is on the Lake Shore Limited, an overnighter from NY/Boston to Chicago that, in his case, ploughs straight in to an epic snowstorm apocalypse.

Amtrak made this train look pretty damn romantic back in the day.

That’s the “pre-footsies” glass of wine.

Here’s some advertising from even earlier, back when the New York to Chicago trip was called the Twentieth Century Limited.

18 hours! Like a shot out of a gun indeed…

Now, let’s parse a random(ish) paragraph from this leg in the book to give you an idea of what reading Theroux can be like:

“At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city’s name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse’s relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Delmore Schwartz, the classroom (…) in which I heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later—though not as a consequence of this—met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.”

Slightly edgier than, say, Outside the train window, the snow got deeper and deeper, ain’t it?

[To be continued… (it’s wine o’clock in the Pyrenees at my slightly less-glamourous yet also perfect picnic table.)]