This Land is Their Land

Today's post was sent to us by Great Plotnik Travel Correspondent Hanley R. Plotnik.

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This Land Is Their Land

"But did you accept Him as your personal savior?" says the young man with yellowing  teeth and a scruffy goatee.

"I don't like that kind of question," says the middle-aged woman wearing a Disney t-shirt and a crucifix the size of Fantasyland around her neck. She and her friend were taking up four seats at a table in the crowded Observation Car and I asked if they could please move over and make room.

Looking at me, she says "This has been the worst year of my life, what with the ar-tha-ritis and the di-a-bettis and... "

"But have you accepted Him as your personal savior..." says the young man, touching his hand like a mosquito on her fleshy arm.

"Let's go," I say to Barb.

She nods and we keep walking. The dining car is still three more cars in front of us. It has been a ten minute slog forward, from our "roomette" three cars back, in the rear of the train, through crowds of elderly tourists, many with limps, falling from side to side and slip-sliding towards us us like carnival bumper cars as they attempt to stay upright as the train wobbles along the track.

The Empire Builder is filled to capacity with codgers. Young people don't take the train. They're in a hurry. Older people have the time and you cannot beat them to the dining car. They must have put their names on the list at 6am.

I'll tell you who rides The Empire Builder.  Wobbly geezers. People who can't squeeze into airplane seats. Women on Christian Travel Tours. Families with lots of kids who live along the line in places like Minot, North Dakota or Havre, Montana, or on the Blackfeet reservation. People who are poorer than the plane but richer than the bus.

In St. Paul, high on a hill, we toured the palacial 1891 home of James J. Hill, President of The Great Northern Railroad. The Great Northern built all the trains and laid all the track that became The Empire Builder. James J. Hill was a real Emperor.

But that was The Great Northern, not Amtrak. As a romantic memory, Amtrak stimulates the American heart. But as transportation, Amtrak is a joke, especially on the long hauls. Trains are never on time. You fall behind.

But behind what? On an airplane you are meat. Uncomfortable, unhappy meat. The train takes forever but you walk around. You meet people. Earlier, we sat in the Observation Car with a dairy farmer from NE Iowa and his nineteen year old son and talked about cows, and silage, and feed, and drought, and how you need two acres to feed one cow and they were milkin' eleven hundred head.

I asked the Dad whether he thought his life was easier or harder than his grandparents' who lived on the same property.

"Theirs was harder physically but they lived better lives," he said. "They worked 'til they dropped but they had neighbors, friends. We have machinery but worry all the time about how to pay for it. We never sleep."

We share our breakfast table with two large ladies with Kentucky, with those same pendulous crosses around their necks. They have grits, we have potatoes. They are from northern Kentucky. Barb's mom was from southern Kentucky.  The women say "that's all right, Honey," just like Auntie Melba.

There are a lot of Mennonites on the train, thin Christians. I get the homespun trousers, the suspenders, the white caps covering the girls' hair, the beards on the men. I don't get the silly page boy haircuts. Why does every boy have to have the same haircut?

Religion. There's a volunteer park ranger on the train. He lives on the Blackfeet reservation so he must be native American. As we roll through Montana he talks about all the dinosaur finds in this area.

A child asks: "How old are the dinosaur bones?"

"Well, do you believe in evolution or creationism?" he says. "If you believe in creationism those bones are no more than around 4,000 years old."

"Yeah, but what if you don't?" somebody else says. The ranger hems and haws and won't answer. He changes the subject.

Later on, in Glacier National Park, another ranger tells us native Americans always avoid controversy. Religion is complicated for them.

In James J. Hill's day, religion was simple: God gave us this prairie and I'm going to build on it. Amen."

Hill's Great Northern Railroad built all the wonderful old chalets in Glacier National Park, a hundred years ago, when the train was luxurious and a place for the wealthy to play.

Now it moves like a cow, swishing its iron tail. It stops. It waits. It chews its cud. It's August and very hot on the prairie. This does something to the iron in the tracks. Trains can derail. We're falling further behind.

Again, behind what?

As we move further west, hearing the train whistle all around us, and the tireless thrum of iron wheel on iron track, the view from our roomette window becomes drier, hillier. Cows change over to sheep. You see a few trees. But it's still wheat, wheat, wheat. And now there's oil. Rail spurs filled with tanker cars, and petro villages with new prefab housing for imported oil workers. Company towns. Locals are fighting it but they can't deny history. We will drill for it and frack it and crack it and put it all onto trains and trucks or into pipelines to send down to the refineries in the gulf. Montana and North Dakota couldn't stop it, even if they wanted to. Jobs. This is what people see, not world politics, not the death of the prairie, not a pipeline owned by Canadians and transnationals, crossing our land, a pipeline that could be sold to anyone in the future. We get a few jobs and they get a thousand miles of our country.

Shouldn't this be obvious? Shouldn't somebody say something?

"Keep government out of it," says the dairy farmer.

"Creationism," says the volunteer ranger.

"Accept Jesus," says the kid with the yellow teeth.

"Oil," say the people.

 The scenery falls away, hour after hour. Up here, this land is their land, not mine.