DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  The low hum of the station was broken from time to time by a loud clacking sound, like a flock of noisy crows having an argument. It took some time for me to identify the source as the departure board resetting itself as the trains set off for their destinations. Our own train, the Lake Shore Limited from Boston to Chicago, moved up the board, and it was soon time to collect our luggage and climb aboard. We were not disappointed. The shining silver monster, two stories high, stood there hissing and steaming, waiting to transport us across America. We had booked a sleeping compartment luxuriating in its memorable description as a “Viewliner Roomette.” It was on the lower of the two floors, about four feet across and eight feet long, with a window spanning its length. The “View” in “Viewliner” combined with the “ette” in “Roomette.” The two comfortable seats faced each other across a table, thoughtfully decorated for chess. The seats converted into the lower of two beds, the upper one swinging down from the ceiling when it was needed. Given our weight difference and the possibility of collapse, Richard did not need much persuading to take the upper bunk. Our main bags checked, we stowed our hand luggage, leaving only a little room to move.

  The train pulled away exactly on time and, with a blast of its whistle, wound its way at a leisurely pace past the maze of intersections, power lines, and industrial buildings, through the suburbs, and then out into open country. It was soon time for lunch in the café car on the top level. The train was wider than we are used to in England, and had roomy tables spread with starched linen cloths. The blue leatherette armchairs were at once experienced, tired, and extremely comfortable. The food was particularly good, cooked and served at a great pace by cheerful attendants. There are no separate tables on the Lakeshore Limited or any of the other long-distance Amtrak trains. Everybody shares, so in no time we were chatting away to our fellow passengers. Recognizing our foreign accents, they soon asked the first of many “Where are you guys from?” When asked to hazard a guess, most replied, “Australia.”

  As we moved away from Boston, the landscape changed almost imperceptibly from urban to rural. Fields gave way to woods. Many times we passed swampy ponds with the skeletons of dead trees reaching from the water like the fingers of drowning men. From time to time a lone tree, ablaze with red, showed off its autumn plumage among the restrained greens and yellows of its immediate neighbors. The countryside passed at a leisurely pace, around forty miles an hour by the feel of it. This is much slower than we were used to; our intercity trains regularly exceed a hundred miles per hour, and the Eurostar that connects London and Paris fairly flies along at almost double that speed. But neither the Lakeshore Limited nor any of the other trains we took ever exceeded sixty. I learned later that most of the track in the United States is not owned by Amtrak but by the freight companies whose mile-long trains, going in the opposite direction, we passed at regular intervals. I counted the cars on one of these—fifty, sixty, seventy—then I was distracted and gave up. There must have been more than a hundred. There is no need for them to go fast, and no need for the cargoes, such as coal, to have a comfortable ride, so there is no great incentive to maintain the track to the standard required for high-speed passenger travel.

  Most of the passengers, we discovered, were on the train because they disliked flying. Jim, a middle-aged man from Los Angeles, was returning home after visiting his daughter in Boston. Unlike us he was not breaking his journey and after Chicago was going straight on. Three days and three nights on the train. That sounds like hell, but he was looking forward to it, though he did admit it got a bit tiring on the third day. As lunch drew to a close we arrived at Springfield, Massachusetts. The station was red brick and rusty metal—and deserted. No one got on and no one got off. Shortly after we left Springfield we crossed the first of many wide rivers that intersected our route across America. This one was the Connecticut. Soon we were back in the woods, not dense but dappled by the sun, and on our way to Albany, the capital of New York State. The woods looked as I imagined they had at the time of Ots-Toch, “Atticus Finch”’s Mohawk ancestor. It seemed ideal country for deer and other edible game.

  Our driver was now applying the whistle with increasing vigor. At the approach to every crossing, no matter how small the road, the same melancholy blast rippled through the sleeping woods. Occasional homes interrupted the monotony of the trees, gray-slatted timber in plots with the abandoned swings of children long gone that parents didn’t have the heart to dismantle. On one lawn an old rusting jalopy had collapsed at its final resting place, the grass carefully mowed around it as if this were a grave. These were most definitely homes, with all the paraphernalia of the living, not the pristine empty house-tombs of Cape Cod.

  There were fields, but barely any of them were cultivated, and even those that were showed no signs of enthusiasm. In the distance blue hills appeared, the Catskills, I supposed from the map, but the trackside trees blocked any sustained view. The sun was low now. I closed my eyes, and blood red flashes flooded my retina as trees strobed the sunrays. The woods retreated, and we rolled into Albany across another wide river, this time the Hudson, and to the station where we were to wait for two hours to join up with the train coming from New York City. It was getting dark by the time we left Albany heading west toward Buffalo. The track passes along the shores of Lake Erie, but by then we were asleep. Richard and I are very used to sleeping on trains, as we go up and down to our house on the Isle of Skye, so we both slept well enough. Without knowing it we passed through Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland.

  By dawn the country had changed again. Now we were in Ohio. The unbroken woods had gone and the land was much better cultivated. What trees there were grew in isolated clumps between dark green fields of corn. Gray-and-white cantilevered barns sat surrounded by woody hedges. A slow succession of small townships, their names displayed on water towers, passed by on each side. “Bryan (est 1840)”—I noticed that one, across the state line into Indiana, then Chesterton, where a Sunday market was in full swing.

  As we got closer to Chicago, the land became more undulating, more woody by the mile. The vast cornfields thinned out and the housing changed from isolated farms to small apartment buildings surrounded by cars. Crumbling factories, some still breathing steam, lined the route. Getting closer and closer to the exurbia of Chicago, these gave way to chemical plants and refineries, burning off unwanted gas like giant candles. We crossed a canal, its water an opalescent blue that I have seen before only in the lakes of New Zealand. There it is caused by the diffractive effect of a fine suspension of glacier-ground rock. Here I am not sure the explanation is quite so natural.

  The skyline of the city drew closer, and the trees all but disappeared. We passed street after street of boarded-up houses with For Sale signs nailed to the windows, the first hint of the subprime fiasco that rocked the banking system in America and has reverberated around the world. More small brick terraces of dreary uniformity as we passed the city limits. Some high-rises, and then we slid into Union Station. We had been on the train for twenty-two hours and covered 959 miles. Viewliner Roomette 3, car number 4920, had been our home, and we had not been bored for a second.

  We were staying in Chicago for only two nights and had one very specific reason for being there and that was to talk with Rick Kittles, the scientific brains behind African Ancestry. We had arranged to meet on Monday so, it being Sunday, we wandered from our hotel in the theater district down the broad streets toward the shore of Lake Michigan. For the first time in a week we did not have appointments and could enjoy an afternoon of just being tourists. That evening we ate in the hotel bistro on the ground floor, where the de rigeur television was tuned, alternately, to baseball and American football.

  Our visit coincided with the height of President Obama’s fight to get his health-care reforms through Congress, and we were both taken aback by the political advertising, which we simply don’t have back home. The messages were seductively presented but very direct. On the side of the reforms, we
were told how so many Americans had no health insurance at all and that, even if you did but you lost your job and with it your insurance, you were in big trouble. The messages were interspersed with examples. Middle-aged couples who had their savings decimated when being laid off was followed by a serious illness. Young families whose claims were not honored by the insurance companies. On the opposite side, health-care-company campaigns emphasized the perceived advantages of being able to choose your own physician if you fell ill. We were vaguely aware of what was going on from news bulletins back home, and that our own National Health Service had been compared to a shrine of Stalinist ideology. Most surprising to my ears was the rhetorical question, “Do you want the government to run your health care?” inviting the answer, “No, certainly not.” Back home that is one of the things we do expect the government to do as part of running the country. Even politicians from the Right know that if they were even suspected of wanting to dismantle the National Health System, where all treatment is free for those who need it, they would stand no chance of being elected.

  Our hotel was art deco and very chic, but it also had one feature neither Richard nor I had ever seen before, which was revealed when a sudden movement on the wall caught my eye. The small mailbox in the hotel lobby had a glass-fronted chute running into it from the top and another coming out of the base. One floor down, on the ground floor, there was a large mailbox in the same position with the same chute coming from the floor above. What I had seen must have been a letter dropping down from an upper floor. This was too good to miss, and for a few minutes we were back as father and young son. Richard grabbed an envelope from the front desk and headed up to the top floor in the elevator. I went downstairs to the receiving box on the ground floor and waited. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the envelope flashed down the chute and into the box. Of course, schoolboys both once more, we did it again, but this time I was the one on the top floor and Richard was the ground-floor witness.

  Brought up on the folklore of speakeasy Chicago still perpetuated in film, we kept our eyes open for evidence of the city’s gangster past. We may not have found any, but we did eat out that evening in a restaurant that could, should—even must—have witnessed at least one gangland shooting. How else would we know about Chicago other than through the movies? Needless to say, the restaurant was Italian, and we were led into the dark interior where a lady—or could she have been a “moll”?—was riffing some jazz piano. The closely packed tables were crowded with diners, and all around the wall hung signed black-and-white photographs of film stars and theater actors. Many were strangers to us, but there was John Belushi, and over there Barry Humphries as his outrageous alter ego, Dame Edna Everage. As my eyes got used to the dark I scanned the other tables expecting to see, at the very least, George Raft as “Spats” Colombo from Some Like It Hot—that must be him in the far corner, his back to us, leaning over the table and talking to his fellow diners in a low voice. The piano gave way to a cabaret act. We went on eating. Spats and his party left quietly enough. We lingered over the cherry crisp and ice cream. The cabaret ceded to another pianist. There were no shootings, no police raids that night—but we left with the feeling that there just might have been.

  Union Station, Chicago, is the hub of the American rail network. From there lines radiate east to Boston and New York and south to New Orleans. But the real excitement of the place stems from the lines heading west, of which there are three. The northern route, taken by the Empire Builder, pushes up through Wisconsin and Minnesota toward the Canadian border, then straight west through North Dakota and Montana, reaching the Pacific at Seattle. The Southwest Chief takes the southerly route through Missouri to Kansas City, Colorado, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. From there it crosses the desert to Flagstaff, Arizona, and eventually meets the ocean at Los Angeles. We had decided on the third, central route taken by the California Zephyr. Originally I had wanted to visit the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, site of the Wounded Knee massacre and more recently of the bloody standoff occupation by AIMs in the 1970s. Not “ancestry informative markers” on this occasion, but the American Indian Movement once led by the charismatic Russell Means. Having read his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, I definitely wanted to meet this man, and I set about trying to reach him. Though Pine Ridge is equidistant from the routes of both the Empire Builder and the Zephyr, the timetable forced a choice between renting a car in Fargo, North Dakota, at three in the morning or from Denver, Colorado, at seven. Having seen the eponymous Coen brothers film, and with winter on the way, we chose the Zephyr.

  After our meeting with Rick Kittles (which I relate elsewhere), our luggage was growing as books, pamphlets, and reprints of scientific papers, all indispensable research material, were crammed into our three suitcases. Unable to find a Skycap, or a working elevator, at Union Station, we commandeered a reluctant trolley with an unhelpful determination to veer to the right as far as it could. We eventually arrived at the top of a flight of steps leading to the Amtrak reception area on the floor below. There I had a vivid moment of déjà vu. Even though this was my first visit to Union Station, the steps looked oddly familiar, with highly polished brass art deco handrails on either side. But where could I have seen them before? I had a clear vision of a child in a stroller hurtling downward, but try as I might, I could not place the scene or the movie. I thought it might have been Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but that was filmed in New York, I discovered later. Only recently, while watching the movie on TV, did I see the stairs again. There they were in the final shoot-out between Andy Garcia, as one of Eliot Ness’s agents, and Al Capone’s deadeye assassin, played by Billy Drago, in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Eureka.

  The Zephyr waited on track 7, looking altogether taller, longer, and shinier than the Lakeshore Limited that had carried us from Boston to Chicago. We settled into our Viewliner Roomette, with much the same layout as before, stowed our hand luggage, and got out the chess set to begin the second leg of the onboard tournament we had started at Albany. It was three games apiece as we pulled out of Union Station at two o’clock, dead on time, on our way to Denver, 1,038 miles down the track. The train rumbled through the by-now-familiar urban landscape of exhausted factories wheezing their last, demolition sites, empty lots, and occasional newly built low-rise apartment houses that surround the railway tracks in and out of most large cities, not just in America but everywhere. After half an hour the surroundings got a lot more elegant as we passed through Naperville—as I was told by a fellow passenger in the lunch car, one of the wealthiest cities in Illinois. Half an hour later we were going through Aurora, Illinois. This name was familiar but again I didn’t know why until Richard got it. It was the setting for Wayne’s World, the hilarious pastiche of Midwestern America, written by and starring Mike Myers, that Richard and I had watched back home a few months earlier.

  Our lunch companions changed, and we found ourselves sharing a table with Ed, a man in his seventies wearing a U.S. Army hat embroidered with “Paratrooper Airborne Division.” He told us he was a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and that he was retracing his first-ever rail trip when, aged sixteen, he had traveled from his home in North Carolina to Seattle to enlist as a paratrooper. Ed had eventually become a full colonel and gained a Ph.D. in military history, but he looked back on his career not with pride but with a deep sadness. He had witnessed slaughter on a grand scale, where life meant nothing. Hundreds of thousands had died in the wars he had fought, wars he felt the American army had never been allowed to win. It was all a long time ago—and no time at all. Like many older Americans we met on our travels, Ed told us he felt the country had lost all sense of pride in itself. We left him with still-sad eyes.

  Outside a new greenish gold color appeared in the fields alongside the corn. This, I was told, was soya, a crop that, unlike corn, is not grown back home. The fields got bigger still, and the woods got smaller, and then we reached the river—the widest so fa
r. We were crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, Iowa. Even with well over a thousand miles to go until it spills into the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans, the Mississippi was already three hundred yards across, already muddy and sluggish. At that rate it must take weeks for the water to get to the Gulf. As we crossed the river we were also leaving Illinois for Iowa. Back out in the country we passed a pile of red-painted corn augers; the corn fields grew bigger and the farms more scattered. These were the fields of dreams, but there was no sign of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson among the waving stands of corn.

  Suddenly the track got much worse, and the Zephyr slowed to about forty miles per hour, swaying from side to side. This was “lateral movement” according to the announcement over the public address system. Back in the roomette, our drinks spilled and the chesspieces fell to the floor. If it was going to be like this for the rest of the journey, then I had made a serious mistake in choosing the train to cross America. We recovered the pieces and resumed our game, which eventually ended in a stalemate.

  Richard and I climbed back upstairs to the dining car, and this time we were sharing a table with a powerfully built man whom we soon knew as Jesus. He was going to Denver to collect a car for someone back in Wisconsin. Originally from Ciudad Juárez, just over the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, Jesus had three children and at forty one was already a grandfather. He and his family had come to live in Wisconsin to escape the violence of his hometown and to give his children a more secure start in life. We never found out if anything more sinister lay behind his decision to leave the drug-fueled hell of what has been described as the most violent city in the world. And, having recently watched No Country for Old Men, another Coen brothers movie, we certainly didn’t ask. We didn’t want our door locks blown out by a cattle bolt.