A Friday in July . . . Boston is a tangle of cranes and earthmovers, half-built flyovers and half-dug trenches and a huge steel snake slithering along the narrowest of paths through the chaos—Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, weaving its way through the city’s $15 billion highway construction project known as the Big Dig and heading westward toward Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago. We’ve said our last goodbyes to the family, hauled our backpacks into our two-person sleeping compartment, and finally, after weeks of ever-more frantic preparation, begun to feel the rhythm of the world rumbling slowly by beneath us, the rhythm of our lives for the next six months. The train picks up headway as it groans past the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox and the spiritual center of New England, the dense triple-decker blocks of the inner suburbs and the verdant lawns and oak groves of the outer suburbs. James and I sit across from each other, grinning slightly, both a little intoxicated by a cocktail of excitement, relief, and anxiety. Family, friends, work, school, daily antagonisms, and well-worn rituals are all receding physically if not yet mentally. Over the horizon ahead loom Alaska, the Pacific, Japan, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal, and 25,000 miles or so of who knows what else. But it’s no big deal, we tell ourselves. We’re heading home, just taking the long way. Just past dawn, west of Cleveland, we’re running two and a half hours late. Our sleeping car attendant, Fred, tells us that we lost time overnight to track repairs, slow-loading mail shipments, and freight trains. Once you start to lose a little time on this run, he says, you quickly end up losing a lot, because the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their trains have priority. If an Amtrak train slips off schedule, it starts the kind of chain reaction of delays that have earned this train the nickname the Late Shore Limited. I ask Fred if we’re going to make our connection in Chicago. “Not if we keep stopping like this,” he says.
