Hard as a Rock Island

Hard as a Rock Island

Noel Laflin

6-9-15

The greatest train ride of my life took place just a few days before Christmas, 1963.  If my parents were still alive, they might dispute that claim.  But they could never deny the fact that it was one of our most memorable trips – if not exactly ‘great’ in the eyes of an adult.  But hey, I was just a kid – what did I know?

Our family literally walked, suitcases in hand, from our home to the old Santa Fe train depot one mid-winter day, jumped aboard the Super Chief and traveled to Minnesota by rail. We arrived in St. Paul on Christmas Eve, spent and weary.

My parents packed a ton of homemade sandwiches, which served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  We slept in the comfortable upholstered chairs beneath the glass dome of our carriage and watched stars and snowflakes fly by.  The train made a brief stop somewhere around midnight in distant Lamar, Colorado.  There waiting for us were my godparents, their son and his cousin.  We had five minutes, as we stood crowded in the doorway of our car and they on the small platform below, by which to exchange presents, wish one another a Merry Christmas and shake a hand or two.  And then we were off into the frigid night once more – now bound for Kansas City, Missouri.

And that is where the comfortable portion of our journey definitely ended – once we changed trains and boarded the Rock Island line.

My sister and I spent the last leg of the trip, all four hundred miles of it, sitting atop our suitcases in the middle aisle of a 1930’s (or possibly older) Rock Island passenger train car. And we were not alone in this arrangement. Folks lucky enough to grab a seat found themselves on hard wooden benches, including the young couple with the baby sharing space with my parents. 

As it was nearly Christmas and America was migrating home in massive numbers, every available passenger car in the Kansas City rail yard was put into action – including our vintage carriage.
 

We must have looked like refugees to the woman in the mink stole who boarded somewhere in Iowa. By then, my parents had assisted the young couple with the infant by fashioning impromptu clotheslines strung across the car by which to hang damp diapers, freshly laundered by my mother in the ancient cabin lavatory.  The lines was jam-packed with small white cloth.

She too - the lady in mink - sat atop her suitcase for the remainder of the trip.  It’s an image not soon forgotten – this finely dressed woman, with elbow perched upon knee and fist placed beneath chin – despondently taking it all in as she took another drag upon a Chesterfield cigarette. 

My brother, who was sixteen at the time, disappeared in quick fashion, and took up with a group of Marines playing poker in the next car over.  Three years later, he’d be signing up for the Corps himself.

 

As my mother still had sandwiches to spare – and there was clearly no food service available for this last ten hour leg of the journey - she shared with our newest friends, including the woman in the mink stole. It was a true fishes and loaves moment.

The time spent with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins – once we reached our destination - pales in comparison to the journey getting there.  And, I have no recollection whatsoever of the train ride home.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

But then again, I don’t think that Mr. Hemingway ever traveled via the hard, Rock Island way at Christmas time; for if he had, I am certain that my parents would have been the first to point out that those seats would have gotten to him in the end.