The train whistle sounds the same. Sweet and melancholy. But it no longer draws out any yearning. No yearning to hop on, find out what it's like elsewhere.
"I attended the Roman Catholick Church last sabath," Amanda Trulock wrote to her brother on April 26, 1846. "I always had a great curiosity to attend once. I am satisfied that I shall not attend again. The Church is on the other side of the river, a mile and a half from us."
I always had a great curiosity. I am satisfied.
And after nine days (thank you, old friend) walking around Baltimore, I feel no need to join the Catholic Church, even though that is the church of Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor and they will always have their communion.
The best observers of Arkansas are women from the North. The vision, unperturbed by sentimentality, persists. A friend, a gifted photographer, comes from Connecticut. She likes black and white dogs. She photographs vanishing places.
She would know what to do with the light from the southeast hitting the hind wall of Baltimore's Westminster Presbyterian Church.
I was drawn to the Westminster Burying Ground to see the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. But if you're curious about the man, just read his work.
The beauty of this burying ground creeps up on one in the tight space between the Presbyterian hind wall and the tombs of Robert Smith and Samuel Smith, men who helped make the English colonies and then helped make our Republic.
On a winter morning, the light comes from southeast, hits the Presbyterian Church, and then lands, so light, on the Smith tombs.
Modern idiot that I am, I take a photograph with my phone. It fails to pick up the mellow light on the tomb.
. . .
Our nation's capital to Pittsburgh: Ride this train. Spare no expense. The train hugs the Potomac River, crosses the Potomac River, over and over.
January sky opens up for the sunset west of Antietam. Blood red.
. . .
Back in Chicago, Nature's Metropolis. The canals used to run red with the blood of the steaks we like to eat. At the Amtrak lounge, 14 Mennonites are in line ahead of me. I need to skip the line to get to the washroom. Oh, the indignities of travel. I declare to the gatekeeper: "Emergency."
"Ma'am, no."
"But ..."
"Ma'am, no."
"Ticketed. Sleeper. Passenger."
"Those were the words I needed to hear."
Suddenly I am in the gatekeeper's realm of grace.
"Go ahead, Ma'am."
. . .
Walk 10 blocks south from Chicago's Union Station and a block or two west and find Manny's Cafeteria and Delicatessen. It is like Bryce's in Texarkana, but Jewish. It's been here since 1942.
You get a tray, and slide it along as if you were in Texarkana, except you are in Chicago. And you just say, "I want matzo ball soup" and they give it to you as if it were tomato aspic.
. . .
Walnut Ridge: I have been homesick since I left two weeks ago. If needed, I could hop off the train here and find a friend and catch a ride back to Little Rock.
As we move south, the pine trees strike me as scraggly. So does our haphazard use of space. With all love, I must ask: "What are we doing here?"
Middle Illinois has trailer parks that are better organized than west Little Rock.
It was not always this way. Davidsonville (now known as Historic Davidsonville State Park) was laid out on a township plan, New England style. Why did we abandon symmetry and order?
. . .
Getting off the train at 3:02 a.m. in Little Rock was not scary, nor was walking home. Nor was walking through what I was later told was an open-air drug market on Lexington Avenue in Baltimore.
Some scary things I saw: A pro-Hamas parade, anti-Israel graffiti.
How did we let this happen? How can it be that young Americans are out in the streets questioning Israel's right to exist?
Every young person I know proclaims support for women's rights and the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, as they should. And yet the young are cheering on a terrorist organization backed by an Iranian theocracy that beheads women for not veiling themselves sufficiently. And, unchecked, would bring that theocracy to the rest of the world.
In 2019 in Charlotte, I overheard two young women at a coffee shop. One was trying to persuade the other to identify as Black. ("I'm sorry you don't want to be Black like me.") Fair enough.
Then they started talking about the Holocaust. "Why should I care about six million people who got killed in Europe? Look at all the atrocities that have happened here."
I didn't say anything. Alarmed as I was, I didn't want to be rude.
I should have said something.
I'm told that Christianity's emphasis on individual salvation is mistaken, that salvation is something we should be working out, in this world, for the group. For humanity.
Salvation looks like Israel.