So you love trains. And you decide to take one of the last long-distance railway rides left in America before Amtrak's dismantled, a picturesque 28-hour jaunt from Philadelphia to New Orleans on "The Crescent."
Your actual destination is Baton Rouge, to give a reading from your current book and visit recently relocated friends. But Amtrak trains don't go there anymore. The train only goes as far into Louisiana as New Orleans. Your Baton Rouge friends will pick you up at the train station.
Fortunately, New Orleans happens to be one of your truly favorite cities – the French Quarter's architecture, beignets at Cafe du Monde, incredible jazz and blues on Basin Street, red beans and rice and po'boys under the banana trees in Jackson Square, sipping Hurricane cocktails on Bourbon Street, the legend of Marie Laveau at the Voodoo Museum – just as long as it's not Mardi Gras season when the streets are paved with, well, puke.
Long ago, you flew to New Orleans to meet someone just for dinner. It was vaguely romantic, a once-in-a-lifetime gesture of extravagance, but that, as they say, was in another country, and certainly before 9-11 made air travel, at the least, a dicey thrill and, at most, a hellish experience worse than any you ever encountered in El Salvador or Guatemala: not just armed guards and possible strip searches and jewelry-confiscations, but the very real possibility of automated bomb detectors set off by, say, a foil-wrapped box of chocolates in your luggage and suddenly the whole airport's shut down for a few hours.
Despite such alluring inducements to air travel, you are still among a stubbornly dedicated bunch of train-lovers who believe riding on the ground beats suffering aloft any day. When you hear your friend Jim, the Washington, D.C., editor/poet, took a train from coast to coast across the United States, intentionally, you nearly envy him. Like you, he believes faster isn't always better. "I wanted to take the train," he says, "because I realized the right-wing is dead set on abolishing Amtrak and I wanted to have the experience of cross country train travel while it was still possible."
You have not gone cross-country like that, although once you took a 9-hour train-ride to Pittsburgh, enraptured with watching the world unfurl before your eyes as the train hurtles through Pennsylvania, an enduring tapestry of history and geography and civics, grassy baseball diamonds and shining necklaces of water, plumes of factory smoke, the Johnstown flood-bed, that unbelievably majestic Horseshoe Curve.
Last year you traveled 13 hours to West Virginia, past the heartbeat of government, reveling in the sheer simplicity of land, sky, trees, fields, woods, clouds, bridges, buildings, cows, sun.
Train travel is like that: elemental, iconographic.
And so you plan your trip on the Crescent. Certainly the price is right: $213 round trip, comparing favorably to $172 airfare. Forget the sleeping car – for some reason, that's $811. But try convincing most of your friends you really do prefer trains to planes, even prior to 9-11.
"Take the plane! Being strip-searched isn't so bad," your painfully practical friend, who should know better, e-mails you.
But no. You want to savor the leisurely play of scenery, America out the window, perhaps from the deliciously panoramic view of the train's observation car, your feet up, a book in your lap.
Except – and here's where it gets a tad scary for joy-trippers like you – Amtrak now requires Photo ID from all riders in order to purchase tickets. They call it a matter of "guest security." However, you are missing some crucial proof you exist. Your passport has expired. Nor do you have a driver's license, because you live in the center of a huge city and have always managed quite well thank you, by using public transportation. They insist they won't accept your Birth Certificate, because they don't consider it a "valid form of ID."
And you have only seven days to pick up your train ticket. Though it may take several weeks to renew or replace a passport. And if you want a Non-Driving Photo ID, issued by the state, that requires a Social Security Card, "no exceptions," and yours was stolen along with your purse in a brutal (but unbureaucratic) mugging, and there's no telling how long it will take to get a replacement of your Social Security Card, let alone your formerly radiant smile.
Kafkaesque.
Apparently Amtrak is unaware U.S. citizens are not, on a federal level, required to have a national ID card – YET! They may call you their "guests," but they treat you like their prisoners. Our Long National Nightmare is not nearly over.
Nothing anyone says can convince you we are not already living in a Police State, nothing.