Night Booms

It's 3:30 AM. The trains running through Newton are very loud tonight; not with their whistles, mind you, but with their coupling/uncoupling of cars. When they do this (frequently, of course, as Newton for some reason is still a major train hub for BNSF railways), it creates a rolling, thunder-like booming noise that echoes across the plains and is very audible within my home about two miles from the train station.

The whistles are omnipresent and annoying as well, of course, but I must remember that living here is much better than when I lived in the former girlfriend's old parents' place, which was not only twenty feet from the train tracks but about 50 yards from an intersection with the road. If you don't live in an area with trains, this probably doesn't sound like a big deal to you until you realize that, by law, a train must blow its whistle every time it crosses through an intersection with a road, day or night, regardless of time or weather.

One doesn't realize how loud a train is, or the vibrations one creates, when one passes by a house every hour or so. When I was living there (for only a short month or two, before we moved to Kansas for school) I had it timed to almost an exact set amount of minutes -- usually 47 to 55 -- between trains. 24 hours a day. It was maddening. As much as I loved that little town, I would never, ever choose to live there (or anywhere else that close to train tracks) again.

Newton, where I live, has the only Amtrak passenger station that I know of between here and Kansas City. There's not one in Wichita, and if there's one in the larger cities to the north like Topeka, Lawrence, or Manhattan, I don't know about it. It's amusing that they'd keep it here, in a town of less than 20,000 people, in the middle of nowhere. Newton is the smallest actual city I've ever lived in, and most people wouldn't even call it a city. Yes, there's a downtown area with a main street, post office, and lots of shops, but it really is a small town with a small-town mentality about it. I'm surprised the newspaper still publishes six days a week (it does) because nothing of importance really happens here. Most of the stories published in it when I worked there were reprints of stories from the Associated Press. Oh, they were new stories, to be sure, but so little happens here that the paper was filled with them on a daily basis.

The point of my writing about the town and about the trains here is because for a lot of us in the department/program who either don't have a really reliable car and/or don't want to drive their car cross-country for incredibly long distances, the train station is their easiest and/or cheapest option for travel. The very notion of traveling by train in 2012 is rather quaint and old-fashioned to me, personally. I would much rather drive or fly. I mean, as I said, it is 2012. If my Monte Carlo were reliable enough to do so (it's really, really not), I'd drive back and forth to visit my parents three or four times a year, as the money factor (read: gasoline) would be about the same cost. However, many of us in the department apparently aren't huge fans of driving long distances, so they take trains to different destinations. At least a handful of them do, anyway.

The AWP conference is a month from today, or at least that's when it starts. For anyone in the writing world, this is (as they say) a big deal. The AWP, or Association of Writers & Writing Programs, is probably the biggest literary organization in the country not just for established authors, but as they say in the name, writing programs. As in, what all of us are a part of at Flat State University. I've never been to it, but it is my goal to attend it next year as a way to put something interesting on my CV and celebrate what may very well be the last year of my college education ever, depending on whether or not I decide to go on to a PhD program. This year, it's being held in Chicago, which is close enough to entice a large number of my fellow graduate students to go (not that they wouldn't have gone anyhow). The route most of them have chosen to get there is by train.

See where this post is headed now? Good.

I have volunteered (or, more appropriately, I have been volunteered) to be the shuttle for what may amount to seven or eight friends in the department to get to the train station here in Newton. How this will work isn't exactly clear as of yet, especially since every single Amtrak train makes its stop in Newton at three in the morning. I'm not kidding when I say that, either -- you want to travel by train? You've gotta take the red eye. Always. As all of us teach or attend classes (at least we will on the day/night they leave, the 28th), this makes the situation interesting. The 28th is a Tuesday, which not only starts my week but is the longest day of it. I now have the responsibility of figuring out how a group of my friends can get up to Newton and on a train to Chicago at 3AM, when I would normally be waking up two hours later to start my Wednesday.

"Can we park our cars at your house?" one of them asked me.

"Well, yes," I said, "but there'll only be enough room for about two of them, max. On-street parking."

This is true; while I have a wide driveway and only one car, it is shared with the neighbors on the other side of my house (it's a duplex) and they have two cars that they park in a staggered fashion because both of them work odd hours and need to be able to get in/out. The street in front of my mailbox (acceptable enough for friends to park in) is only wide/long enough for about two vehicles, maybe three if they're all tiny compact cars and they park with their bumpers almost touching and tires rubbing the curb. Obviously, friends can't park in my driveway or I would be unable to get in/out of it myself.

"Hm, that may be a problem then," he replied.

Like I said, there's a large number of them going, traveling together, etc. I can't do much about that, really. It's not like I can magically create more street parking space, or invade the space of my neighbors on the street.

"Are there any good bars in Newton?" was the next question.

Haha, no. Not anymore, anyway. I must remind you these are graduate students, and -- especially when traveling and/or on vacation -- they tend to drink copious amounts of beer and liquor. Apparently when traveling by train, as well, you can take as much alcohol as you want with you. It's not like an airplane. So I'm assuming that by 3AM when the train leaves, all of my friends will be quite drunk or definitely "on their way there," as the saying goes.

I am aware of but two bars in Newton; both are "cowboy bars," which is a nicer way of saying they're total hole-in-the-wall dive joints that cater to rednecks and white-trash clientèle. One of them is about a mile from my house, give or take, and the other is on main street. The one really nice bar in town, the blandly/succinctly-named Sports Bar and Grill, went out of business and closed down almost a year ago. This, really, is too bad, as they made some of the best bar food I've had in years.

Yeah, like I've said before, this is a boring town in which nothing ever happens and there's nothing to do.

"How far is the train station from your house?" was the next question.

"About two miles or so," I replied, "give or take."

This is true; the train station is in the dead center of town, and the train tracks therefore bisect our town into two sections. There are seven tracks, all laid together, that run southwest to northeast. Crossing said tracks also lets me know just how badly I need new tires and shocks.

"Shit, we could walk that if we had to."

This may be true as well, but everyone is forgetting that the conference isn't for another month, and we've had a very, very warm and nice winter thus far by Kansas standards, with the temperature reaching almost 70 degrees half the time. That's bound to change. It would not surprise me if the weather took a 180 and we got an absolutely hellacious snowstorm around the time of the conference -- February is not usually the kindest month when it comes to what mother nature can dish out here in the great plains. I will remind you that it was last February when we got a freak snowstorm which, over the course of about three days, dropped a foot of snow on the area, canceled classes at the university for two days in a row, and made the temperature fall to around -5, with -25 to -30 wind chills. Anything can happen in a month. Kansas weather can turn on a dime, folks.

Again, I will remind you that my car desperately needs new tires, and isn't prepared to drive in a foot of snow, even around Newton.

I'm really not sure what the "game plan" for this trip thing will be yet; what will more than likely happen is that I'll end up ferrying two or three people up here in the Monte Carlo (for, even though the car is a land boat, it has a tiny backseat) after class that night and will drop them at the train station (or downtown, so they can drink) when necessary, and the others will probably carpool in a vehicle or two and park on my street for the duration of the trip, then come back and pick up their cars when done, etc. But who knows, really; it's a month away. I'm happy to help, of course, even if it ends up inconveniencing me -- I know they'd do the same for me. The department may be a dysfunctional family at times, but we're still a family -- we help each other out.

Perfectly fitting to end this post, of course, I hear a train whistle in the distance. It's 5AM, and I'm exhausted. It's time for bed. More soon, when I have more to update.