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Paul Theroux

The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes. . how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the 'bad medicine waggon' charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?

— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant

'Romance!' the season-tickets mourn,

'He never ran to catch his train,

'But passed with coach and guard and horn -

'And left the local — late again!'

Confound Romance. . And all unseen

Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

— Rudyard Kipling, 'The King'

For my Shanghai Lil, and for Anne, Marcel, and Louis, with love

1 THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED

One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work. You would have known it immediately by the size of his bag. And you can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth — he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble. But why be coy? I had woken in my old bedroom, in the house where I had spent the best part of my life. The snow lay deep around the house, and there were frozen footprints across the yard to the garbage can. A blizzard had just visited, another was expected to blow in soon.

I had dressed and tied my shoes with more than usual care, and left the stubble on my upper lip for a moustache I planned to grow. Slapping my pockets to make sure my ballpoint and passport were safe, I went downstairs, past my mother's hiccupping cuckoo clock, and then to Wellington Circle to catch the train. It was a morning of paralyzing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America.

For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at the very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia. Two men using a foreign language spoke in low voices; there were others with lunch-boxes and valises and briefcases, and one lady with the sort of wrinkled department store bag that indicated she was going to return or exchange an unwanted item (the original bag lending veracity to the awkward operation). The freezing weather had altered the faces in the multi-racial car: the whites' cheeks looked rubbed with pink chalk, the Chinese were bloodless, the blacks ashen or yellow-grey. At dawn it had been 12° Fahrenheit, by mid-morning it was 9°, and the temperature was still dropping. The cold wind gusted through the car as the doors opened at Haymarket, and it had the effect of silencing the muttering foreigners. They looked Mediterranean; they winced at the draught. Most of the people sat compactly, with their elbows against their sides and their hands in their laps, squinting and conserving their warmth.