So very close. I don't know how close, because we were delayed for a while by cows on the track (or something) a while back.
When I boarded in Chicago, the first attendant I talked to told me, with urgency, to go past everyone to the very front of the train. The way he said made me think this was some insider info wherein the front of the train had the best seats and he was only telling me about this wonderland. Accordingly, I went to the front car where about ten people were already smattered among the seats. Then a woman came and told us these seats were being blocked off for people they'd pick up along the way, so I went back two cars to actually quite nicer seats. Then this same woman told me this was the car for people going to Buffalo (though considering the fact they were surprisingly upbeat). She let me stay, though. And sure enough, this morning the car emptied in Buffalo. Somewhere between Buffalo and Albany it repopulated, to the point where I was pretty sure one of these times there wouldn't be enough double seats for everyone, and somebody was probably going to sit the non-threatening me. But that never happened, and again the car slowly emptied. And now there are maybe a dozen of us.
It's dark out again, though unlike North Dakota it's clear we're we're going through civilization this time. We just passed a Panera Bread. I hate Panera Bread. Panara Bread isn't a restaurant, it's a place for people who drive Volvos to meet people who drive Subarus.
They have a few Panaras out west. Some things you can't escape, even by traveling however many miles I've traveled. In some ways, western civilization has become homogenous. This makes it pretty easy to up and move 3,000 miles away, but pretty strange to actually travel those 3,000 miles. Panera Bread sucks. Why is it everywhere?
But it's not all the same. The west coast is not the east coast. This seeming homogeny just requires us to think a little harder about what makes us unique in the big, wide world. I think it's better this way. This way, I don't tell people about the strange fast food of Maine, where you order fries and they ask if you'd like a burger with that. This way, I have to rack my brain a little. And then I tell people how my town acts out the Walk to Bethlehem every year, with a live baby. Like Panara Bread, the Walk to Bethlehem is weird, sort of dumb, and you can't imagine it being real until you see it. But unlike Panara Bread, it ain't catching on. Things like that are significant differences. They're interesting; they matter. When I'm more optimistic, I think that for easy shit like soup, the western world does it all the same way. Uniformity is just easier sometimes for soup. But it's in the details that we keep our culture. It's in the stuff that ain't catching on. Oregon's got theirs, Maine's got theirs. I certainly haven't seen a lack of novelty in my travels.
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