Hanover and back (Or, The war with Amtrak)

It's 2:45 AM on Saturday morning. I'm standing in a dark parking lot in Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, with only thick tendrils of mist for company. And it's all Amtrak's fault.

The journey began at 1 pm the previous day when I boarded a clean and spacious train leaving sunny Buffalo, the first leg of my weekend trip to Hanover. All went extremely smoothly at first, and we even put into Schenectady, NY at the precise minute printed on the schedule (when was the last time you saw an airplane do that?). There was a scheduled 2.5 hour layover, which was plenty of time for a quick hamburger with some exploring for dessert. In addition to Union College (Dartmouth's old ECAC hockey foe), Schenectady is home to General Electric, which was called the Edison Electric Company when Thomas Edison founded it in 1878. Quite a neat town.

The trouble started when I asked the stationmaster from which track my train, which was due to arrive in three minutes, would be departing. He wasn't sure, so he made the appropriate inquiries and came back with the news that it would be delayed approximately 55 minutes. That didn't actually answer my question but was good enough for the time being (it ended up coming on Track 2). When the train finally arrived, loaded/unloaded passengers and luggage and resumed its journey with me aboard, it was running more than 90 minutes behind schedule. Even this wouldn't have been a problem if the train had exceeded 40 miles an hour for the rest of the trip, but it didn't. They held us for an additional 45 minutes at one station for a mechanical inspection but apparently could not correct the problem.

We finally pulled into our final destination only to be shown the door by an impatient stationmaster. While his eagerness to go home could but equal mine, his means to do so were far superior. A flick of the lightswitch and a turn of the key and he was homeward bound. And so I found myself alone with the Amtrak parking lot in all its dark, dank splendor. Fortunately relief came quickly in the form of Ellen, who drove me back to Hanover and a long-overdue reunion with my sleeping bag in a friend's apartment.

More to come on this trip soon (including my revenge against Amtrak), but one positive from the Amtrak (mis)adventure was that I had a chance to finish my book. Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy came highly recommended by a friend, who called it the best book she had read in a long time. Vanauken recounts "the spiritual autobiography" of the love he shared with his wife before her premature illness and death, including their conversion to Christianity and the grief that followed her passing. Yale- and Oxford-educated and a longtime correspondent with C.S. Lewis (some of their letters are shared in the book), Vanauken is insightful in a simultaneously subtle and profound way. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in poetry, love, faith or God. If you're in or near Hanover now, there's a copy in Berry lower level.