Slow Cut Through the Center

Tips Iron & Steel is a strange anomaly of preservation in downtown Austin. Just a few blocks from the tallest residential tower west of the Mississippi — the nearly-completed Independent, whose Jenga-inspired gravity defiance practically dares the bull market to crash in the city below — the rusting artifact of another century’s economy is an oddity of time and place. Sure, there are other signifiers of industrial history nearby, like the Art Deco facade and substance-turned-style accoutrements retained during the tony redevelopment of the old Seaholm Power Plant, but the unreformed ruins of Tips — its blown-out windows barely hiding within the highest-rent neighborhood in Texas — feel like some sort of oversight, a fill the colorist missed, a tuft of stubble that escaped the razor. Still, it’s altogether appropriate that the old foundry is the first sight a passenger sees as the #22 Texas Eagle pulls away from Austin’s inauspicious Amtrak station, leaving the fresh accumulations of altitude and glaziery behind. After all, no other transportation mode is better suited to witness the shelf life of American dreams than the locomotive, which in a single century tumbled from gilded, golden-spiked grace to near-oblivion.

If the Transcontinental Railroad was finished either too late or too early to mark the fullest achievement of manifest destiny — the contiguous lands having already been claimed by the United States, but many years of savage violence towards Indigenous submission still ahead — it certainly represented its first crown feat of engineering. Connecting East to West four years after the grizzly suturing of North to South, the railroad fully embraced its designation as a symbol of a nation complete, a high achievement of capitalist braggadocio and bravado conveniently backed and fully blessed by the federal government. The reign of that crown was short, of course, neither headlights nor ditch lights able to illuminate the automobile or the airplane barreling head-on from of the future, towing the momentum of municipal airports and the interstate highway system. One hundred and one years after the driving of the Golden Spike, an act of Congress was necessary to keep passenger train service in the United States from derailing entirely. Richard Nixon’s signature was an indication of political expediency more than any expectation that its result, Amtrak, might actually sustain well into the next century, making the Texas Eagle itself a somewhat strange anomaly of preservation.

But then again, measuring the success of American rail by its passenger routes might be missing the point. Actual people were a disposable resource throughout the creation of the rail system, and tycoons raced towards the lowest price possible. Chinese construction workers were imported at bottom dollar and jailers leased Black prisoners back into slavery mining raw materials, the losses of these lives always preferable to losses on the ledger. The racialized brutality by no means ceased once the tracks were laid, and brutality was hardly limited to the waste of humans alone. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out that conductors offered firearms to passengers for the sport of slaughtering buffalo, the complimentary ammunition aiding not just in the eradication of a species but also its associated way of life throughout the plains. The railroads were built for the commercial profit and social victory of wealthy white men, and commerce remains their ultimate function; whether or not they happen to provide for the movement of people is really neither here nor there. They continue to act as a source for riches, more interstate freight still traveling by train than any other means, and as every Amtrak passenger learns sooner or later, freight reigns supreme not just in profitability, but in preference on the tracks.

That’s why “As long as you don’t need to get anywhere on time!” is the punchline as an older woman and I commiserate over the legroom and the views and good deals on tickets over scrambled eggs and burnt coffee in a dining car paused outside St. Louis. The joke goes bad fast when she asks the younger woman at our table why she’s travelling — between two work shifts in Kansas City, she’s in a sleepless rush to make a court date in Bloomington, Illinois. (The real reason a cop pulled her over has changed as many times as he’s been asked to explain, but she’s still stuck with the half bottle of liquor in the trunk, the consequences of not knowing another state’s open container laws, and a suspended license.) The older woman expresses dismay and confidence simultaneously as only a grandmother can, while the younger woman states that her faith in a loving god reassures her she’ll avoid the jail time threatened for tardiness.

Back in the coach car, as the clock ticks but the train stays still, a beleaguered assistant conductor tries to calm an impatient chorus building around a man on his way to a Michigan hospital where his son is in the ICU being treated for stab wounds. The father himself maintains a remarkable calm, and we roll in under the wire for his connection with hopeful news of his son’s condition stabilizing, which might have made a better case for my breakfast companion’s loving god if we hadn’t reach Bloomington three and a half hours after her time on the docket. Rail travel can certainly be a pleasure, but for many passengers in coach it’s just a few dollars difference from a Greyhound bus, a whole lot more comfortable but with all concerns remaining at the end of the line.

Those lines, or at least seventy percent of them, belong to the enormously profitable freight corporations. While federal law ostensibly grants right-of-way priority to the odd public-private entity that constitutes Amtrak, most passengers (and most definitely that beleaguered assistant conductor surrounded by that impatient chorus) know that’s not reality on the ground. In the last decade, routes have recorded on-time percentages as low as single digits. Anecdotally, I’ve given up on ever arriving in Chicago, the Midwestern hub of the passenger rail system, on schedule. Amtrak itself devotes a page on its website to recent court decisions undermining efforts to keep passengers rolling punctually, and as author Tom Zoellner has noted, the particular freight travelers are often sidelined for tends to be coal and crude oil, the railroad legacy of filthy lucre at fatal costs shuttling along fast as ever. As for the federal administrators responsible for upholding the statutory primacy of passengers over profits, that’s a five-member board with three vacant seats, chaired by a Trump appointee involved in the deregulation of freight that created a moribund board in the first place. At least Mussolini made the trains run on time.

If you’re in this country and you’re in hurry, chances are you’re going to fly right over it. There’s a lot you won’t see in an airplane, and even from the interstate, the billboards, fast food franchises, and big boxes can hypnotize away any perception of the changing landscape with their uniform monotony stamped across it. But traveling by rail makes it hard to miss the size and scope and disparity across this great big nation, might even make you wonder if it really is too great to be a nation at all. Which begs the question: What is a nation, anyway?

This one, certainly, does seem far too large for the broad strokes so frequently brushed by politics and punditry. Geographically, it dwarfs most others. My trip from Austin to Madison is roughly equivalent to a journey from Amsterdam to Madrid or Istanbul to Tel Aviv. The coast-to-coast journey once facilitated by the Golden Spike is further than a drive from Lisbon to Moscow or Kolkata to Hanoi. Culturally, there are cities like mine where immigrants from each of those places and countless more rub shoulders with people who have never left their home state. The continent’s deepest cultures, for centuries rooted in and equipped to the natural specificities of this land, linger like the buffalo at the brink, pushed to the physical margins and mostly all the way off the editorial margins. Tossed like tissue over the turbulent action painting of American backgrounds there’s the manufactured consensus culture of television and Hollywood, but even that’s tearing apart, asking itself if it’s ever been more divided with characteristic amnesia.

Whatever its geography or sense of self, this thing we call a nation is an economic organism as well, a conglomeration of resources distributed and accounts payable, and perhaps that’s the best lens for truly understanding what America really is — as local scholar and decolonization activist Tane Ward puts it, “Culture is material.” The gazing face of that material culture is easy to see from the highway — it’s the billboards, fast food franchises, and big boxes, the front door of consumerism. But very little of that is built around rail, so from the window of a train you get to spot it from behind, the spine, the limbs, so much more of the whole body.

See: Texas not from I-35 but the way it looks in story books and movies, all scrub brush and shallow rivers and Dallas glass towers like vanity mirrors for a big sky; groomed backyards with swing sets and inground pools; Arkansas somehow haunted and only ever in the darkness; the Mississippi majestic underneath the Gateway Arch; fertile farmland specked with humble homes; Hallmark Main Streets; sea of electric light Chicago racing around its dizzy peak at the height of the darkness. See: terrible speed of freight cars filled with coal and crude streaking by; flare and smoke and twisting pipes of the plants where they burn; Arkansas tire piles and scrap yards hazy at dawn; backyards buried beneath weeds and busted plastic outside decaying screen doors; the Mississippi muddy underneath its barges; endless fallow miles of emptiness after the harvest; everything on Main Street closed for years except one last bar; Tips Iron & Steel upon Tips Iron & Steel upon Tips Iron & Steel oxidizing outside the cities they built, the skyscrapers done and done with them. At the end you pull into a station, a low-slung shelter or a grand marble hall, but wherever it is there’s someone asking for a dollar and everyone else saying they haven’t got it. Is there anything more American than a person at the terminal with nothing?

The realities of these places in all of their details and contradictions are especially hard to ignore in the week before an election, rocking down the line between two state capitals with two top public universities, all manner of power and knowledge and treasure crashing together in the gravitational field around their marble domes. Between this pair of lush liberal cities of ideas, front lawns blooming with signs for Beto and Baldwin, a slow cut through the center of the nation in between is an object lesson. Eduardo Galeano wrote of how the extraction of agricultural and mineral wealth from South America enriched port cities like Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro even as the continent was bled dry, and it is very hard not to see some parallel in a North America where the factories are shuttered, the squares boarded up, the soil exhausted by the relentless amber waves of grain, all while some cities seem to prosper, the docks now optional when so many bays are electronic. The degree of this disconnect between the material world and the economic one is highlighted here in Austin by a group of downtown dwellers, some surely living inside that skeleton of the Seaholm Power Plant, recently organized to demand that passing trains stop making so much noise on the tracks. Such absurdity notwithstanding, this narrative parallel of the urban as a parasite on the rural runs askance with the realization that the depleted zones of the postwar American dream wield an inordinate amount of political power, the nation’s bizarre machinery offering half a million people in Wyoming as many Senate seats as 40 million Californians, and the Spirograph of gerrymandering in my own town an ironic expression of the meaninglessness of borders crafted by a party obsessed with them.

But I did say contradictions, didn’t I? Because a nation may be a figment of collective imaginations, but the complex interconnectedness of all things is not, and if the Internet has given a few modern-day railroad tycoons the opportunity to become uselessly rich through enormous human suffering and a more ephemeral sort of freight train, it’s also boarded minds from every origin bound for previously unimagined destinations and community-seated virtual dining car booths with an eclectic mix of passengers who would never have met anywhere else. And to wind the clock and the thought back, although the railroads and the nation its ties bind together were by any honest assessment inventions of settler colonialism and white supremacy, there is a crack in everything.

George Pullman was the heir to a small engineering business who made his fortune by bringing new heights of luxury to train travel. After transporting Lincoln’s corpse from Washington to Illinois in 1865, he began employing former slaves to serve passengers like royalty, and eventually built a town for his workers where he could engineer every aspect of their lives. When he cut wages but not the rent, his workers went on strike and his clockwork town sprang apart. The day that Pullman died rich but vilified, Asa Philip Randolph was only eight years old, but Randolph’s legacy is just as likely to spring to a mind that reacts to “Pullman” as the tycoon’s is. During the 1920s Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black union in the United States. In 1963, already having lived longer than the man whose brand he had brought to bear, Randolph led a march through Washington that concluded with the voice of Martin Luther King ringing out from the Lincoln Memorial. The 1964 Civil Rights Act that reverberated from King’s speech and Randolph’s career used the legal tools of federalism that this idea of a nation offers to chip away at the perverse injustices of its localities.

The physical nature of rail — its fixed track — is itself a tool that can be turned towards justice. In 1996, eager to extract any copper left stranded after laying off a large part of its workforce, a mining corporation sent a tanker train filled with sulfuric acid towards White Pine, Michigan. The chemical freight was forced to a halt in Wisconsin at the Bad River Reservation, where Ojibwe protectors had formed a blockade to prevent the potential catastrophe of a derailment on their own sovereign lands, as well as the danger the completed shipment would pose for the watershed of Lake Superior. Joined by activists from outside the reservation, the blockade lasted for 28 days, preventing any sulfuric acid from passing and ultimately cancelling the acid-mining project altogether. While the Ojibwe protectors say they were moved to action by dreams of the harm that could come, they might never have dreamed that twenty years later, protectors on another reservation in a very similar situation would catalyze the largest Indigenous assembly in North America in more than a century, Standing Rock awakening the entire world to the ongoing spiritual resistance of the continent’s first peoples. Meanwhile, rail blockades became a fixture of nonviolent direct action in the environmental and climate movements. At the same time Sacred Stone Camp was growing, hundreds converged in Albany (another state capital where I used to live) to stop a “bomb train” carrying fracked oil from North Dakota, its volatile cargo routed just feet from public housing in the city’s South End.

Perhaps some of those activists arrived by rail. A nation might also be imagined as the area you are allowed to move freely within, and this nation has a particular reputation for restlessness. Coach cars headed South to North carried hope during the Great Migration, and the shuttered small towns of today aren’t just sapped by outside interests — homegrown prejudice pushes children towards a ticket to where the word “queer” is intoned with empowerment. There’s nothing more American than someone finally getting that dollar where nobody’s got one and buying a seat on the next train out. The people on this stretch of land between two imaginary lines (plus an additional enormous peninsula and a chain of islands in the Pacific) shuffle and shove, pushing each other out of the way, reaching out a hand to help each other back up, 325 million people pretending we all have something in common beside odds and space.

Detrain in Austin from the #21 Texas Eagle and in front of you will be the shimmering new skyline of a prosperous city, and in the moment its sparkling newness makes you blink it might get even bigger and brighter. It is a dazzling place. Beautiful people swim in cold water that springs from the ground even in the hundred-degree heat of the summers. The new central library has six stories of stairs that seem to be floating on air. There are restaurants and bars you’ve read about in the kinds of magazines that probably don’t mention how recently they housed a tire shop or someone’s home. There’s nothing but good times ahead and Tips Iron & Steel right behind you.