Did not get murdered, fall in love, or meet John Candy: The 40 Hour Train Trek
“If you will forgive me for being personal—I do not like your face”—Murder On the Orient Express
Oh Poirot, you sweet talker, you!
I was headed from a writer’s retreat in Seattle (the famous and always inspiring Camp Barry) to my first ever San Diego Comic Con, where I planned to wear a completely inappropriate sparkly dress to what I had decided was geek prom. Book 3 in my Guinea Pig series, The Ferret’s a Foot, was nominated for Best Publication for Kids by the biggest award in comics, the Eisners. HEY MOM! Feel free to cut out this blog post and hang it on the fridge. Right next to that drawing of a goose I did in elementary school. The one where I spelled goose using four different vowels. I was ambitious even then.
It seemed so silly to fly back and forth across the country when the retreat and Comic Con were only three days apart, so a smart friend (who also happened to be my brilliant agent Barry Goldblatt) suggested I might try the train. I’m pretty sure he hoped I would work on some of my deadlines during the trek, and I hoped so to but just in case, I started to collect train-based literature and movies, deciding that if I WAS going to slack and not write, it would be okay as long as what I was consuming was train-based. (My logic is FLAWLESS.)
The first book on my list when I thought of trains was, of course, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. Strangely enough it wound up being one of the only things I finished on the train. I didn’t write. I didn’t watch movies. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t listen to music (mostly because, as my friend Molly O’Neill pointed out, I’d be in danger of just listening to RUNAWAY TRAIN on repeat, a pain I don’t wish upon my worse frienemies.)
What did I do for 40 plus hours? I stared out the window. I talked to strangers. I smiled like an idiot. I didn’t sleep because I was afraid I’d miss something, something flying by the window. 2 second sights that made my heart stop. Nature untouched. A random line of hand-painted bi-planes. A row of children standing by a trailer park waving like something out of a twisted animatronic Disney creation.
The Coast Starlight line—train from Seattle to San Diego, a nearly 40 hour journey, winding through cow fields, forests, holes in mountains, deserts, lots of desserts (food was free to us sleeper car folk and believe me I took advantage of that! By my math, I ate so much free food that I made $30 bucks and gained roughly 200 lbs.), and stories from strangers like Roger who was 80+ and had endured 62 years to get the girl. A recent widow, she was waiting for him at the end of the train tracks. In Roger’s own romantic words “my best friend married her when we were young and he just wouldn’t die.”
I’ll write another post with my long list of train books/movies, but after reading MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS I did a lot of thinking.
Not being a huge fan of Christie’s detective stories (I much prefer the more ambiguous mysteries like AND THEN THERE WERE NONE) MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS felt a lot like a train journey: it started off exciting, then fell into a rhythm, one that remained nearly unchanged for much of the book. Poirot sits in one place and interviews people. Poirot sits in another place and interviews some other people. Poirot sits somewhere else (surely this man’s butt must have been sore from so much detecting!) and interviews the first group again. And on and on. With about 10 pages left I was sure that I disliked the book confused why so many had raved about it over the years. But suddenly, as the answer started to unravel, I an involuntary “whoooa” left my body, loud enough for all my neighbors in the crowded observatory car to hear. Each page got better and by the time I got to the last I was totally in love and drunkenly shouting—NOTE: not my fault, I blame Amtrak’s free wine and cheese hour—that it was one of the best endings ever written.
Many days I think about what it must have been like for Christie. To not only be a woman writing in a time so dominated by men, but to be THE most popular writer of her time. Sure people pushed her work aside saying “oh it’s just it genre, they aren’t real books” but her prose is so stunning and the woman is pretty much KING of the kick-ass ending. She even made it in that Guinness Book that every modern child dreams of getting into, with hopes more in the realm of “Fastest Runner” vs “Longest Case of Hiccups” (68 years?!). According to Guinness, the lovely Agatha is the best-selling novelist OF ALL TIME. Not FEMALE best-selling novelist, just best-selling NOVELIST.
I thought about this a lot as I watched the landscape drift. How much Agatha did, and wondering where I’d be without her. ACTRESS, HEROINE, COMEDIENNE. Oh how grateful I am that Novelist and Author are terms that somehow escaped the gender differentials.
Maybe it’s because they never expected us to actually write books.
Yes Comic Con was fantastic, but it was that time I spent on the train with Agatha and Roger and the free wine (Amtrak, what are you trying to do to me!) and the ever drifting landscape that really made me happy to be alive and filled with cheese. Two very, very great things to be.
