My dad, who is 83 and in talks with his doctor about a replacement hip, has just come back from three weeks riding American trains, alone with his rucksack and his walking stick. From the east coast to the west coast, down to New Orleans, up to Illinois, back to Boston.
When he told me he was going to do it, I felt a bit sick. Then he said he had booked all the hotels himself, on the internet; my dad is very new to the internet, so then I felt a bit sicker. He said no, no, it was all fine, he’d found a motel in Raton, New Mexico that charged only 40 bucks a night, and wasn’t it funny, the comments people left in their reviews, trying to make places sound absolutely terrifying?
He is a lifelong train enthusiast who did manual labour on the railways for a decade before becoming a philosopher. I always think he’s about to stop, and then he doesn’t. So for the past three weeks I haven’t fully exhaled, a low-rent horror film playing in the back of my mind at all times. David Cameron was having sex with a pig, and my father was being brutally murdered in Raton, a town that (and this did give me some comfort) takes its name from the Spanish word for mouse.
Then it was my daughter’s fourth birthday, and my dad arrived back home in time for the family celebrations, having planned his trip around it. I don’t know who was more surprised: us, to see that he had returned alive, or him, on realising we hadn’t expected him to. “Was this thought to be my journey of no return?” he asked. “No!” we replied, meaning yes, and we’ve done the seating plan for your funeral.
He told us that the kindness of strangers, when they saw a lame old man with a stick, had been hard to believe. When he got to Raton he went to the laundromat to wash his clothes. They asked him if he’d walked from the motel, “and I hadn’t actually, as a man driving past had offered me a lift, so I had come in his car. And the woman said, ‘Great, I’ll get Jim to take you back’, and so this other bloke drove me back again, and he was convinced he was reincarnated. Completely irrational belief, but a lovely man. Half an hour later I had a phone call at the motel, and it was Jim again, asking if I’d like him to drive me to the top of Goat Hill, as you can see most of New Mexico from there. So up we went, and we saw all the kingdoms of the earth.”
I ventured to ask whether he thought Jim might possibly murder him.
“Absolutely not!” he replied, and I felt rather evil. “Goat Hill is the most visible point in the whole of Raton. Very bad idea to do it there.”
In fact, the only time he thought his number might be up was in downtown Los Angeles, where he stood outside his hotel and saw a gang of tattooed Hells Angels riding past. “You know, with those handlebars that go right up on their motorcycles. I couldn’t forbear from taking a photo of them, as I thought they looked rather wonderful.” Afterwards, he examined the photo on his camera, and realised he shouldn’t have taken it, as there was a woman riding pillion “and staring directly at me with a very concentrated expression.” Then the gang came back from around the corner, back towards him – and rode straight into the parking lot of his hotel.
“And I imagined them all saying, ‘That old guy, he’s the one,’” he said.
I asked what happened then. “Oh, nothing,” he added, breezily. “It must have been a coincidence. I just felt apprehensive for two hours.”
Then there were the friends he made on the trains: the woman who had lost custody of her four children, for mental health reasons (it was her son’s birthday, the day they met); the paranoid ex-soldier who would begin his sentences with “Of course, what they don’t want you to know is…”; the Christian widower on a journey to cure his alcoholism and his broken heart.
I wondered if all these encounters/meetings had left him worried, but they hadn’t, really. He said the only thing that had, as he traversed the whole of America and back, was the sight of a 10-year-old boy, with his brother, in a T-shirt that said FEAR FAILURE. “I thought that was very sad indeed. A recipe for not even trying to succeed. No! Try again! Fail again! Fail better!”
