Humanity is traveling this journey together

All kinds of people ride the train. Mickey is a black man in his forties who sat across the aisle on my recent Amtrak trip to Salinas, California. He was attending his uncle’s funeral in Oakland, his uncle being like a brother as they were near in age. He hadn’t seen his family in a while. Mainly because they’re waiting for him to get his life together.

Mickey didn’t know when he’d get back to Spokane. He was stranded until he could afford the one-way ticket home. Meanwhile, his family lived in a rough part of town and he planned on staying mostly inside when he got there. Said all the black men in his neighborhood wore dreadlocks so the police couldn’t tell them apart.

A heavy set older black woman in a wheelchair in the lower handicap car, where I was seated temporarily on the return trip north, was cold. An elegant young white woman gave up her own blanket and wrapped it around the woman. “We need each other,” she said. A white man with mostly paralyzed legs also tried to help her. He told me he’d been an arborist and made a “stupid mistake” and fallen out of a tree. He was dragging himself around on crutches.

The woman in the wheelchair was planning to go to San Francisco, having been unsuccessful in finding an apartment in LA, but when she realized she’d have to bus from the Oakland station she bought a ticket continuing to Sacramento. She was alone. I have no idea what she was going to do from there.

A middle-aged man and woman, white, boarded the train in Sacramento and took seats behind me. He’d recently checked himself out of the hospital — he still wore his wrist bracelet. Their conversation consisted of where they were going to end up. They thought they might stay in Spokane a month. Then head over to Kalispell, Montana. Maybe they’d get a van and live in it.

She hadn’t slept as much as he had outside the other night. He’d lost his backpack with his medications. “They’re keeping you alive,” she chided. They bickered about him using up her money.

Lunching in the dining car was a trim grandmotherly woman from Colombia, crisscrossing the country visiting family, conversing in Spanish with a young Hispanic wife going up to Seattle to see her husband. He had a temporary job there. She hadn’t liked the weather — or being away from her family — so she was back in California.

At another table an eye-catching vivacious black woman was finishing her meal. Flashy jewelry, expensive clothing. She was headed back to her sleeper car. Traveling in style.

All kinds of people ride the train. Life condensed in a railroad car. I was glad to be part of it. To know of these others — their bits and pieces of stories mingling with my own. To understand that no one has the tracks to themselves — all of humanity travels together.