Glaciers and gorges

The Empire Builder has been running on largely the same route for 75 years. Glacier National Park provides a guaranteed stream of tourist passengers, and the little towns provide a surprising number of passengers. In winter many of the roads are covered with snow or ice.

At lunch in the diner, I was seated with three-quarters of a vacationing family: a silver-haired and rosy-cheeked father, and two rosy-cheeked and very much red-headed teenage children. Heredity at work.

It's a family of vegetarians, so they all have the pasta. They're headed for the Park, I mention the effect of global warming on the glaciers in their namesake park. They note that, of course, this is why they decided to go here this year, before the park disappears. The one word that describes this family from suburban Illinois seems to be "genial." Apparently the father is the only one who managed to sleep reasonably well last night, the mother is dozing off in the sleeper. The teens look sleepyheaded and don't talk much, and break out into embarrassed grins when their father mentions that he'd had a good night's rest.

Later, I strike up a conversation with the man in the sleeper across the hall from me, a retiree traveling to visit family. He has mobility problems and has all his meals brought to him; airline seats make it worse, he says, and given how heavily booked the Empire Builder is in summers, he made this reservation four months in advance. He talks about his son marrying "a girl from Korea" during his stint in the Army and of how happy she was when he gave her money to visit her family. Brings up thoughts of the pax americana which never quite was, and now has no chance of ever being. He tells me to watch out for a river gorge on the right-hand side of the train.