The great adventure: Riding the rails from Stanwood to Portland
It was a beautiful day for a train ride Saturday from Stanwood to Portland. The snow capped Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascade Mountains on the east framed the peaceful landscape slipping by. Puget Sound rocked as gently as a mother holding her newborn.
Car number six on Amtrak Cascades 513 was full of passengers going to Portland. About a dozen local residents climbed aboard adjoining cars at Stanwood Station for a daytrip to Seattle.
I was a bit nostalgic glancing out through the train’s large picturesque windows at farm fields – imagining what it looked like at the beginning of the last century. Some “homesteads” had been renovated, while others were dusty reminders of a family’s loss. Riding the train back then would have been more of a necessity than an adventure.
Fellow passengers on Amtrak busied themselves quietly on their laptop computers and surfed the Internet on their handheld devices, while others did timeless activities such as reading and knitting. Cell phone use was restricted to between cars or in the bistro. Thank you Amtrak.
But unlike the turn of the last century when people rode the train to distant locations because the last ox-cart caravan had already left for the season, riding the Amtrak today is just one of the many options for travelers. For me, it was part adventure, the need for a mini-vacation (a chance to read!), helping to keep the planet green, and because I didn’t want to drive myself to Salem.
On my return trip it was Super Bowl Sunday, which one might expect to be a low-ridership day. Every seat was full, which I found as a hopeful sign for a slowly rebounding economy.
As the game progressed, scores rang out from passengers and excitement built when someone yelled “the Saints made another touchdown,” which was met with cheers for the underdogs. The train car full of strangers suddenly became one with the rest of the U.S., but perhaps more importantly, had connected with one another. Something that cell phones, I-pods and Blackberries often make impossible.
–Kelly Ruhoff
Editor
