ENTRY #1: GOLD, GOLD, GOLD

The leg of the journey through Montana was one I’d eagerly awaited since setting off from Chicago, and one of the prime motivations for originally taking a punt on an Amtrak ticket. I was well aware by this point into the ride, that the arrival and departure times advertised on the ‘Empire Builder’ route map amounted to very little. (This scrap of paper was pretty much the only souvenir I picked up on my entire 3 months of being in America other than a very questionable, and since jettisoned ‘TEXAS’ belt). Big freight takes centre stage on the American railroad so we were already several hours behind schedule. I began to fret that we’d be slowly rolling through some of the most impressive landscapes in complete darkness. It wasn’t hard to stay awake however, retinas pulled back, nose pressed against the glass of the observation carriage watching the moonlight bathe the hills in silver until the sun could paint them gold.

The transition from the Dakotas into Montana was stark, almost unnatural. The entire sheet of black, regretful cloud that taunted North Dakota seemed to disappear immediately when we crossed the state line. It’s burgeoning industrial treadmills replaced by silent cheers of relief and big open skies. It reminded me in part, of the feeling you have when you leave Manchester from any direction; the cloud thins, and even the slightest shaft of light attacks sun starved eyes with the intensity of a surgical lamp. 

It was the third day into the journey from NYC now, I was eager to grab my guitar down from the luggage rack and start work on a bunch of song ideas that were rapidly forming through the big window. I would often work in this way with songs, rarely would a song be born out of playing the guitar, always from movement by foot or carriage where melody can come into the mind freely. However, I’d normally never be more than a couple of hours away from the chance to pick up an instrument to build the song. This rationing of time with the guitar would be a big feature of my entire time in America; I had it on me at all times pretty much, but spent long stretches without having a chance to play it in anger or work out structures and chord changes. It led to me doing everything in my head, this wasn’t a new process, just an even more spartan way to do things I guess. What it did allow, was more time to think about the lyrics as there wasn’t the temptation to get carried away with cycling through an idea into a dead end. 

It was pretty much impossible to sleep on the train unless you found a way to dive into a sleeping bag between the seats (A cabin was no where near in the budget for my trip and I’m not exactly the most conspicuously built guy to be hiding from the train guard in a sleeping bag). I was too excited anyway, happy to claim a specific table and window seat in the observation carriage like a possessed pensioner taking ownership of their regular place in a church pew. 

The Amtrak isn’t really built for either speed or comfort, but as an outsider with nowhere to be, I wished my time on the train would never end. It’s slow, almost aimless weave through the Pacific Northwest a far cry from the clogged arteries of England’s North Western roads and train tracks. The terrain was astoundingly beautiful, yet I had no way of tasting it, treading on it or breathing it in. We were fairly heavily behind schedule at this stage so there was scant opportunity to even step off the train for a few moments unless you were a smoker. Perhaps the only instance where a nicotine addiction could actually improve your health. As the third night of the journey drew in, the sky’s blue brilliance slowly lost it’s hue. By the time morning had come around after the train split at Spokane, it had been replaced with a tone of grey so familiar I’d truly doubted I’d just crossed near five thousand miles over sea and land. The overcast ceiling was welcome though, the new friends I’d fleetingly made between Chicago and Montana on the train had headed straight West for Seattle when the train decoupled. I had a sense it wouldn’t be the last time i’d see these strangers, but the familiarity of the skies at least tempered any underlying feelings of loneliness that being this far out on a limb could have stirred.

The sounds of The Stanley Brothers, John Prine’s Lake Marie and a couple of early Hiss Golden Messenger albums were on heavy rotation during much of this leg of the trip, all three laying fingerprints on the half dozen or so songs I wrote from the confines of my window seat. That earthier sound would give way to the bigger country style that would emerge in the coming weeks. I still can’t completely work out where that came from, other than listening to ‘A Thousand Miles From Nowhere’  by Dwight Yoakam probably little under a hundred times between Spokane and Portland. 

I can’t recall how many hours we were late arriving into Portland, but be assured that it was a high enough number to make a number of too infamous to need naming British rail operators sleep a little easier at night. Stepping off the train at my destination was both comforting and eerie, a consistent, very Mancunian brand of light drizzle accompanying me from the train station to my hostel just Northwest of Downtown Portland . A four day journey from East Coast to West now at an end, I was eager to stretch out the legs, pull the guitar out of its case, and see if Portland would live up to what I had drawn in my imagination.