Journeying

Snow, trains, people

Dear Bread Fans,

I am watching the snow fall in thick flakes, pile up on powerlines and branches. Cars are hiding under snow domes. I meant to take a walk first thing, before the snow got rolling, but I’m recovering (again) from Covid, so I took it easy.

How did it get to be December? Part of me feels like July still needs to happen. That we need to get to the beach and read some magazines. Bring grapes and eat chips. I understand that the calendar has turned, but I don’t know how we passed through this year, how it passed through us.

In anticipation of the storm yesterday, I pulled up all the collards. We have a hard time admitting the growing season is over. Ages ago, Francis kept one collard plant going for three years – quite a feat in Upstate New York, even with climate change.

As the snow piles up, I feel like a witness. Like a traveler. A few weeks ago, I was an actual traveler, to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Beautiful sights at The Burnt Toast Inn.

What a glorious little trip! I stayed at a bed and breakfast called The Burnt Toast Inn – because where else could I possibly stay? And marveled at the décor and the hospitality of the owner Sarah, and her sweet black lab. My friend Daniel brought me out for Yemeni coffee and to my talk at Zingerman’s Bakehouse – I gave an encyclopedic glimpse at the history of American baking – and to Bird Dog Baking!

Watching bakers handle the dough there blew my mind. I will never get over the way dough grows! I watched a batch of maple cherry sourdough get weighed and shaped. I tried to take a picture but nothing caught my amazement. The pictures showed a blob, not an animated thing being tended.

Bree Stillwell! Mark and Jenny! Daniel Berman!

I sat with other things: old cookbooks at the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. I felt like I was in church as I turned the pages of charity and promotional cookbooks. The codes of recipes. The ads and images of food and women. I am sifting these remnants for evidence of other times and lives, and I am the thing that leavens this stuff – my curiosity for what it was like to be in a kitchen at a given when.

I want to animate someone who used these kitchen tools. I want to slip inside their skins and estimate their thoughts and feelings. But I know I can’t get as close as I want. I can hardly understand the thoughts and feelings of people near me.

For instance, I have two sisters, 18 and 21 months apart from me in age. I am close to them, but we are distinct. I cannot cross through skin. It is nearly impossible to approach anyone else’s experience.

But I can witness. I can observe.

And that is what I did on my long trip home from Ann Arbor. I got on a bus on a Friday night at 8, beginning what I thought would be a long journey. If things went well, I’d get home at 3 the next afternoon.

But things did not go well. As soon as the bus got to Toledo, Amtrak declared our train delayed. Instead of leaving at 3:30 a.m., we’d leave at six. Soon, we were told we’d leave at 7:30. Then they said our train, the Lake Shore Limited was infinitely delayed.

Luckily, I was not antsy. I’d chosen to take the train rather than the plane because the air traffic tangles seemed less predictable than Amtrak’s. My family are avid cross-country train riders. I know to expect delays. And when I left Ann Arbor, I felt ready for whatever this trip home would bring.

I had snacks from Bird Dog – a jalapeno corn muffin and a collard scone. A sorghum cookie. I had a book cued up on Libby, Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan. Coincidentally, she stayed at the same B-n-B. I’d never read her work before, but I sat with her voice and book all night in Toledo, watching people sleep and try to sleep.

The Floridian was due to leave before my train. A family of sisters gave each other cookies and settled in to rest. I sat on a mesh chair that was not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be.

Brain on Fire is a reporter’s account of getting sick with autoimmune encephalitis, and fortunately, recovering. The book came out in 2013, and has drawn awareness to this little-known illness, which can be a cause of psychosis. It is a gripping tale. I hope you’ll read it.

The book held me through the overnight, bringing me right into the author’s experience. I was watching a waiting room, and connected, riveted to a story. I was dually observant: of this incredible experience, and of the life of the station at night, people sleeping, working, snacking.

The Floridian passengers left before sunrise. Eventually, the outside brightened. At seven, I scouted for coffee, using my phone.

I walked by warehouses that were art studios. Past a motel that seemed like it had long ago become cheap apartments. I felt like I was walking through the 1990s, through a part of a city that was still figuring out what to be – but isn’t that what most of the rust belt/northeast still is? A cocoon of structures, a was-been becoming something else, or not, in varying stages of revival and decay.

Toledo sights.

In ten minutes, I was downtown, and streets were blocked off for a holiday parade. There were craft breweries and good coffee. A high school band practiced, lots of drums! Kids and parents wore green and red costumes – more grinches and elf’s than Santa’s.

I went to the convenience store and got some fake cheese and crackers, and nearby I found an apple tree. Most of its fruit was on the ground, but I was able to pull down one branch and pick a small, lingering apple.

Eventually, my train approached. I got my suitcase back from the very friendly staff, and went outside to wait. When the long-awaited Lake Shore Limited stopped, I got aboard. found a seat. It started to rain as soon as the train left Toledo, and I fell asleep.

When I woke up, an Amish man asked if a girl could sit with me. She was about 8, and we smiled at each other throughout the afternoon. Like the cookbooks at the library, I couldn’t read her.

She and her family left in Syracuse or Utica, I can’t recall. I didn’t feel restless until then, when I was close to home. Suddenly, my patience was gone.

But all that night and day, I’d been a willing traveler, as I had been in my teens and twenties. I remembered riding the Greyhound from Plattsburgh to Seattle, when I was thinking of transferring to Evergreen College. I took it all in: the fields and highways, the places the bus stopped. How big the sky was at the diner in Montana, how big the plate of pancakes were: the pancake-sized sky

When I finally got home from Michigan, I savored the feeling of motion. I wanted to hold onto the sense that I am a passenger in life, an observer. I carried it a while, but now, like the loaf of maple cherry sourdough I brought from Bird Dog, the journey is gone. I am thankful for the snow for inviting this sense back momentarily.

Yours, Amy