Free All Gone to Look for America by Peter Millar Page A

forbearance , ‘I just wanted to know if there are carts available on the platform.’
    ‘Well,’ he draws out the pause, painfully, ‘there is one. But it’s kept locked up, for the night shift to use.’
    This seems to me as strange a set of priorities as it clearly does to the woman with the children, who has begun to look despairingly at the ever-widening circle of clutter her kids have spread around the carriage. I’m wondering how she’s even going to get it all packed again, never mind cope with getting it off the train and to wherever she’s going. But the praetorian has a soft heart and comes back a few minutes later to tell her he’s rung ahead and they’ll ‘see what they can do’.
    We roll into Syracuse through a building thunderstorm which provides suitable rolling grey rain clouds to accompany the industrial wasteland of brand new breeze blocks, grey corrugated iron factory sheds, an electric power substation and acres of monotone abandoned and decaying structures that were once what we would call fixed caravans, and what Americans know as the lowest level of housing – trailer homes. And this is where they come to die.
    In fact Syracuse is mostly known for its salt. Mines here were for years the main source of the town’s income and the seasoning Americans in their millions poured on their food until the health lobby in the late twentieth century finally realised how much harm it was doing. The Amtrak station is nearly 10 miles out of the modern city centre, where the tracks were laid to be close to the industrial zone. The otherwise grim vista is allayed for alighting passengers – if you can call it that – by a new out of town retail park, which masks much ofthe decay. The mother with the small children struggles off the train with most of their baggage piled onto an unfolded pushchair, which means of course that its intended occupant has to walk – or rather toddle – behind. The praetorian’s call ahead has somehow failed to persuade the guardians of Syracuse’s sole cart to yield it up for the use of a passenger.
    But then sympathy for one’s fellow passengers on long-distance rail journeys can wear thin, I quickly realise. We are all familiar with the curse of the mobile phone on commuter trains – the endless ‘I’m on the train, darling’ conversations – and already on my first few hours on Amtrak I’d experienced one serial call-maker, but I had not been prepared for a whole new encounter with the digital age’s most useful and annoying invention. The phone as vanity accessory was new to me.
    Already by the outskirts of Amsterdam I’d been getting mildly irritated by the series of beeps at irregular intervals coming from the seat behind me, but assumed the big white man dressed all in black with an iPod in one hand and phone in the other was playing some game on the latter and I had done my best to maintain a façade of good humour on my first US rail journey by not even suggesting he might seek out the ‘mute’ key.
    It’s only after leaving Syracuse, with the now rather monotonous landscape fast fading beneath a blanket of rain that I decide to switch seats. My new position , across the compartment, doesn’t exactly remove me from the noise, but for the first time it enables me to see what he was doing to cause it: he’s been taking photographs of himself!
    That was one possibility that had simply not occurred to me, but there he is, turning the phone away from himself, in order to face its camera, adjusting his profile this way and then that to present a variation of noble poses reminiscent of Roman emperors perhaps – still in classical mode here – or perhaps Mafiosi capi , just to update the Italian theme. After each little flash he turns the phone back round, takes a thorough look at his own likeness and then presses a button which makes the little bleeping noise that’s been driving me absolutely potty for hours: whether the bleep is made by him saving or