COLUMN: Just in case you forget, I came up with a little rhyme: A train equals pain
I don’t know what it is about Spring Break that somehow coerces people into making incredibly bad decisions.
For example: I may or may not have exposed myself for a video camera, only to be rewarded with a tie-dye man thong. I may or may not have accidentally killed an endangered bird at a zoo by feeding it some McDonald’s french fries. And I may or may not have tried to talk to a police officer through my butt – a la Ace Ventura.
But none of that comes close to the worst decision I made this Spring Break – I took a train from Salt Lake to California.
What? You don’t see how that was a bad decision. It sounds pretty innocuous, right?
Well, you’re wrong.
If you’re thinking about riding a train, just jump off a cliff, pick a fight with Chuck Liddell, try your newly acquired Kung Fu skills on a grizzly bear, tell Chuck Norris he’s a sissy, piss Darth Vader off and get long-distance choked or dress up like a bug and step in front of a speeding bus.
The point – do anything but ride a train. All the things listed above will ensure a quick death. A train kills slowly, sucking every ounce of your lifeforce out in the most painful way.
Trains are an inferior form of transportation. You could steal a horse and ride it. We’ve all seen Westerns. The horses are always faster than the trains. You could ride a pimped-out Big Wheel. You could even get a piggyback ride from a leprechaun – they’re friendly, and even though they have short legs, they can get you wherever you’re going faster than a train.
You may think I came up with all that stuff up off the top of my head. No. I had a total of 42 hours on two different trains to figure out better ways to travel. That’s just a sampling from the list – the more practical ones, of course.
Maybe it just takes a special person to ride a train. What’s the word I’m looking for? Sadomasochist. Yeah, that’s it.
Maybe it just takes a sufficient degree of intoxication to ride a train. I saw a lot of people drinking on the train. But, I honestly don’t think being drunk on a train is a good idea.
First, you can barely walk on the damn thing anyway – even hitting the toilet while peeing is almost impossible. Yeah, too much info, I know, but I just want to paint a very vivid, accurate picture here. Since the train is already staggering for you, it would be virtually impossible to stand, walk or sit upright if you were about three sheets to the wind.
Second, you might puke. Nobody likes to puke. Nobody likes to see or smell someone else’s puke. But really, puke probably wouldn’t hurt the train’s already pungent odor – a fragrant potpourri of body odors, accrued by a host of people who have done nothing but sit in the same place for 20-odd hours soaking in their own sweat.
Or, maybe you need to be old to ride a train. I saw a lot of old people on the train. And, retirees don’t have anything better to do than ride around the country on trains. It’s better than having them driving around. Sorry, Grandpa.
And I’m aware that some people ride trains to get a good look at the scenery. Let me tell you, the Nevada desert was soo beautiful – I cried tears of shear joy.
It’s true you get a good look at the things around you. During our never-ending wind through the mountains, I think I made friends with every pine tree in the Sierra Nevada range.
And, possibly because of that fact, I can see why the Donners ate each other. I, too, was getting worried. I thought I was going to die in those mountains – spit roasted to a golden brown hue over a fire fueled by train seats and finally eaten by my plumper fellow train riders.
But as long as my story can save at least one or two of you from experiencing this savage horror, it may have been worth it.
Wait. No. It still won’t be.
David Baker had a really bad experience as a child with Thomas the Tank Engine. He has yet to recover. Comments or encouragement can be sent to him at dabake@cc.usu.edu.