Train travel has a number of advantages over bus travel.  Traffic is a major factor, of course, as is comfort (the seats are generally bigger on trains, with more leg room).  But most important is the frequency of stops.  Anybody who has ridden Greyhound a long distance will understand what I mean.  When you’re stopping for fifteen minutes in tiny backwater towns, loading or unloading a single package or passenger while half the bus disappears for a smoking break, it is almost impossible to get any sleep.  On the other hand, the train moves at a gradual pace, slowly accelerating or decelerating, and stopping only once an hour at most.  In addition, since the passengers are travelling similar distances on a train (with less one-stop travelers) the mood is quieter at night.

The train ride to New York was rather uneventful.  After the first night, we pulled into Chicago around 10am for an eight hour layover.  This gave me time to make some phone calls from the large payphone banks (mostly to people with 1-800 numbers), eat a sandwich and salad at a local restaurant, and pick up some extra snacks at a drug store (my supply of Chex Mix was already running low).  The only real delay was waiting for the train to depart from Chicago.  My memory is fuzzy on this point, but I remember standing in line a good three hours before we were allowed to board.  This was the only part of my trip where I had to deal with “polite talk” with the other passengers.  I was tempted to be honest when they’d ask where I was headed, but simply to keep the conversation to a minimum I was half-truthful and said I was going to visit my parents in Staten Island.

The whole train ride was slow and surreal.  In a way, I found myself comparing it to prison: surrounded by people I did not know, away from my comfort zone, unable to freely move around, the schedule determined by those in power.  Of course, I was trying not to think too much about imprisonment or my sentence.  The whole idea of being locked up for that long was too hard to get my brain around; I was doing my best to psyche myself up to facing it one day at a time.  And I had no real mental picture of what the place would look like or what my day-to-day existence would be.  The fear of the unknown can be a very powerful and debilitating force, and I was determined not to give in to those thoughts.  Instead, even if I was faking my way through, I was trying to act matter-of-factly.  Many months later I would hear an expression which inmates in the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program would use to describe the way to get through that program even if you didn’t believe the things they were teaching you:

                                                        “Fake it ‘til you make it.”

I hadn’t been taught that philosophy yet, but I was already making use of it.

(Sorry for the delay in chapters, things have been busy and this essay isn't grabbing me too much.  This could have been a real emotional time, but once I left home and got on the train I became numb to everything, so there are no big scenes or huge moments.  I'll try to get the next chapter done in a few days, so we can wrap this up and move on to something else).