On bored Amtrak

ABOARD AMTRAK’S THE PENNYSLVANIA -- I love having the opportunity to slug a story of mine with a dateline.

“Dateline” is an old-fashioned journalism term for the all-caps story tag that used to include the date along with the place where the story was filed. It’s also the name of a new-fashioned investigate show where they resort to questionable tactics the likes of which old-fashioned journalists often disapprove.

The cool thing about a dateline that starts with “ABOARD . . .” is it makes it seem like I’m some kind of dashing war correspondent.

If you think that couldn’t be further from the truth, you’re mistaken.

I am a war correspondent.

I’m covering a war on boredom.

We are about six hours into an 8-hour trip through tedium clear to Philadelphia. Right now tedium is near Lancaster.

The girls out of childish habit say they are bored.

They are lying. They are fully alive.

They’ve just never been confronted with an opportunity to revel in the joyful boredom only a long train ride can bestow.

“I’ve ridden everything with either legs or wheels and nothing beats the train.”

That’s what an old friend of mine, John Clouse, once told me before he died. He was not lying. And that man was fully alive.

He was for years listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Most Traveled Man. I wrote maybe a dozen stories about him for everything from National Enquirer to Playboy because this veteran of the Battle of the Bulge was one of the most gregarious and entertaining men I’ve ever known.

The idea of watching 4 to 6 hours of television a day as a way to banish boredom was anathema to him.

The girls haven’t been bored once today. Rather they’ve been challenged to avoid boredom.

We arrived at the convenient Amtrak station in Latrobe about 30 minutes prior to the train’s scheduled 8:11 a.m. departure. There were about 20 people, three-quarters of them passengers, waiting.

“Is it ever going to get here?” said Josie, 10, cueing Lucy, 5, to commence the same whine.

They were confusing boredom with a moment that absolutely crackles with excitement: standing at a train station and waiting to hear a distant whistle.

At 8:10, a man who was probably steeped in boredom said, “See, it’s late,” an instant prior to hearing the whistle and seeing the headlight coming ‘round the bend.

It was right on time.

It’s a mechanical marvel that something so big, so loud and so muscular as a locomotive can seem so welcoming when you step inside of it.

“All aboard!”

Taking a train on vacation is like taking a vacation from the hassles of taking a vacation.

You can nap, you can read, you can talk, you can anticipate.

I told Lucy we were going to Philadelphia, birthplace of America. She asked if we’d get to see the hospital where it was born.

I never feel any of the apprehensions I feel on an airplane. If the engine on a train gives out, we just roll to a gentle stop.

The girls are beginning to think of the train like it’s a rolling prison and they are beginning to embrace the novelty of it.

Because it is boring and boring in our distraction-mad world is becoming a precious commodity.

Our nearly 8 hour trip will be maybe an hour too long. Maybe not.

The girls are still pressing their little noses up against the windows and waving at the smiling people at the crossings. They’ve spent the hours reading, playing cards and cuddling with us when the air conditioning got too efficient.

We ate in our seats the lunches we brought from the only fast-food restaurant that allowed us to continue the track theme of the day: Subway.

The girls are eager to get to Philadlephia, but have really enjoyed the trip and will be looking forward to the return ride, which will be maybe two hours too long. Maybe not.

I know now we’re embedding a memory that will have them loving the train the way Val and I do.

“All aboard!” is the phrase most associated with train travel.

Maybe it should be “All are bored!”

It’d be an excellent way to increase ridership.

An exercise in ironic education

I was explaining to my class the difference between coincidence and the over- and mis-used word, “irony.”

“It is coincidence, not irony, when you meet an old friend on the street outside the building where you both went to school,” I lectured. “Irony is when a vegetarian is eaten by wolves.”

I gave an insufferable professorial smirk and prepared myself to bow to the applause I was sure would follow. It was the fourth week I’ve taught a three-hour creative non-fiction writing class to graduate students at Point Park University in downtown Pittsburgh.

But there was no applause. No appreciative nods.

Later on the drive home I figured out why.

Because from January through May, this group of polite young adults had signed on to bear witness to one of the world’s most colossal ironies -- me teaching anybody how to succeed in writing.

This is the third time Point Park has flattered me by offering me this adjunct position and I think I figured out why. I am to journalism students what a human cadaver is to medical students.

Prospective journalists can examine me, my flaws and failings, and try and forensically determine what killed my career.

Was it god-given laziness? Massive stupidity? The jigsaw puzzle of career scars leaves ample opportunity for dissection.

Really, I probably make a better professor of writing than I do a practioner of writing. And it’s a lot more fun to get paid for talking about failed assignments than it is to not get paid for failing assignments.

I’ve noticed that the students come alive with interest when I tell them stories about how I’ve cratered once-thriving magazines with my questionable ethics, sloppy fact-checking, or reckless and exorbitant expense account sprees.

True story: Details magazine in 1999 closed four days after I’d submitted a $5,450 reimbursement bill for a five-day frolic I enjoyed while on assignment to cover a mundane TV programming convention in New Orleans. I got paid, but the magazine didn’t recover to publish another issue until 2002.

But students stare out the window like Gitmo detainees whenever I tell a story about a rare career accomplishment from long, long ago when I used to have them.

Worse, is the reaction I inevitably get when I read them some of my own work as I inevitably do.

I just can’t help myself. They are truly a captive audience. Again, the Gitmo detainee analogy is apt. I’m like the righteous Army chaplain who preaches to fanatical Muslims about the everlasting importance of being good Christians.

It’s worse for my students than it is even for my poor wife and children. Family face no repercussions when they leave the room or shove their fingers in their ears when I launch into another rambling story.

Getting up and leaving isn’t an option for my students. I could fail them for that. I do wonder if by week six some of the weaker students might crack and agree to submit to waterboarding if it’ll get me to shut the hell up.

I might enjoy that quid pro quo, too. Besides being a bore, I also have a mean streak that makes Dick Cheney seem mirthful.

Again, ironies abound. Just last night I spent about two hours talking about the importance of, get this, being concise!

Yes, I went on and on and on about why they need to be brief. I read them long passages from Hemingway and lectured ad nauseam that the only way to get ahead in writing is to write less.

To stress the point, I even assigned them dainty little 150-word essays in praise of something brief with no sentences longer 15 words each.

In hindsight, I suppose it would have been funny if I’d have told them to make the brief essays no less than 2,500 words.

Then there's this: The lengthy lesson about the importance of being brief was given by a man prone to wearing boxers.

How ironic.