Escapes WEEKENDER
In San Diego, I was too hot during the August heatwave to do anything but sit in the cabana at Town and Country and strategize potential story angles with my editor. The missed calls from my partner in Chicago told me it might be a love story, although I wasn’t sure of the ending. My stay down south was brief, and sooner rather than later it was time to get back on the train. I walked from The Guild Hotel, where I was staying, to downtown’s Santa Fe train station. Back on the Pacific Surfliner heading straight to Santa Barbara, we traveled over bluffs and beach ridges. It felt like I was trusting the waves to carry me instead of track. In Santa Barbara, I met a new friend, Magan Kunin, owner of Kunin Wines and the Valley Project. We sat outside drinking a grenache wine named after her daughter Phoebe, talking about how she ended up in Santa Barbara. Magan had lived in Chicago most of her life—I’d only been there a year, and already I was thinking of giving up—but her late husband Seth urged her to consider moving here and start a winery. “Sensible people don’t move to Santa Barbara,” Magan told Seth at the time. It was the same thing my partner was telling me. Back on the rails to San Luis Obispo, I brought smoked salmon and three bottles of wine Magan had sent with me to ease the rest of my journey. Amtrak’s complimentary rosé was a great perk, but the Valley Project’s rosé was infinitely better.
At Ebony SLO, an Ethiopian restaurant, owner Feben Teffera is one of the best-dressed and most chic women I’ve ever met in my life. Teffera and I sat outside on the patio and talked for more than an hour about how we both chafed under the expectations of womanhood. To that point, I confessed to her that I was considering not going back to Chicago, that I was disappearing more into California by the day, torn between being single and rootless or making my own family with the man I loved. My avoidance couldn’t be helped, but neither could my desire for home. I decided to wash off my ambivalence by taking a surf lesson in Pismo Beach, which felt right after days of staring at the waves from my perch on the train. I fell off my board constantly, snot and saltwater pouring down my face. My instinct was to give up, but I was also possessed by a manic urge to prove I wasn’t a quitter. This would be a turning point in my life, I decided, the day I’d transmogrify into a person who finished things. A person who stayed. Then I fell again. The board slammed into my head, pushing me beneath the waves. After washing the sand out of my hair, I saw a Washington Post article about an impending railway worker strike. The majority of the railways aren’t owned or operated by Amtrak but by companies like Norfolk Southern, Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary BNSF, CSX, and Union Pacific, where workers weren’t even able to get time off for doctors appointments. Unreservedly, I supported the strikes. But since Amtrak is beholden to the railway companies, a long strike could keep me from traveling for some time. I felt relieved. If the trains stopped running, so could I. Back on the train, I headed to San Francisco on the Coast Starlight, where the train car vanished into California’s golden hills instead of gliding along the ocean. Now in coach, where the bathrooms are dirtier, the wine isn’t free, and the passengers are more diverse in every way. Trains serve people in a way that other modes of transportation don’t. Airfare is expensive. Cars and insurance are expensive. Busses, claustrophobic. Nothing covers distance as comfortably and economically as a train. Everyone deserves this, and those railway workers keep it all moving. On the Coast Starlight, I met, as I often do on trains, a woman who was recently released from prison, heading home. Like many of the formerly incarcerated people, the prison held onto her ID, so a plane wasn’t possible. Her husband was still incarcerated, and she said she planned on taking the train to pick him up when he was eventually released. In San Francisco, public transit took me to the Mission. I could hear preachers moaning, shouting, and
Ethiopian eats at Ebony in San Luis Obispo.
DECEMBER 2022 110
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