"Alone?" they ask me, incredulous, concerned. Not alone, I want to say. I travel surrounded by ghosts. The echoing whispers of their lives roll down these tracks and weave through the air, a constant murmur in the back of my mind that says "you are not the first." My great-grandmother rode this train to New Mexico with a trunk full of beautiful clothes, and somehow this knowledge has changed the shape of my backpack; my great-great-grandmother followed this road when it was a path cut through the prairie and the wheels of our car must be pressing down on her ancient footprints; my great-great-great-grandfather picked his way down these country lanes on mule and buggy and I can smell that journey in the air, muleshit and sweat. These empty deserts are full of cowboys and these industrial backwaters have known a thousand laborers. None of us are alone.
Besides, I want to say, even without these accompanying shades, company abounds. My mother texts, my boyfriend calls, my cell phone shows my twitter updates and who messaged me on Facebook. Every time I step off the train I walk towards family, towards a world where the quiet corners of my brain must be twisted into a socially-acceptable shape, where at dinner I am polite instead of moody and warm instead of cold. The most basic duties we take on when we decide to live with other people - I take them for granted until I visit my grandfather, who has dropped these duties (and others) in the dirt of his past. Seeing him reminds me that I do not ever live alone. And in my bags I carry letters, cards, loaned books, little bits of other people. In the seats next to me and the rooms across the hall sit strangers and we ask each other "Where ya headed?" and share our stories. Even in the middle of an endless desert, in a little steel-and-glass shell slipping between canyon walls, there's no alone.
But I know that's not really what they're asking me. They're asking, "Aren't you afraid?" And to answer I return to ghosts: my great-grandmother came out here when the west was lawless and Las Vegas a place where the sins were deadly, not sexy. My grandfather barely spoke English when he crossed this country in the colored sections of these trains. My great-grandfather hopped freight trains with hobos in the great depression, fleeing along the dark and dirty edges of a civilization that seemed to be crumbling away. And I've got a cell phone and credit cards, the internet at my fingertips, friends in every state, and the kind of face policemen look kindly upon.
This isn't scary. If anything, it's too easy.
But I don't say any of this. I smile and say last summer I traveled alone in the Philippines, and that this is far less scary - deflecting their concern to a trip safely in the past, one I clearly survived. To one woman, with a friendly smile and precocious children, I dare to tell a bit of the truth - that traveling "just one, please" is easier, less stressful, because there's only me to deal with. When something goes wrong, it's just me to fix it. When the nights are uncomfortable and the mornings weary, there's no snappy arguments because there's nobody to fight with. When the days are long and slow there's nobody to keep entertained - just me, and I stretch my arms and yawn and open my netbook and I know that I'm fine. There's no negotiations over when to stop and where to eat and who needs what and how we get it. When it's just me, traveling is easy. She nods like she understands and her son’s green eyes are watching me and they remind me of myself, when I was ten years old, and really believed in adventures.
But I don't tell anybody that I'm not alone at all. When I was in the Philippines I rode down a mountain on the back of a stranger's motorcycle and felt a single, pure moment of ecstasy. I realized that no one in the world knew where I was, except for Jun-jun, my ride - and he didn't know who I was. For this brief moment I existed only with and for and in myself. And yet I knew I was riding this motorcycle, the quick way down the mountain, because I had promises to keep, and miles to go and so on, and that there were people waiting for me just around the corner of my life, and I could not disappear. One moment behind the curtains, but the show goes on. The web that ties me to the people in my life is stronger than the distances I test it with, far stronger than these teasing absences.
Sometimes I have the face of a girl who is careful and does not make mistakes, the kind of girl who savors quiet adventures and plans a responsible career and makes clever small talk and will laugh at your jokes, and this is the face I wear to dinner on the train. I lost my nose ring in California, I brush my hair each morning, I work on my laptop, I do not flirt with strangers, I do not drink, I do not curse, I do not argue. I would trust me to watch my laptop. I would let me talk to my children. And this is the person strangers fear to see alone in the world, the person other people's parents reach for with concern.
I am as vulnerable as they need me to be, obligingly nodded my head like a wide-eyed ingenue as they warn me that New Orleans isn't the world's safest place. Strangers surround me with compassionate concern everywhere I turn, every time I return a glance. And yet they think I am alone?
In the dining car, surrounded by the noise of wheels on track and engine through air and wind through sagebrush and knives clattering on plastic, I sit by the window. I sip coffee from a plastic cup. I cannot see the other passengers; I'm staring out towards distant mountains as the sunlight turns golden on the sagebrush, watching two delicate deer, ears up high. I only look alone.
