KFS to SAC

This week, I once again find myself doing something fun and feel compelled to share it with everyone on the Interweb. I’m on my way to Utah to hang out with my friend Laurenne, riding the train from Klamath Falls to Sacramento to Salt Lake City over the course of thirty hours. At the moment, I’m sitting in the Amtrak station in Sacramento. It’s too cold to go outside and explore right now. As much as I’d like to avoid contemplating the traumatizing train ride I just endured from Klamath Falls without the professional help of a therapist and a chiropractor, I will recount my experiences so we can all wallow in mutually foul moods.

Luckily, the train was late departing Klamath Falls or I would have missed it. I was having too much fun down at the Creamery to pay much attention to the time, and when I got home to prepare to leave it was already 9:30 pm. The train was scheduled to leave at 10:00 pm. I showered as fast as I could and packed up some things I had been saving for the last minute so the trip would be more exciting, and Dad took me down to the train station at 10:05 pm. The train showed up at 10:30 and, after being assigned a seat on the top deck of the two-level train, I climbed on.

I sat next to a kid from Mazama named Eric. He was pretty shy, but we talked for a little while before both trying to fall asleep. Trying to fall asleep in that seat was like trying to make a basket in one of those carnival games where the hoop is smaller than the ball. I gave it a couple stabs, sitting this way and that way, stretching out my legs until I was sliding out of the seat, curling my legs underneath me like a chicken. Eventually I figured out some of the little tricks, like the foot rest I discovered hiding underneath the seat in front of me, and I started wearing both my jackets, one over my legs and one over my head, in order to block out the cold and the light, but let’s face it: the basketball was bigger than the hoop, and no amount of fidgeting in my seat was going to win that ridiculously huge stuffed panda hanging in the smoke cloud above the drugged-up carnie. Eventually, after making all the right adjustments and using the Styrofoam pillow the train so graciously loaned me, I found the perfect sleeping position; that is to say, the basketball was perched in the center of the rim, clearly too big to fall into the folds of the sleepy net below.

After reaching this fateful realization, I began to take more rash shots at the hoop, trying to bend it to my will or otherwise just trying to pass the time, because I really didn’t have anything better to do at three in the morning on a train in the middle of northern California. I tried to sleep with my head between my knees, and with my arms tied into knots. I think I may have spooned Eric for a few minutes. Sorry, man. In the end, nothing worked very well and I resigned to accept that the carnie had won this round. They seem to win every round. Which leads me to an important life lesson which I hope to pass on to my kids someday: If you want to be a winner, become a carnie.