All my holiday memories begin with the bleating of an alarm and being ripped from restorative sleep into confused panic – who’s dead? What’s on fire? – until I remember and silence the source of the sound. I’m bleary and weary, double-checking the bags I packed the night before. The holidays would officially begin a long way away from the warmth of plastic lights on a plastic tree – my mother’s victory after decades of fighting against the mess of a dying tree only she would clean up after – the ruckus of other people’s children, and a buffet of poorly made casseroles.
Journeys in and out of my home state of Kansas always started this way, because getting in and out of Kansas – whose public transportation system is at this point almost entirely nonexistent – is onerous. While passenger rail and then intercity buses used to link up even the smaller towns with the larger cities and out to the rest of the nation, what we are left with is one major airport in the neighboring state of Missouri, one Amtrak train that lumbers through Kansas in the dead of night, a couple buses that may or may not actually be running that day as scheduled, and long stretches of interstate highways.
One of the most iconic rail lines in America started in Kansas – the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe – but its disappearance in the 1970s was part of the postwar push toward atomization and disconnection: suburbs were prized over mixed-use urban spaces; automobile ownership was prized over public transportation. Given the thriving middle class, prioritizing the individual’s freedom almost made sense.
But as fortunes declined and the chasm between the haves and have-nots turned into one of the great wonders of the world, fewer people could take advantage of those freedoms. And the social systems that offered an alternative had long been degraded. Being priced out of car or home ownership isn’t just a disappointment of personal ambitions. It’s how you get pulled off the stage of your own life with a giant hook, forced into invisibility and irrelevance.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the severing of the rail lines that connected Kansas outward to the rest of the country happened at about the time when Kansas disappeared from popular culture – no longer the setting of films like Paper Moon, no longer the site of Judy Garland singing jaunty little tunes – and its politics turned paranoid and malignant.
Which is why my memories of holiday travel are visceral. I remember the heaviness of fatigue, the freezing temperatures of stations and sidewalk pickup points, the stuffy stench on overheated buses, the fast food and feet funk of a train that most people around you have been riding for two days, the thick ashy coffee of truck stops and fast-food restaurants that enlivens your body more with adrenaline and cortisol than alertness.
It was a good year when I had a car and knew I could afford the gas for a trip that would last seven, 10, 12 or 20 hours each way, depending on where I was living that year for work. Each hour driving was an hour spent not working and not earning, each hour clawed away from a reluctant supervisor and each potential dollar subtracted from my revenue.
On a really good year, I could spend more than $500 for the privilege of a couple flights – Kansas City and other smaller airports having their direct flights routinely cut to save the airlines money, requiring one or two transfers with leisurely layovers – or a little less on a ticket for a day-long train ride that would still get me nowhere near home.
Even if there is a cheerful greeting at the airport or a weary one at the train station – since the only daily arrival is at 2.50am – that is still only the midpoint of the journey. There is still a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the airport, or two hours from the train station in Newton.
For those whose relationships with their families are fraught, these holiday journeys back home start to feel like a trap, or like the quicksand all the adventure books we read as children promised we would one day encounter and need a strategy for. Fighting it only makes it worse; the only hope is in surrender, to let your body go slack and hope that you will be spat back out rather than swallowed. The effort needed to maintain connection through hurt feelings and political polarization starts to feel less worth it when it also comes with lost days of expensive travel.
Even that is better than the reverse experience: of being young and born in a place that does not sustain you, that is maybe actively hostile to your very existence if your gender or sexuality or religion doesn’t match everyone else’s expectations, but knowing that escaping would require resources of time and money that feel impossible to amass as the price of cars spirals ever upward for no other reason than corporate profit.
Much of the midwest, south and west – really anything west of Chicago, south of St Louis or east of Reno – exists in this vacuum-sealed state. Deemed problematic by the coasts, this mushy middle often remains underserved by its own governors and legislators and cut off from cultural supply lines and opportunities for mobility and influence.
Any improvement in access – an Amtrak project to open a Wichita station closed since the 1970s – is swiftly followed by more setbacks: Greyhound shutting down stations all over the country. The residents’ lives and problems seem invisible and unimportant to the rest of the world. Unless individuals can accumulate the cultural, educational or material capital to make a break for it, they can find themselves stuck. And if they do manage to leave, it’s easier, then, to stay away, given all that is required to return.
Isolated regions can behave like isolated individuals, turning suspicious and resentful, or arrogant in anticipation of receiving criticism. This is the state, after all, where when I have said its people deserve certain things – healthcare in rural areas, public transportation accessible to all classes, local earnings staying in the local economy instead of being drained off by corporations like Walmart and dollar stores – I’ve been told that if you want something, you have to work harder to deserve it. According to this logic, making things available for everyone, no matter their circumstances, will only make people weak.
The passenger train that ran through the county of my childhood has long since disappeared, and this holiday will be spent solo, as has become the custom for me. The distance between my origin point and where I am now – both literal and metaphorical – has become too far to traverse, even for bad casserole made with cream of mushroom soup as the central ingredient.
I can’t help but think the thing that would have saved us is an easier way in and out: a local train, a bus that actually runs, a regional airport that doesn’t double the price of your ticket. If I hadn’t had to spend so many years planning my grand escape, I could have spent that time engaged with my surroundings and my community.
Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist
