Pay As You Go

The train station of Raton, New Mexico, seemed little more than a cement slab, simmering in the June heat. In cooler weather, in less dramatic circumstances, I'd probably have enjoyed the history of the mission-style building. The station defied all my expectations of rail travel. The terminal building was locked.  No smartly-dressed porter in a tie greeted me. No one carried a pocket watch.

It was 1997. I was earnest and crying and twenty years old. I said, I can’t believe this is how we end. It’s not, she responded, we’ll see each other again. The capstone project of her senior year in college was to take place among the red rock of the southwest. My crappy summer job was to transpire back home in the humid flora of the southeast. I’d wanted to see her off, so we’d wended our way from school in Chicago to this train platform in Raton, from weeds to wheat to cacti to the simmering slab. I boarded the train with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a whole supermarket rotisserie chicken. I had a change of clothes and a jacket and a couple of books. And I was broke.

I was always broke, of course, but now I was broker than usual, so broke I hadn’t contributed to gas or food on the trip. And now she was not only bidding goodbye to me, but to twenty-five of her dollars that she could not spare, pocket money for the train that more than doubled my pathetic savings. 

My Amtrak route would backtrack me from Raton to Chicago, then send me on home to Greensboro, North Carolina, where my father would meet me. Cacti to wheat to weeds to kudzu. Amtrak would demand payment in Greensboro when I claimed the boxes containing the contents of my dorm room that I had shipped ahead, but that was a problem for Greensboro.

I read James Joyce on the train. When I was done with the book, I bought a newspaper. I ate my chicken and my peanut butter, but when I tired of it, I bought train food. During my layover in Chicago, I splurged, took a bus from the station and went to a Bruce Willis movie. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I watched the dollars dwindling from my wallet, but hey, I still had that twenty-five in reserve.

When I returned to the terminal after the movie, that twenty-five was all I had left. It was late, but over an hour until my train was to leave, and the grand hall of Union Station was nearly deserted. After perhaps thirty minutes, I realized that a man who had been hugging the wall was now looking occasionally in my direction. He was dressed shabbily, and acting peculiarly. After five minutes of milling around the lobby, looking at me but not looking at me, he approached directly. He sat down on the bench facing mine, and informed me that for only twenty dollars, he could go to a shelter where he could have a meal and a private room for the night.

 I nodded, and set my jaw gravely, and reflected for a moment. My parents supported my tuition, room, and board at a pricy private university, a place where my friends watched out for me, advised me when I was doing something stupid. My girlfriend, a year older and ten years more responsible, picked up the tab for me at the movies and the grocery store and the bar. This man standing in front of me looked more desperate than I had ever been. Desperate enough to rob me if I refused? It seemed unlikely his girlfriend or his dad would buy him a rotisserie chicken tonight. And Bruce Willis was completely out of the question. And hey, what could happen to me between Chicago and Greensboro? Would I really even need money? Heck, I wouldn’t even be off the train.

So I gave him twenty dollars.

Even as the cash left my hand, I regretted it. What had seemed compassionate only an instant earlier now seemed incredibly stupid. Somewhere in the wilds of Arizona was a struggling young woman who had only a thousand dollars to live on for the entire summer, and had entrusted me with twenty-five of them. I had given away her gift. I was five states away from home, with only five hundred pennies between me and calamity. For the first time, I was truly at the world’s mercy, with no one to bail me out. What will I do, I thought, if I’m somehow stranded in the next thirty minutes, and need a hotel? God, what if someone steals my backpack? Forget that, what if I simply get hungry? What if something bad happens?

Nothing bad happened. I didn’t need a hotel. No one stole my backpack. And I had enough peanut butter. Nothing went south for me, as the train entered the Southland. But I fretted, and cursed myself, the entire way. My face kept going red. I imagined the other passengers could tell how foolishly I’d acted, just by looking at me.

In Greensboro, I asked my father to ransom my boxes from Amtrak. I had asked the man for money countless times in my two decades, but for the first time ever, I was ashamed. It wasn’t an expensive fee, maybe fifteen dollars. He paid it readily, and I was truly thankful. Truly.

Privilege is a strange thing, because it’s invisible to the privileged. Those who have never been underprivileged sometimes think they have been. Which is not to suggest, of course, that my single day of dangerous living qualified me as “underprivileged.” I did not have that unhappy distinction then, nor have I since that day. But my time on the train, with a fiver my major resource, did teach me the importance of self-sufficiency. Of pride in doing for myself. It’s easy to fall into the habit of relying on others to carry us, when we’ve always been carried. And it’s easy to give something away, when we don’t really know its value.

Now I'm sliding towards my mid-thirties. I’m married to the girl on the Raton train platform. She’s forgiven me for the twenty-five dollars, mostly. I still give money away sometimes. But when I write a check to a charity, or hold out a handful of change to a man on the street, I appreciate my conscious decision, at that moment, to part with that resource. And it makes me all the more thankful that I am not canvassing a train station myself, begging the funds for a meal and a bed. We all pay as we go.

Comments

[April]

I vaguely remember that trip, but it is nice to read about it ten years later with your reflections. Well written.

[Aaron Ragan-Fore]

Thanks for your comments, Jesse. Definitely a life-changing experience. Sometimes it seems like the *less* dramatic moments in life are the ones that change a person.

[Jesse Ragan]

Aaron, this is a really touching piece. It succinctly evokes several aspects of your nature with a genuinely open heart. I remember you taking that trip, but I only knew the basic details. I'm glad to have a fuller picture of your experience now.