As children, my sister Becky and I traveled with our mother from our home in Iowa to the family farm in Louisiana at least twice a year. My grandmother lived alone on a sugar cane plantation, which is what they called farms in the South, for reasons I did not yet understand. As far as I can remember, she was the only white person anywhere near those cane fields, with the notable exception of Sidney Hebert, pronounced A-Bear.

Sidney was the foreman. His skin was a leathery auburn color that contrasted with his black hair and deep blue eyes. It was too hot to wear cowboy hats, so he wore a short-brimmed straw hat with an intentionally loose weave that seemed designed to circulate both air and dust.

Each summer, Sidney and I rode around the fields in his big white pickup. He talked to me and squeezed my neck with affection. I couldn’t understand a word he said. Sidney was Cajun. The only phrase I understood was his daily greeting, which I also found impossible to answer: “What you say?”

Each morning I stood there perplexed and befuddled, unsure how to respond. Did he mean, what did I just say? Or what would I like to say? I shuffled my feet and looked at Mom. But then we got in the pickup and drove around looking for the lost watermelon patch. And each summer, we eventually found it. Usually on the hottest day. Sidney had a knack for that.

Like most kids, I hadn’t yet developed much sense of time beyond the simple rhythm of day and night or the vague progression of seasons that drifted in and out with little logic. I should mention that I was five for a long time. I think it lasted five years. During that time, Becky progressed up the ladder of age, maturity, and responsibility without me. She never waited. I was always left behind.

Adding to the confusion was my persistent inability to distinguish between two deceptively similar phrases: “golf course” and “Gulf Coast.” Or, as I heard them, “Gorf Corst.”

I remember happily minding my own business, probably playing with my perpetually tangled marionette or one of the nifty free prizes from a box of Cracker Jacks, when Mom’s voice would suddenly ring out: “Are we ready? We’re going to the Gorf Corst. Hurry! Don’t want to be late!”

I’d freeze in panic. Were we heading to the golf course for sledding, which meant bundling up and grabbing extra socks? Or were we packing for the long haul to Louisiana, which meant warm weather, toys galore, hamburgers at drive-ins, and Gamma’s wonderful buttery biscuits? I usually guessed wrong. And Becky always laughed, delighted by my mistake. I felt like the village idiot, bumbling through a world where everyone else seemed to have the script.

The trips to the Gulf Coast were considerably longer than those to the golf course. They required several days of travel, cooped up inside our tiny, two-door tin can Ford Anglia, one in a succession of quirky little foreign cars that seemed to spend most of their time in the shop. Four of us usually made the trip: Mom, Becky, me, and the cat.

Becky and I both coveted the front seat. Mom tried her best to be fair, but neither of us was happy. The unlucky one in the back seat made sure the front-seater paid with foot jabs, hair pulls, nudges, bumps, and other creative forms of torment.

“Mom, Michael’s kicking me!”

“Mom, there’s no room for me to sit back here. Becky pushed the seat all the way back.”

Only if you are an only child could you not relate to this.

When our squabbles escalated, Mom would calmly pull over, open the trunk, and retrieve a toy or puzzle from her peacekeeping stash. It usually did the trick.

Ultimately, the cat suffered the most, particularly on the annual summer trip. We had a small box under the front seat, and the pathetic thing spent most of its time there in the dark, panting and whining in protest the entire way down the Mississippi River valley. Of course, you can guess what happened each time we stopped for gas. The cat jumped out and hid under the car or, if it was really angry, ran off into the bushes, where we had to camp by the roadside until the furry devil cooled down and decided to rejoin us. The timing of capitulation usually coincided with hunger.

Once, we stopped to clean out the box because the cat had just vomited. As soon as the door opened, it sprang out of the car and into a dark culvert. We couldn’t extract it until a kind motorist stopped to help. He came up with the idea of lighting a fire at the other end.

The man had a funny accent. It had occurred to me, even as a kid, that people’s speech changed depending on where they were from. In Iowa, voices carried a bright, chirpy twang, while down in Louisiana, everything shifted to a languid, timeless drawl. This man was somewhere in between. I wondered where, along our route, the twang faded and the drawl began. And I wondered if traveling also changed our own speech. Would we get the linguistic bends if we went too fast?

I was about to find out.

My first real train ride came the following summer, when Mom decided to treat us to a trip down to New Orleans on the Panama Limited. I suspect we had the cat to thank for that.

In those days, Illinois Central ran two trains between Chicago and New Orleans. The Panama Limited was a luxury, all-sleeper night train with private rooms, fold-out beds, and a little box where you could put your shoes at night. By morning, like magic, they had been shined. By contrast, the City of New Orleans was the cheaper, coach-only day train. It later became famous when Steve Goodman wrote a ballad of the same name, about the slow death of rail travel.

It wasn’t easy putting us in sleepers on a fancy train. Mom had always been careful with money. Our father had been a man of the cloth, but he left both the ministry and our family “to sell mountains and bars,” as he told me, or so I recall, out in Colorado. We had enough to get by. Mom rented out her bedroom to exchange students from India while she slept on the living room couch. She probably did that to save up for the extravagance of a train trip.

So, we took the Panama Limited.

The adventure began with a Greyhound bus ride from Iowa City to Chicago, where we caught the big train south to New Orleans, then somehow made our way from there to my grandmother’s farm deep in the bayous. I don’t remember much from when I was five, but I do remember trains. And I remember being five for a long time.

The Panama Limited had private rooms with big picture windows where you could sit and watch the world go by. It was like having a television without the bad reception. At night, the conductor came around and turned the couch into a bed with freshly starched sheets and a blanket if you needed it. The bed was right next to the window, so you could lie there and watch the night scenery flash past: spooky sparks along the rails, people huddled around streetlamps in small towns, sometimes an old DeSoto or Plymouth making its way down a highway, people hanging out the windows. But you couldn’t hear what they were saying. The train window was too thick. No sound came in.

The only sound was the rhythm of the rails below, a deep, primal rhythm that infused me with the opium of wanderlust, though of course I did not know that at the time.

The train had a dining car with china plates emblazoned with the bold brown and burnt auburn colors of the train’s branding, and silverware that was heavier and shinier than ours back home. It had a lounge car where men shared stories and drank alcohol. I knew that because I had to carefully wind my way through a shifting forest of dark suits below a low ceiling of steel-grey smoke to get to the last car on the train: the observation car, with plush armchairs that spun around like barber shop chairs and a teak desk full of Panama Limited postcards and crisp bleached stationery with the embossed logo.

But the most exciting part of the train ride was the chance to listen to the passengers as they boarded at each stop. I wanted to know just where, along the route, the Midwestern twang ended, and the Southern drawl began. Each time the train came to a stop, I slipped out of the compartment and tiptoed down the aisle to the open car door to listen to the conversations on the platform.

People getting off the train. People getting on the train. People meeting people, getting off the train, or saying goodbye to people getting on. Each station had its own voices, its own weather, its own light.

Finally, I found it.

The twang became the drawl at Carbondale, a train stop midway between St. Louis and Memphis. I was so excited. There it was, right there: an inflection point on the continuum. A pin on a map.

Ever since that experience, I’ve been quietly obsessed with continuums and their inflection points, as if they were keepers of secrets. That magical spot where, if you could only put your finger on it, or a map pin, everything might be revealed, and the world might finally begin to make sense.

That first ride on the Panama Limited was just the beginning of my interest in trains, and in continuums. Later, at the turn of the 21st Century, I took a trip that combined both, following the longest stretch of rail on earth. 60 days, 30 trains, and 15,000 miles across the entire Eurasian continent, from the South Pacific to the Arctic.

More coming from the memoir Runaway Train

This is an excerpt from Iron-Headed Old Rat, a memoir from my years in and around China.

I had always wanted to work for Jardine Matheson.

Not because I shared the co-founder's name. Not because of a swashbuckling history that began nearly two hundred years earlier as opium smugglers on the southern coast of China. Not because they were still doing business in China from their headquarters atop the tallest building in Asia.

And certainly not because I had any inkling that Jimmy Carter was about to announce the recognition of the People’s Republic of China, opening the floodgates to a tumbling, thundering stampede of American cowboys, oilmen, advertisers, schlockmeisters, and snake-oil salesmen, all dreaming of selling “a bicycle light, and a battery as well, to every one of them billion Chinese.”

No, I wanted to work for Jardine Matheson simply because it would be much better than my previous job in a mine in Colorado, and likely better than the one that awaited me in Taiwan, where I had a gig lined up to teach English to spoiled rich kids.

I had heard of Jardine Matheson while studying Chinese (another story). “Oh look, a company with my name,” and “oh my, they operate in China,” and “wow, at one point in time they accounted for half of the country’s foreign trade?” and then “What, they smuggled opium?”

In 1978, when I graduated from college with a degree in Chinese language, it was not possible for Americans to even visit “Red China.” So upon graduation, my girlfriend Debbie and I set off on an elaborate, six-month reconnoiter of the countries and regions bordering China, from Taipei to Tehran, Tbilisi, Tashkent, and Tokyo, by way of Kathmandu, Kabul, Khabarovsk, and Kyoto, with a few stops in Singapore, Srinagar, Sochi, and Samarkand. Behind the itinerary was a subconscious hope that, by circumventing China, I might glean a few morsels of the mysteries that lay within. It was a step below the old parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which each man touches one part and mistakes it for the whole. I wasn’t even touching the elephant. I was outside the tent, trying to infer what animal it was from the shape it made on the canvas.

Before leaving, I sent a letter to ‘To whom it may concern’ at Jardine corporate headquarters in Hong Kong. It stated simply that I was American, that my name was Jardine, that I spoke Chinese fluently (a slight exaggeration), and that I was curious whether there might be a connection between my family and the company's founder. I thought it was subtle.

At the time I sent the letter, the company had over 50,000 employees spread across a corporate empire that included China and most other countries in the Far East. Their original opium trade had expanded into shipping, airlines, banking, insurance, hotels, real estate, and, of course, trading.

I received a reply. It was shorter than my own letter and more to the point. “Thank you for your interest in our company. Regarding your curiosity about a family connection, may we suggest you contact the Jardine Clan Society in Edinburgh?”

My second contact with the company came through a Texas oilman who happened to manage an offshore oil business for Jardine in Singapore. By coincidence, he was a friend of my late father, an Episcopalian minister in the deep South.

He said, “I’d like to help you, but I’m afraid all I can offer is a grunt job on one of our offshore rigs. If you want to hire on as an executive, you’ll have to go to London. And it would help if you were a graduate of either Oxford or Cambridge.”

By the time Debbie and I reached Kashmir in the autumn of 1978, the idea of working for Jardine Matheson had faded into a distant fantasy. We took a dilapidated bus from Srinagar to the Sonamarg valley, nestled between glaciers cascading down from snow-covered peaks on both sides. Our accommodation was a chalet owned by the Indian government, which we rented for $5 a day. It was large, warm, and comfortable. The low fee was almost a fair exchange for the chalet's only heat: a fireplace with a faulty damper that left our clothes smelling of creosote for the rest of the trip.

Each morning, a breakfast of sweet Indian milk tea, toast, and poached eggs appeared on a rickety card table in the large lawn outside our front door. It was rustic, but the view was breathtaking.

We spotted a casually well-dressed couple meandering toward us along a path that descended from the upper reaches of the valley. It seemed they might have taken the wrong exit from a theater.

He wore a pin-striped shirt and a sweater draped around his neck, and pressed jeans. His partner had a quilted hunting jacket and fresh white tennis shoes. Her earrings glinted in the sun.

At the same time, they too spotted us, so I gave a friendly wave. Taking this as an invitation, they strolled right up to our rickety table, just as we were breaking the yolks. Steam rose from the tea into the cold morning.

“My, that looks civilized,” he smiled, brushing back a dangling arm of his sweater and revealing a jauntily loosened necktie.

Yikes. An Englishman.

I rushed to stand, spilling tea in the process and nearly upending the table.

“I say,” he began, confirming his nationality. “That looks most civilized.” The use of the superlative sealed it: British.

“My word, you even have poached eggs!” she exclaimed, over-inflecting her vowels in the way only Germans manage.

We invited them to join us. They did. Two more plates with eggs and tea appeared from a boy who apparently lived under the house.

“We’ve just returned from an absolutely appalling few days on a fishing excursion,” the man said after introductions. “Fifty dollars a night for conditions that made my years in the service seem luxurious!”

“Are you in the Army?” I asked.

“Not anymore. I was stationed in Hong Kong, at a barracks near the border with China, until just last year.”

“We absolutely loved it there,” his wife chirped, “especially the shopping! You can get anything in Hong Kong. So when Ray’s conscription ended, we had to decide whether to go back to England…”

“Or leave the service and join the private sector,” Ray finished. “With a military background, it’s remarkably easy to move into business. British firms prefer to have their personnel managed by ex-military.”

“When Ray’s superior, Major-General Douglas Withers, left to become the Personnel Director of a major trading firm, he asked Ray to join him. It took us minutes to accept!”

“We were just in Hong Kong,” Debbie said. “I got this lovely cashmere sweater there at the Communist department store. It’s so soft! Who do you work for?”

“Jardine Matheson,” Ray replied.

The Yangon circular railway makes a long, slow circle around the entire city, taking several hours. Some people use it to visit relatives. Others take it as a kind of circus ride, something to do with the kids on the weekend. Either way, everyone is watching everyone else, including the vendors at the stations.

This taxi driver in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, seemed totally lost in thought and oblivious to anyone outside his window. Or maybe he was just waiting for the light to turn red?

From the other side of a taxi window, on the way out of Cairo to the pyramids of Giza, we started a conversation with our driver about family, since I was traveling with my son Jon-Erik. The driver proudly pulled out four photos of his own children. Mirrors are windows, too.

On a recent visit to Afghanistan, we traveled to Bamyan in a two-vehicle convoy. In the front car, Lisa spotted three handsome Taliban fellows on a small motorcycle and snapped a picture from her open window — the first image below.

They did not take kindly to being photographed and began following her car. Our driver, behind them, noticed what was happening. He followed the motorcycle closely, then expertly forced it off the road by pulling over as he passed them.

He had a lively conversation with them in Dari about why they were following the car in front. They explained that they did not want their picture taken.

At this point, Dolf, not understanding the conversation, snapped the second picture. I snapped the third.

The incident was resolved when Lisa and Dolf agreed to delete their images from their phones.

These four seemed amused by the tourist pointing his camera out of the train's bathroom window. It was the only window in the train car that opened to the outside. Or maybe it was just the thin air? Qinghai Plateau, China.

Standing on the platform at Harajuku Station, trains on the Yamanote Line pass every five minutes in each direction on their circular route around the center of Tokyo. I didn’t notice the two people waiting for a train in the opposite direction until I looked at the photo later.

On the ‘sky train’ to Tibet, the scenery changed from lakes and rivers to soaring peaks and high-desert landscapes. This photo of my daughter Josephine and a fellow traveler shows no one on the other side of the window, as seen from someone on the same side.

On the train from Delhi to Jaipur, Katherine snapped this photo of a passing train, window to window. The graininess from the darkness adds a layer of mystery.

The Amtrak Cascades from Seattle to Vancouver follows the coast and, at points, crosses wide river mouths as they reach the sea. For a moment, the train feels almost like a boat, with water visible through the windows on both sides. This was just days before Covid hit.

Leaving Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is always a pleasure because of this two-sided glass wall, stained with transparent images of tree rings, the living grain that supported both the city and the aerospace industry back when the Spruce Goose was made of wood.

Japan is a mixture of quiet Zen design and visual cacophony. The stillness seems to make room for the chaos, and the chaos makes the stillness visible.

Houseboat lovers at the window, Bremerton Harbor.

And sometimes, there is nobody on either side of the window, and it hasn’t been for quite some time.

There’s much talk about how AI will make it easier to design user interfaces (the screen of your iPhone) and human-machine interfaces (everything from your steering wheel to your toaster), so that we humans can better and more easily understand how to interact with all our devices. And there’s no question that AI can speed up the design process. But from what I’ve seen so far, the results are muddled. And mottled, too. To me, all this increased speed and volume of output has created more issues than answers.

And while we’re at it, can you help us with another fundamental issue?

To elucidate…

Stop burning my Toast, SirLexa!

Most of us humans want to know where things are. That may sound obvious, but apparently it is not. Take my toaster. When the toast is in and the toaster is toasting, which single button or switch do you think is more important than anything else?

Right! The ‘end’ button. You know, to pop the toast out because, guess what, your sensors aren’t working again, so it’s burning. The equivalent of the ‘esc’ key on my keyboard.

Have I taken a stupid pill, or is that function hidden away in a “sensitivity dial”? Yes, I can learn to turn the dial back down towards 0 - after all, I’m human, and the price of that learning is only one piece of burnt toast. But because I am a digital nomad who wanders from one AirB&B to another, I can end up with a lot of burnt toast.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the price is not burnt toast. It can be a lot higher. Imagine you are driving in your smart car. You have the AI drive set to ‘self-driving’ or something more legally legitimate like ‘drive assist.’ You take your hands off the steering wheel for a moment to fiddle with the YouTube app on your iPhone, trying to figure out how to stop a video and get back to the main screen (no back button and no prominent pause button). You slam into the car that was stopped for a red light in front of you because you had inadvertently canceled ‘drive assist’ when your hand grazed the non-haptic touch sensor on your steering wheel. At least the airbags worked, right?

So, what can AI learn about us humans that can actually provide benefit?

1. Stop changing the fundamental stuff.

   Humans only like change when it’s cosmetic. You know, like the same old Cheerios in a box that says “new and improved.” Change the colors, freshen up a font, move the sprinkles around if you must. That’s allowed. I know this sounds complicated and fickle, but follow the Cheerios example: reassure us that your marketing department is still above ground, then leave us alone to eat our favorite breakfast.

2. Understand the balance.
   Avoid interface clutter, but please, please, stop hiding the critical stuff. We don’t like burnt toast, and we don’t like t-boning other cars.

3. Give us clues.

   We may not like reading manuals, but humans are not clairvoyant. If something is new, hidden, gesture-based, AI-powered, or mysteriously “contextual,” give us a hint before we start poking at the screen like raccoons trying to open a cooler.

4. Stop creeping me. And when you do, get it right.
   I find it weird to talk to inanimate objects. And I find it really weird when those inanimate objects - the ones that are always listening to our conversations - suddenly, and completely unprompted, hallucinate and think I’m saying “blow up the house” when I actually said, “Show up at the house.”

Siri, are you listening?

Lagniappe

** Bonus: Which of the above four “learns” was generated by AI?

Thanks to these humans on unsplash:

Andrés Dallimonti and Maxim on Unsplash