In the Amtrak breakfast car this morning we sat opposite a polite and pleasant older American couple. They introduced themselves as Mack and Billy. They had been to Chicago to see one of their (grown) children and had decided to return to Denver by rail so as to see ‘some of the country’. In addition to the daughter in Chicago, they had twins, a son and a daughter, based in San Francisco and Boston respectively. All of their children were in steady relationships and had had children of their own. Mack , a proud grandfather, had just turned seventy. On hearing my English accent he told me that he was still working – for a British company, based in Hull. He frequently visited Hull, taking direct flights from Denver to Schiphool and then a hopper flight to Hull. It wasn’t that tiring, he told me. Theirs was a quintessentially American life, I first thought. How many Europeans would be happy to work into their seventies or, at such an age, be ready to step onto trans-continental flights every time they wanted to see their grandchildren? But, then, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that Europeans have been quietly becoming more American – in that regard at least. Towards the ends of their lives my own parents, for example, had to travel to the Isle of Skye, Brussels and Prague if they wanted to see their children and their children’s children. Cheap flights have made such travel affordable and developments such as the end of the Cold War, fall of the Iron Curtain, European integration (particularly the Single Market), the Schengen Agreement and programmes such as Erasmus have encouraged Europeans to move around far more (with inevitable consequences in terms of relationships). This point was excellently illustrated by this entry in this year’s edition of the EESC’s annual video clip competition. Working into his seventies was clearly Mack’s personal choice but in Europe, as in America, standard retirement ages are creeping up to 67 and 68.

Last night we gazed out on the endless cornfields of Iowa. I was aware of those native indian ghosts again – ‘Iowa’, after all, was the name of a Sioux tribe that once hunted its endless plains. Like Illinois to the east, it was first ‘discovered’ by the French but organised settlement began only in the late 1700s. It passed to the USA under the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Once the local Indians had been driven into a small settlement and replaced by European settlers, Iowa was incorporated as an independent territory and in 1846 it was the 29th state to be admitted to the Union. This morning, having climbed overnight to the Plateau of the Great Plains, we gazed on the vast open fields of Nebraska (from the Omaha Indian name for the Platte River). This was where the American bison once roamed in vast herds of tens of thousands before being hunted almost to extinction in the late 19th century, primarily by market hunters. They were hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animal left to rot on the ground.  (Buffalo Bill Cody once killed over a hundred of the animals in a single stand and such hunters would have killed thousands in a career). I have chosen as my illustration a picture of a pile of bison skulls, taken in the 1870s, which rather says it all.  Nebraska’s recent history was similar to that of Iowa, though it was more of a transit territory for pioneers on their way to the West. It was declared a US territory in 1854 and in 1867 became the 37th state of the Union. Now, big herds of black cattle graze where the bison once roamed, giving a faint hint of how things might have appeared a century-and-ago. The Indians, meanwhile – the Dakota, Omaha, Cheyenne, Pawnee and many other tribes – have been penned back into reservations. Only their ghosts roam the plains.

This could maybe sound like Old World snobbishness, but it’s not meant that way. I am interested in the way Americans use language and the English language in particular. For many, it is not their mother tongue. As British English speakers within the EU institutions become unthinkingly tolerant about their colleagues’ ‘globish’, so all Americans are, it seems to me, unthinkingly tolerant of their compatriots’ English. Grammatical errors, approximations, liberal insertion of foreign words, slang and jargon, free invention – all are tolerated unthinkingly. There is a sort of mutual solidarity in this acceptance. It reinforces the ‘melting pot’ image, as if to say ‘we’re all migrants here!’ It also makes American English a living language in a way that British English isn’t necessarily. Perhaps this is what enables Americans to come up so often with witty new composite words, such as ‘staycation’ (a holiday spent at home) and ‘adulescence’ (an adult displaying adolescent behaviour) – two words that I have heard on this trip. Then there is the way Americans seem to assert authority in language through the use of more words. We have been told, for example, to stay in our seats ‘until the train has come to a complete and final stop’ (I think we would just say ‘stopped’). ‘No smoking allowed’, says one sign; ‘danger of traffic activity’, says another (in the UK that would be ‘No smoking’ and ‘Danger; traffic’, respectively). Then there is what I like to call the loquacious officiousness of petty authority. I don’t mean this negatively, but give an American some sort of uniform and s/he will be waiting, chest puffed, for a chance to give some sort of public announcement or instruction (multiply that by ten if a microphone is at hand). I think this is because there is a deeply ingrained sense of civic duty: authority, no matter at what level, is a responsibility and a duty and should be respected as such by both giver and receiver. It goes together with the extraordinary civility and politeness of most Americans. I heard the best example of this phenomenon so far in the Art Institute in Chicago. A young man working on a new exhibition space wheeled a loaded trolley with some wood through a gallery. I suspect that in most European galleries a similar worker would simply say ‘excuse me’ as he wheeled his trolley through; not in Chicago. The man clapped his hands and, without the slightest sense of irony said the following (I noted it down on the spot):  ‘Ah, ladies and gentleman, thank you for your attention, please. We have a loaded trolley situation here. I would be grateful if you could all stand to the left while I proceed through this gallery. Thank you.’

At one stage this afternoon we crossed the mighty Mississippi River and, in so doing crossed the State Line from Illinois to Iowa. The bridge, with a swing section for big ships, isn’t much to write home about but the river is broad and, yes, it just keeps rolling along – for 4,000 kilometres, to be precise, being the largest river system in the US. Indian ghosts are again present in the river’s name which comes from Messipi, the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river, Misi-ziibi (Great River).

I was planning on running early this morning, but a massive storm broke over the city and I couldn’t get out until almost eight. The sky was suddenly blue again and the only traces of what had come before were the litter bins that had been blown all over Chicago’s north shore beaches. With a placid Lake Michigan beside me (difficult to believe that anything so huge could be a lake!) I ran up the shore to the zoo and back. The view of the city from the north shore is lovely (especially because the Willis Tower cannot be seen). About halfway along my path I came across a bust on a plinth of Emanuel Swedenborg. What on earth was it doing there? I e-mailed a knowledgeable Swedish friend. Back immediately came his reply: ‘Swedenborg was immensely respected, a kind of Einstein of his age. And the Mid-West was settled by Scans. It takes only a few wealthy Scan-fans to raise a statue.’ And he was right, as this link and this one show! Strange, though, to see such an isolated memorial to a once famous European. He now shares that particular stretch of the shoreline with an American Indian chief. We spent the rest of the morning exploring Chicago’s architecture, and then it was time for us to board a train again – this time the California Zephyr, bound for Denver. Everybody in our group had been enchanted with Chicago and vowed to come again.

Our hotel is at the northern end of the ‘Magnificent Mile’ (Michigan Avenue). After inadvertently eating a lunchtime pizza at famous Gino’s (we wondered why our pizzas took so long!) we walked down the Mile to Millenium Park. Chicago was really sweltering today (well over 100° F), so we were aiming at the cool indoors of the Art Institute. On the way, though, we stopped off at Anish Kapoor’s iconic public sculpture, Cloud Gate, which has clearly become an integral part of the city’s urban fabric and interacts so well with the skyscrapers behind it and the crowds around it, like a gigantic version of a fairground mirror. Behind it, we visited the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion, with its cleverly-designed spans bringing all of the audience in the adjoining park into the intimacy of the performing space, and just opposite Renzo Piano’s modern wing of the Art Institute. But we headed first to the original Art Institute  and, as my little picture illustrates (I was trying to look suitably Gothic), it is jam-packed full of well-known works, both European (Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, Toulouse-Latrec, Seurat, Van Gogh) and American (including Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks), as well as containing a wealth of less well-known but equally precious works and objects. The modern wing is just as rewarding. (My favourite work there was Charles Ray’s Hinoki.) Afterwards, I bowed out of a visit to the Sears Tower (now re-baptised as the Willis Tower), for long the tallest building in the world and one that I find rather ugly (certainly when compared with the Hancock Tower). An Irish pub dinner rounded off a hectic, and very hot, day. My younger brother lived in Chicago for a while and had given me the addresses of a number of jazz clubs, but with only one night in the city and potential restrictions on entry for our young companions (ID requests for any drinks are a constant refrain), we decided we’d have to give them a miss this time.

We were serenaded during the night by the almost constant hooting of our locomotive’s horn. This was not the harsh, steam-powered whistle of a steam engine but a low, sonorous, evocative, multi-noted tone that will be familiar to anybody who has been to the States. But why do they hoot so often? The answer is that the law obliges trains to hoot for fifteen to twenty seconds before any level crossing and on the particular stretch of line that we travelled last night there are an awful lot of level crossings. I had hoped to provide a link here to a newspaper article, unfortunately lost, that I read earlier during this trip about some poor town somewhere in middle America that is a junction town and has several important freight lines running through it. Local residents are campaigning for the fifteen to twenty second law to be changed because there are nights when they simply cannot get to sleep because so much hooting is going on…

I shall spare Amtrak’s blushes and just say that we got into Chicago (another Union Station) in the morning and were immediately whisked off on a guided tour of the city. Numerous songs have been written about this city and with good reason. Maybe there is something in the air, but everybody in our group immediately felt the attractive ‘vibes’ of the city. We stopped off on the shore at Northerly Island Park to look back at the famous skyline (picture – me roasting in the heatwave in the foreground). It truly is a beautiful city. Our guide took us out to Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs). I was fascinated by the ‘Wrigley Rooftops’ phenomenon (the owners of houses overlooking the Field have built seating onto their rooftops!). Inevitably, the guide took us to the site of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre (now an anonymous parking lot) but the one that interested me was the Biograph Theater in North Lincoln Avenue. The theater is on the National Register of Historic Places and, as a recognised Chicago Landmark, has a plaque on its wall. But the theatre is also renowned as the place where FBI agents shot John Dillinger in July 1934. A scourge for the authorities, Dillinger’s bank robbing prowess turned him into a sort of folk hero (in the 1930s, banks had a nasty habit of failing and wiping out hard working people’s savings in one fell swoop). Indeed, one of my main gripes about the film starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger is that the audience isn’t given a sufficient sense of why he was popular. After his death, women dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood…

We travelled on an Amtrak train from New York but this Washington to Chicago trip is our first experience of an Amtrak overnight train. The trains are huge double deckers, with sleeping cars, a dining car and a bar. Amtrak owns the trains, but it does not own the tracks, so the passenger trains are frequently directed into sidings whilst extraordinarily long freight trains (in general, well over a hundred wagons) rumble past. Thus, the timetables can be works of considerable fiction (is there any other rail system where freight takes precedence over passengers, I wonder?) The train took us through Harpers Ferry and other historic Civil War sites and then up through the picturesque Allegheny Mountains. As we crossed the Maryland/Pennsylvania State Line we were also crossing the famous Mason/Dixon Line (it became the dividing line between free and slave states). I am sure I’ll be writing more about the Amtrak experience and the rituals of dining cars and sleeping car attendants. Tonight the observation car is full of Amish people (who cannot travel by plane) and we are already becoming familiar with their Swiss German dialect. Before dinner we fell in with two black gentlemen, Michael and Clarence, who were in infectiously good humour, constantly laughing and joking. We asked them to join us at our table in the dining car and so got talking.  Like us, they were making the trip of a lifetime. In Clarence’s case because he was retiring (that’s Clarence in the picture). They were travelling across country to Seattle (‘we want to see the whole country’) and then would fly up to Alaska to fish salmon. Clarence talked about roots. On their mother’s side they had been able to trace their roots back through Jamaica to Ghana (their great-grandmother). Their mother had herself come to New York at the age of 14 and had worked her way up until she owned a chain of beauty parlours. On their father’s side, they could only trace their roots back to their great grandfather and his bill of sale in Alabama, where he was bought (as a slave).  There was that sense of perpetual frustration, experienced by many black Americans, of not knowing where they are originally from (Obama writes very powerfully about that in Dreams From My Father). Back in the sleeping car, I asked the attendant for a ‘little ice’ for our nightcap. He returned with a cardboard bucket full of crushed ice. Did he think I had hidden a soccer team in our roomette?

This morning we took the Circulator bus out to the sleepy, picturesque old port of Georgetown. We saw the Old Stone House (1765), probably one of the oldest buildings in Washington and wandered along the Potomac. We also sauntered along the main shopping streets and so came to a cup cake shop (picture) with a large queue stretching away up the street. Americans, as we are learning, take their cupcakes very seriously. Then it was back to the hotel to prepare for the next leg of our journey. As with New York, it was impossible to do justice to Washington with the limited amount of time at our disposal. Nevertheless, the youngsters in our party surely came away with an understanding that federal capital cities, with their emphases on institutions and administrations (not to mention Washington’s height restrictions), are not necessarily great, vibrant cities. My own impression was of a city of contradictions and paradoxes. When I ran this morning I had to – literally – leap over the bodies of several people sleeping rough in the middle of the broad sidewalks in the streets. (It looked worryingly as though there had been a massacre.) As we leave, the nineteenth international AIDS Conference is opening in Washington today. How can it be possible, the Washington Post asked this morning, for the capital city of such a mighty country to have a ‘higher rate of HIV than West Africa’ and to be experiencing a ‘severe and generalised AIDS pandemic’? Yet this contrasts with the undoubted majesty of the Capitol and the symbolism of the White House (which is, by the way, exactly what it is – a grand old Irish Georgian mansion). (It was strange, too, after 9/11 and the attacks on the Pentagon and the White House to see planes constantly taking off over the city from nearby Ronald Reagan airport.) Late this afternoon we went to Union Station and boarded the Capitol Limited for an overnight journey of 780 miles through six states to get to Chicago. During the night our clocks will go back one hour as we shift to American Central Time…