The Many Meanings of a Water Lily Pond by Claude Monet and an Untitled Abstract Vista by Al Bright

 

Water Lily Pond, 1917/19, by Claude Monet, Art Institute of Chicago, 

CCO Public Domain Designation

In a room full of paintings by Claude Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago in July, I was spoiled for choice. I turned and gazed, focusing at first on the Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge paintings in which these two structures are obscured by the fog and haze Monet loved to paint (see earlier post). In Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, for example, smoke can be seen pouring into the air in the background, and the whole urban riverscape lies beneath a hazy, blurry sky. These London paintings give credence to the thesis of the two climate scientists who argued in a recent study that air pollution "provided a creative impulse" for Monet.

After a while, because there were more than thirty people in the room and most of them seemed to want to take a picture of whichever canvas I was standing in front of, I turned away from the London paintings to look at something more serene, three water lily paintings. In 1893 Monet bought property in Giverny in France where he turned previously marshy ground into a pond, built a Japanese-style bridge over it, and brought in some water lilies. This garden became the subject of most of his later paintings, with a particular focus on the water lilies. 

Water Lily Pond 1900 depicts lush vegetation and is enlivened by the curve of a dark bridge. Swirling masses of water lilies fill the pond, and in the foreground, we can see reflections of trees and other greenery on the banks. Water Lilies 1906 is more abstract and simply shows a few graceful islands of vegetation floating in water that reflects the sky and nearby trees. According to the Art Institute website, as time went on, Monet became less concerned with "conventional pictorial space," and so there is no horizon line. The same can be said of Water Lily Pond 1917/19 in which a somewhat muddy palette of green, pink, purple, white, gray and orange gives depth to the water and allows grassy shapes and shadows to build around a central mass of reflections. Monet’s water lily paintings, according to the Art Institute’s signage, was a “significant part of the inspiration for the abstract artists who flourished later in the twentieth century.” I stood there a long time, taking in this third painting, emerging myself in its somewhat mysterious depths.

Later, at the home of our friends Kathy and Richard in Youngstown, I had a chance to see real water lilies growing in the pond that graces one edge of their garden. The garden is full of herbs, grasses and flowers and is also decorated with small outdoor sculptures, including a few by Akron-based artist Don Drumm. In addition, gazing balls and kinetic wind sculptures give the whole yard a playful and dynamic quality, and when we sat near the pond, we could see frogs hopping onto and among the water lilies. Often there were pink flowers within the masses of the large, round, glossy leaves. But one thing about the water lilies themselves was that their charm and beauty didn’t really call to mind Monet’s canvases. One difference, of course, is that they may have been of different species, but more importantly, Monet's later works were too abstract, too focused on irregular masses of vegetation and reflections in the water to give any real sense of what water lilies are like. Well and good. The master painter shows us the world as he chooses. But there may have been more to it than that. 

Water lilies in the pond in Kathy and Richard's garden

According to Dr. Michael F. Marmor, during the years in which Monet was painting in his garden at Giverny, his vision was progressively affected by cataracts. By the mid-1910s, Monet said that "…colors no longer had the same intensity for me," and he began to trust the labels on tubes of paint rather than his own vision. By the early 1920s, Monet thought he might have to stop painting altogether, and he was aware that he couldn't really discriminate color. His work at that time appeared increasingly abstract, though there was nothing in his correspondence to suggest that he was being influenced by the abstract painters of the early 20th century.

Because there is good historical documentation of Monet's progressive vision loss due to cataracts, we can assume that the changes in his painting style may have been affected by his eye problems. Speaking as an ophthalmologist and not an art critic, Dr. Marmor is careful to add that we can’t make these kinds of judgements about every work of art we see. "It would be presumptuous,” he says, “to assume that nonrepresentational painting implies poor visual acuity or that painting with strong colors (or a lack of color) implies that the artist has cataract or color vision abnormalities." Yes, of course! But it’s a documented fact that Monet's work darkened and became more abstract as his cataracts worsened, which makes it all the more intriguing that, though these late paintings were not particularly influential during Monet’s lifetime, they had a tremendous impact on future directions in the visual arts, especially here in the United States.

Writing in The Brooklyn Rail, art historian and critic Norman Kleeblatt reviewed a 2018 exhibit at l'Orangerie in Paris that purported to show the affects Monet's later work had on the American art scene in the mid-twentieth century. He says that the advocacy of the American Abstract Expressionists helped to bring attention to Monet's later painting, which is why the Paris exhibit displayed Monet's late works next to paintings by American artists who were influenced by it. Kleeblatt says that, at one and the same time, "... late Monet could be explained and exploited as foreshadowing the origins of the large-scale gestural canvases, close chromatic range, and all-over compositions of the American painters." These late Monet's were often dismissed for just these reasons -- "their narrow range of dark color, and seemingly direct depiction of the natural world" seemed "either too romantic or too Symbolist." Or worse, they were disparaged as the work of an artist who had cataracts and very blurred vision. But, Kleeblatt tells us, Monet’s influence was strong enough in the mid-twentieth century that two painter/critics began to call the work of their peers Abstract Impressionism.

The exhibit also strengthened the connection by showing a film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint on canvas “alongside a film of a white-suited Monet painting on an easel in his celebrated garden.” This was likely to be the short film available online today, which shows Monet in 1915 as an assured and masterful painter, looking relaxed in his white suit. He can be seen holding his palette, making thoughtful strokes with his brush and referring frequently to the nearby pond where there are, recognizably, water lilies growing. We can't really follow his progress on the canvas, but when the camera pulls back, we can see how lush and filled with foliage his garden was.

My untitled Al Bright painting

Now back to Ohio where we not only spent time in our friends’ garden, but also stayed again in their Mid-century Modern house, with its eclectic mix of vintage furniture and other well-chosen items. Framed posters, photos and works of art abound, but new this year was an untitled work by Youngstown artist Al Bright. I was especially excited to get to know it, because it was mine, a gift from Kathy because I really enjoy Bright’s work. During our stay, I went from time to time to gaze at it, pleased by its palette of pale honeyed beige tones, with a bit of brown, gray and white in the lower half of the canvas, and more yellow tones in the upper half. There are strong horizontal brush strokes, and nearly in the middle of that upper lighter space, there's a semi-circle that looks like a setting sun cut off by a bank of clouds. 

In a description on the website of the Butler Institute of American Art about a recent show featuring eight of Bright's works, he is described as "an artist who truly understood the handling of paint" and as a "remarkable colorist." Bright died in 2019, but there are a number of videos online in which you can watch him painting to live jazz. In each we see the work of a strongly gestural painter, an action painter. Watch him painting while Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are playing, and you can see the spontaneity of his work and its energy. His improvised art accompanies improvised music, and Bright can be seen to respond in a heartfelt way to the music that he hears. 

Writing in the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2013, Robert Raczka says that Bright deserves to be celebrated for the forty years he spent "translating the sound and energy of jazz into visual expression," while maintaining a consistency of style, color choices, and techniques. Raczka even mentions Bright's frequent use of circles in his compositions, which is at least partially the case in my untitled painting. He also refers to Bright as a "third-generation Abstract Expressionist," saying that his work is closest to the “mellow imagery” of Sam Gilliam and Helen Frankenthaler.

About her own work, Frankenthaler once said, "My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated more with nature." And this year, writing in The New Yorker about an exhibit of Frankenthaler’s work at Gagosian, Johanna Fateman has said that the artist’s canvases present “sweeping abstract vistas that recall the roar of waterfalls and crashing waves, as well as silent deserts.” Both Frankenthaler’s and Fateman’s notions help me to express the feeling my untitled Al Bright canvas elicits from me, with its predominance of sandy tones, reliance on horizontal lines and its hemicircle central shape that calls to mind a sun. The abstract vista it implies for me is a desert heatscape, the sun's energy pouring down on some monumentally barren place, calling to mind the planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's Dune, calling to mind a future earth scorched by climate change. Not that, I think, Bright was ever a pessimistic artist, but this is something I find in this nearly monochrome work, and it gives me, as Frankenthaler says, a feeling of an order associated with nature. And that order is what happens when hot and dry are imposed by an intense and unforgiving sun as climate change proceeds apace.

Smoky skies above the Youngstown area on July 17, 2023,

caused by Canadian wildfires.

Because this has been a summer of Canadian wildfires, it wasn’t a surprise that we experienced a day of smoky skies and dangerous levels of particulates when we were in Ohio. I’m no stranger to smoky haze over the Youngstown landscape because when I was growing up there the mills were still going strong. In fact, I remember that we accepted that smog and soot because the mills brought a certain kind of prosperity, just as Monet had a positive response to the smog and smoke he saw, which gave him a sense that the world was changing in dynamic and exciting ways. But on July 17, the smoky sky implied nothing but climate devastation and rather than being a harbinger of prosperity, it was a warning that humans need to change our ways soon or something that looks a lot like Al Bright's abstract vista may come to pass.

We Looked for Kenneth Patchen in Ohio, But We Couldn’t Find Any Trace of Him Until We Got Home

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972), American poet and
novelist. Photograph by Chester Kessler, circa 1952.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38096697

I’m a lifelong admirer of the poet Kenneth Patchen, and while I was in Youngstown last month I decided to go and look at his birthplace. He was from Niles, Ohio, after all, and I figured there should be a plaque or monument or at least a sign somewhere in Niles to show that this fearless and peace-loving poet got his start there. But though we searched online and asked at the McKinley Memorial Library (Niles' branch of the public library, which did have a few volumes of Patchen’s poetry), there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgement that Patchen was a native son. (To be accurate, he is listed on the Niles Wikipedia page under “Notable people.”) 

Near the library, a statue of another of Niles’ Notable people, President McKinley, gives the 25th president the appearance of a Greek or Roman orator, and it stands in the courtyard of a lavish neoclassical building that honors him. In that building there’s a welcoming little museum, and we also asked there about whether or not there was a memorial for Kenneth Patchen nearby, but no one knew. Why, I wondered, doesn’t Niles celebrate the poet who clamored for peace every chance he got? Wouldn’t that help to counteract in some small way the fact that McKinley's life was ended by an act of violence, by assassination?

Permanent memorial to the birthplace of President William McKinley, 25th President
of the United States in Niles, Ohio. Photo by Lilly Conforti, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when more was made of Patchen in his native state, and for a few short years, there was a Kenneth Patchen Festival in Warren. I attended the Festival in 1989, and I met Miriam Patchen and asked her to sign my copy of Patchen’s Collected Poems. But the present-day indifference to Patchen in Niles saddened me. When I got back to Tucson and had access to my books again, I organized a little Kenneth Patchen Festival of my own. I celebrated the diversity of Patchen’s work as a visual artist, a poet, and a playwright, much as the 1989 Festival did. But because this was a very small and private festival, I focused on a limited sampling of each aspect of his life’s work.

 As always, I started with the visual. I have a copy of What Shall We Do Without Us? The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen, which was published by Sierra Club Books in 1984 and contains 37 color images of Patchen's Picture Poems. In a review of the book that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Steven Ratiner gave a thorough and respectful description of Patchen as a visual artist, noting that the spinal injury that kept the poet in nearly constant pain for most of his adult life caused him to spend his last 13 years in bed. It was during this time, when he couldn't find the strength and energy to work on longer writing projects, that he began to produce his Picture Poems.

According to Ratiner, Patchen, who was not trained as a graphic artist, was influenced by William Blake's illustrated books, and art critic Alfred Frankenstein called Patchen "probably the most sophisticated primitive in the history of American art." Ratiner says the creatures in Patchen's Picture Poems affect us profoundly. "Seemingly childlike, realized with a surprising simplicity of form, they establish a powerful bond with their audience," projecting an aura that is "wise, magical, yet quite vulnerable," and he says Patchen was influenced by Klee and Miro.  In fact, Patchen’s drawings remind me more of those of Karel Appel, who helped form the CoBrA group and who was also inspired by Klee and Miro. 

I decided to choose a Picture Poem from the book and look at it carefully, the way I do when I’m writing an ekphrastic essay. I chose the one which says, “The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now.” This Picture Poem, like Patchen’s many other such works, features alert-looking creatures that remind us of animals and birds, though the one at the bottom of the page, with six legs, a tail, a head like a hillock and a long brown body has flowers sprouting from its front and back and seems to be the ground that is getting disgusted enough to walk away. Its head and body are ochre-colored, which is appropriate because ochre is a clay earth pigment, and this adds to the notion that this creature is actually meant to be the ground. Its eyes are intense and golden, and it has a bemused expression on its face, gazing at the viewer in a slightly helpless way, standing firmly on its little stubby peg-like legs, like a dog that’s just about had enough. Its tail is not wagging. 

Two other creatures nearly fill the rest of the image, outlined against a yellow background and jockeying for space amidst the hand-lettered text of the poem, the last bit of which extends along the body of the standing ground. One of the creatures is a mix of animal, vegetable, and human, wearing leaves for hair and with a small tail, human-like legs and an elephantine sort of nose. It seems to be stepping down off the ground as it looks at us with one eye, the way someone does in an ancient Egyptian image, its head and body in profile and its eye gazing forward. The other creature is birdlike with swirling feathers and a pointed beaky face. It’s doing a good job of standing its ground and seems calmly balanced. Both creatures are yellow and blue. 

But people are the subject of this Picture Poem, and none of these creatures are people. People are the ones who would be left with nothing more to stand on except for that which they have stood for, which sounds like an angry condemnation of people as a species, implying that they have stood for some terrible things. And, of course, they have. Yet when you look at the faces of all three creatures, you don’t really feel as though they or Patchen are angry at you. Instead, they seem to say that you had better be sure that you stand for something ethical and reasonable and well-thought-out, so you will have something to stand on under trying and difficult circumstances, which seems like sound advice to me.

A few books from my Kenneth Patchen collection.

For the second act of my small festival, I spent some time reading older poems from Patchen’s Selected Poems, concentrating on the ones that have the most to do with Youngstown (when it was a steel town) and on the air Patchen and I breathed there (though not concurrently). “Orange Bears” (from Kenneth Patchen: Selected Poems) is one of the most anthologized of Patchen’s poems and appears many places on the internet. It’s a poem about childhood, but it’s also very clearly about environmental and economic justice. The orange bears that played with the poet when he was ten could have been stuffed animals or imaginary friends, but what happens to them is a reflection of something very real. The orange bears have their backs “seared by hot slag,” and they also have their “soft trusting/ Bellies kicked in.” The ideas expressed in these descriptions alternate between what happens to the land in a steel town and what can happen to the people.

As the poet goes down by the “smelly crick” to read Whitman, he realizes that you have to have lived in a mill town to understand these injustices, because even Whitman, who was the quintessential poet of the American people, didn’t know much about “the National Guard coming over/ From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates/ With drawn bayonets/ Jeering at the strikers…” And at the end the poem turns again to the air and the water and the land and tells us that “…you could put daisies/ On the windowsill at night and in/ The morning they’d be so covered with soot/ You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.” In this poem the industrialists who own the mills are shown to be just about everything the orange bears are not. Which is why the bears didn’t stand a chance where Patchen grew up in the 1920s and I grew up in the 1960s. Now the mills are gone and the jobs are gone and most of the most damaging effects on the river and the air are gone, but the sadness remains.

And though you might think that “And May I Ask You a Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?” (also from Selected Poems) is going to be an even more intense poem about those same issues, it is and it isn’t. It does start out lamenting “…the yellow-brown smoke/ That blows in/ Every minute of the day. And/ Every minute of the night,” but then there’s some dialogue between people who turn to alcohol in order to survive the exploitation and the gloom. And there’s less of a clear connection to issues of environmental justice and more of a dramatic portrayal of how people try to keep themselves from despairing when work is hard and unrelenting. At the poem’s end, in spite of death and sadness and living with “the taste of tar in your mouth,” the poet announces that “[t]he day shift goes on in four minutes.” In this way Patchen comments on the routinized and standardized life of shifts and schedules that dominated people’s lives when the mills were operating 24 hours a day. Now that they are not, people must fend for themselves and the lack of the taste of tar isn’t always appreciated.

Finally, looking for a third act for my festival, I turned to Patchen as a playwright and listened to a 1942 radio play called “The City Wears a Slouch Hat,” which I found online quite by accident. It features a “sound score” by John Cage, which was commissioned by CBS’ Columbia Workshop to accompany a play written by Patchen. I was drawn to it because I encountered Cage’s avant-garde music the same year I first read Patchen, in 1970. Cage also directed the "orchestra of sound players,” consisting of five percussionists. There are gongs and chimes and bells and cymbals that fill in for the sounds of rain and ocean waves in the play, though sound effects are also used. In the play an unnamed man, referred to in the credits as "The Voice" wanders the cityscape on a rainy night, talking to people, generously giving a panhandler some money and listening patiently to a distraught woman. He also survives being mugged and harassed by street toughs, and he shows himself to have strange and more-than-human powers as, for example, when he goes up to answer a ringing phone on the sixth floor of a nearby building in order to tell the caller that a family will die in ten minutes time. We are given clearer evidence that he really has such abilities when we learn that he already has a picture of his mugger in his wallet and knows that the three men who later follow him have no bullets in their revolvers.

At one point he simply says "Let's walk up and look around in the sky a bit." The percussion score during that sequence is especially resonant, and it ends when he says, "We better get back down, I guess." But The Voice isn't the only person who has had unreal and unexpected experiences: one man tells another about a talking horse, there's a machine that laughs and a woman who claims to have had a terrible accident with broken glass that disfigured her, yet she is not scarred and won’t explain. Toward the end of the play The Voice recites some poetry ("The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlow and "Death, be not proud" by John Donne), and then he swims out to a rock in the ocean to get away from the city noise and strife, where he muses that "I'll enjoy being alone..." But he soon encounters a man who says he lives on that rock because he got "sort of tired of things onshore. Men and women doing the same stupid things over and over. And the noise of the city..." As he speaks, the sounds of percussion -- the gongs and chimes – substitute for the frenzy of the waves.

After listening to what the man on the rock has to say, The Voice turns his attention to the need for getting along with the other people around us and finding a way to accept the crowds in the city. A slouch hat, which the city is said to wear according to the play’s title, is mostly a military sort of headgear, and in the play the city is depicted as a place that can cause people to be defensive and fearful. But The Voice cautions against this in his small final soliloquy, saying: "We were not meant to be strangers to each other. We have the same fears, the same hopes, joys, and sorrows. We must not be suspicious. We must learn to love each other.” This might be a somewhat straightforward way to end such an avant-garde play, but it’s a message that seems entirely appropriate coming from Kenneth Patchen.

In this play, as in his other work, Patchen advocates harmony and compassion. In his above-mentioned Christian Science Monitor review, Steven Ratiner talks about the "powerful pacifist message" of Patchen's art, and he notes that interest in Patchen's writing was strong during the decade of the Vietnam war, which is when I discovered him. Ratiner says that the poet’s work gained attention again in the 1980s "when speculation about nuclear war and the survival of the planet [arose] in daily conversation and newspaper headlines.” Since those speculations are just as apropos today, I hope there will be a resurgence of interest in Kenneth Patchen's work, which also contained a great deal of wisdom about how human beings can learn to live together without violence.

 

An Ekphrastic Look at Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare and Our Recent Amtrak Trip

 

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). Public Domain
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23.7 × 31.6 in). Art Institute of Chicago

Our Amtrak trip from Tucson to Chicago last month was marked by a lulling rhythm-of-the-rails state of mind that allowed us to sleep even when the train whistle hooted all night long. The food is really pretty good and was made even better by the constantly changing views of the countryside that slipped by as we ate. We could see New Mexico skyscapes along the Sunset Limited portion of the trip, and later we had a chance to look over all those Texas towns we’ll never visit during the 24 hours the Texas Eagle spent in its namesake state. The transition from the West, with its calm arid landscapes, to the East with more grass and trees and population density, is always worth commenting on when you wake up 48 hours into the trip and see the Mississippi River and St. Louis’ Gateway Arch.

Of course, along the way, we experienced the frequent, low-level frustration of being kept motionless as freight trains passed our train, leaving it shuddering in the wake of one of Union Pacific’s rude giants. (Amtrak says that for more than 50 years freight railroads have, by law, had to give Amtrak "preference" to run passenger trains ahead of freight trains, but freight lines tend to ignore the law and it's hard for Amtrak to enforce it. This gives the Sunset Limited an on-time performance of only 19%.)

Amtrak in Benson, AZ https://www.flickr.com/photos/petegregoire/, CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We also had a much longer delay just outside Chicago when there was an accident at a poorly marked crossing, and I thought the day-long layover we had set up for ourselves in the Loop might evaporate altogether. That’s why when we finally made it to the Art Institute, and I was standing before “Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare” as a kind of appetizer before I made my way to the room that’s filled with Monets, I enjoyed my fellow-feeling with the artist, who also loved trains, and I felt a little bit superior to him because he loved those dirty steam engines that clouded up the sky, whereas modern diesel trains are much cleaner (and electric trains are even more so). I also now know something about Monet that I didn't know back in the 1960s and 1970s when, feeling privileged to be at the Art Institute, I would stare for hours at all the impressionist treasures I could wrap my gaze around.

Claude Monet, as it turns out, was a connoisseur of the industrial smog of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and London. According to a recent study, the thick smog of the early Industrial Revolution may have inspired Monet (and British painter JMW Turner, whose work was also included in the study) to depict the world, as the title of the ARTnews article about the study has it, as though in a "dreamlike haze." Anna Lea Albright, coauthor of the study, told CNN that, as air pollution levels increased, “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.” Not everyone agrees with this -- Sebastian Smee, art critic at the Washington Post, disagreed with the study's authors that the creation of Impressionism could be explained so simply, but even he doesn't doubt that "Monet was responding to an increasingly polluted environment." 

The painting of Gare Saint-Lazare at the Art Institute is dated 1877, and according to Jean Renoir in his biography of his father, Monet not only worked to emphasize and celebrate smog and fog in his paintings of the station, he even talked the stationmaster into stopping the trains for the best composition and stoking them up so they would produce even more smoke. In spite of the industrial intensity of the scene in this painting, however, the palette is soothing: blue, gray and white predominate, except for the greenish station floor. According to the museum label, this work is darker and less abstract than later works, giving a fairly clear view of the station, the approaching train, the glass-paneled roof and the buildings in the background. Yet there's something cool and dreamy about the scene itself, in spite of the steamy sky and the approach of a gigantic machine, maybe because there's still some space in the foreground from which we watch the train. It’s as though the excitement that Monet must have felt about the huge energy of the train as it moved so many people and barreled its way into the station was outweighed by his appreciation of its beauty. We now know that those steam engines weren’t very good for the environment, and the passengers must have experienced harmful levels of smoke if they sat in cars with open windows. But Monet considered them to be a feast for the eyes, if not for the other senses.

Our own decision to take the train on our trip east this summer had mostly been a matter of convenience, but we also wanted to be more environmentally friendly than we were on last year’s car trip. Was that the case? Greta Thunberg travels by train, which is something of an endorsement, and according to the same BBC article in which I learned about Ms. Thunberg’s travel arrangements, train travel "virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot.” Unfortunately, diesel trains' carbon emissions are as much as two times those of electric trains, and of course Amtrak trains are diesel-powered. But according to the Amtrak website, “rail travel produces up to 83% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than driving and up to 73% fewer emissions than flying, making Amtrak the best option to shrink your travel carbon footprint.” They also say, “According to the 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Data Book, Amtrak is 46% more energy efficient than traveling by car and 34% more energy efficient than domestic air travel.” 

And not only is travel by rail a greener option, it has other benefits as well. We like to read and write and daydream, and a long train trip is a good chance to do all those things. Our trip was a relaxing experience, for the most part, but I admit that I also felt some anxiety on the trip because I know sharing the track with freight trains can have hazardous consequences. Later, while visiting friends in Youngstown, Ohio, we made a brief visit to East Palestine, the site of a Norfolk Southern train derailment, where there was a “controlled” burn of five boxcars of vinyl chloride and the spread of harmful chemicals throughout the area. Six months later, the cleanup is still ongoing, and area residents are still worried about health consequences. (See this opinion piece at The Hill by E. Palestine resident Misti Allison.)

In a recent article at NPR called "After the East Palestine train derailment, are railroads any safer?" Erika Ryan reported that, though there used to be a four-person crew on a freight train, over time, crew members like flagmen were considered unnecessary. The freight industry now wants trains to have one worker on board: an engineer, in spite of the fact that there’s been a move toward longer trains, some of them three miles long and maybe more than 20,000 tons. Ryan also said that the freight industry's business model, known as PSR (precision scheduled railroading), which was meant to make the trains run more efficiently, has resulted in large numbers of layoffs, and, "Freight workers across multiple class I railroad companies have told NPR that nearly every aspect of their job has changed as a result of PSR -- including reductions in time dedicated to locomotive maintenance, inspections and training." As a result, these workers said that derailments like the one that took place in East Palestine were inevitable. And even in East Palestine, there's still lots of freight traffic. At one point when we were there, two behemoth freight trains passed each other, travelling in opposite directions, holding up traffic and making an intense amount of noise.

Railway ticket for the Texas and Pacific Railway. The trains were designated as
"Eagles"--Texas Eagle, etc. Circa 1950s. Public Domain.

The pitch and duration of a train whistle make it a mournful sound, one which we heard many times on our Amtrak trip, and stories about derailments and so-called bomb trains gave anxious overtones to those sounds. It made me even more uneasy to learn that there is only one human being on those freight trains, and that person is charged with making sure nothing goes wrong. How can a small flesh and blood person keep track of three miles of diesel-driven metal, weighing many tons? It is the hubris of the rail companies that makes it possible for them to think this is possible, and each time a huge train raced past our Amtrak train, I thought about how hard that lone engineer’s job must be. As I write this and I look again at an image of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare painting, I remember that, although the train in the painting was a steaming, roaring monster, at least there were enough human beings around to bring it to heel so Monet could paint it as he chose.