“See America,” an old Amtrak slogan promised, “at See-Level.” And if you ride the railroad’s Empire Builder route from Chicago to Seattle and back, as I did recently, you’ll watch the scenery evolve, from city to suburb to small town to north woods to sweeping grasslands to Great Plains to sandy buttes to snow-capped peaks to sagebrush meadows to pine-lined streams to small town to suburb to city.
But are you really seeing America? Literally, perhaps: You are seeing it zip by. After a while, though, that can get to feel as if you are wearing a virtual-reality headset, and it may occur to you that to truly “see” America, you have to get off the train.
So I bought a $499 USA Rail Pass, good for up to 10 trips of any length in 30 days, and selected a half-dozen stops along the route. Since the Empire Builder runs once a day, I could, theoretically, have 24 hours in each place; 144 hours to actually see America — specifically, parts of it that look, and feel, nothing like the places most Americans live.
I knew there would be challenges. I wouldn’t have a car. The train was scheduled to arrive in some places at an ungodly hour. The trip runs more than 2,000 miles one-way; without delays, that takes 46 hours and 24 minutes.
But there are, inevitably, ubiquitously, delays. The earliest I arrived at any stop was 20 minutes late. The latest was more than seven hours. That particular segment ended up running 23 hours and 30 minutes.
And my pass entitled me only to one coach seat. No bed; no shower; shared bathrooms that, more often than not, looked long overdue for a cleaning. You haven’t truly struggled to sleep until you’ve done so in a rail car where almost everyone is struggling to sleep.
But I also met a lot of interesting people on the train: retirees, and young people, and Amish families, and the graduating class of Minot High School in North Dakota.
Most memorably, I visited six American places that I would never otherwise have experienced. Or even known about.
If you can extrapolate anything from my odyssey, it’s this: There’s something remarkable about everywhere.
Rugby, N.D.
Population: 2,509
If the sight of endless prairie doesn’t convince you that you’ve reached the heartland, Rugby will: It is, as signs all over town will tell you, “the geographical center of North America.”
Whether or not this is true, or whether such a status can even be mathematically determined, is disputed. But Rugby has claimed the distinction since 1931, and erected a 15-foot fieldstone obelisk to buttress it. “Don’t forget the selfie!” a nearby kiosk advises, though the three bikers who pulled up while I was there asked me to take their picture for them. Members of the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, they had, they said, just completed a ride from the Mexican to the Canadian border in 26 hours.
Down Second Street, past the post office and a hot pink house festooned with rainbows, I found the florist’s, in the same spot it has occupied since at least 1903. The 1938 “WPA Guide to North Dakota” notes that the shop’s founder, Nels Lindberg, is credited with coining the phrase “Say it with flowers.”
“He said it at a convention, but he didn’t copyright it,” explained Barb Lee, who bought the shop, Rugby Greenhouse, from Mr. Lindberg’s family 47 years ago and still owns it. “Nels was killed in a car accident while delivering flowers,” she told me, adding that Mr. Lindberg’s business partner, Jesse Hutchinson, expired in the greenhouse out back. “They both died doing what they loved,” she said, smiling.
Stanley, N.D.
Population: 2,321
I was the only person to get on or off the train in Stanley. Two days in a row.
Stanley is unaffectedly wholesome: wooden houses and churches and a lovely city park. Humble as it is, the town also has some architectural gems, including the domed 1914 Mountrail County Courthouse, and the Art Deco 1930 Mountrail County War Memorial Auditorium.
My least populous stop, Stanley was full of surprises, like its still-functioning movie theater, the large Israeli flag draped across one house’s front porch, and the swarm of sea gulls scavenging in the Dairy Queen parking lot, a thousand miles from an ocean.
Its big draw, though, sits behind the counter at Dakota Drug on Main Street: what is believed to be the nation’s last operational Whirla-Whip machine. “There’s a place in Illinois claims to have one,” a lady working the fountain said. “But they use soft serve.” A real Whirla-Whip — a phenomenon from the 1930s that once proliferated throughout Middle America — mixes ingredients of your choice into hard ice cream. I had chocolate with peanut butter, pickles and bacon.
Two cheerful teenagers were working there, alongside two equally upbeat ladies. One showed me a guest register with comments from around the country. To make sure no one leaves disappointed, she explained, “we have five more machines in the basement, for parts or in case this one breaks down.”
Havre, Mont.
Population: 9,362
Havre (pronounced HAV-ur) was established at the midpoint of the Great Northern Railway line that ran between St. Paul and Seattle. A statue of James J. Hill, the magnate who built the G.N. in the 1880s and was nicknamed the Empire Builder, guards its depot.
Havre needed watching. The town was all about the railroad, the people it brought in, and the enterprises that catered to their appetites, among them saloons, brothels, gambling halls and opium dens. In 1904, three visitors, aggrieved over being ejected from a bar, burned down four city blocks, forcing many businesses to move into their stone cellars.
A tour of them, Havre Under the Streets, takes you through the history of the town. My guide, a retired schoolteacher, threw in plenty of juicy gossip about local figures like Christopher “Shorty” Young, Havre’s vice king, and “Long George” Francis, a rodeo champion/horse thief who died mysteriously.
Honest people gravitated to Havre, too, including plenty of immigrants: Chinese, Italians, Irish, Poles. Morris Feuer, raised in a shtetl, opened the Hub Clothing Store there in the 1920s; his building, on Third Avenue, now houses a railroad museum, where a plaque tells his story.
There’s also a self-guided walking tour (available free at the chamber of commerce) through Havre’s tree-lined historic district, showcasing dozens of fine houses, with biographies of their reputable owners (and Shorty). You can still find their names etched squarely into front walks.
Cut Bank, Mont.
Population: 3,056
The very name Montana evokes high peaks, but if you’re heading west on the Empire Builder, you won’t see anything taller than a grain elevator during your first 400 miles in that state. Cut Bank, though, the last stop before the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and Glacier National Park, affords, at last, splendid vistas of the Rockies — without crowds.
The town sits just 30 miles south of the Canadian border. Decades ago someone erected a 27-foot statue of a cartoonish penguin, proclaiming Cut Bank the “coldest spot in the nation”; that’s not factual, but it’s still a draw, which was the point. Another scheme, to build a huge statue of Christ, was thwarted, someone there told me, by a local Lutheran minister who “thought it was idolatry.”
Like so many towns along the route, Cut Bank was sired (or at least fostered) by the Great Northern, but in the 1920s, less than a generation after the area opened to homesteading, it hitched its cars to a different economic locomotive: oil. That boom is long over, but its residue lingers, not in black puddles but in striking homes. My favorite, reminiscent of a 1930s bus terminal, has lots of glass brick and curves.
Many more modest dwellings were built there during the boom, too, as oil workers’ houses. You can spend the night in one (or a recreated homesteader’s cabin, or a genuine caboose) at the Glacier County Historical Museum, if you’re willing to pay — and sit through a mandatory educational program of considerable length and detail.
Sandpoint, Idaho
Population: 8,639
Sandpoint is a nice antidote to an earlier stop, Whitefish, Mont., where a passing glance at the town is enough to convince you that you can’t afford to get off the train there. Whitefish’s depot is an Alpine château; Sandpoint’s is one small, austere room. Whitefish’s is staffed; Sandpoint’s is unlocked by a timer an hour before the train’s scheduled arrival.
The Empire Builder stopped at 11 places in Montana, but I saw nothing at any of them that topped Sandpoint — Amtrak’s only stop in Idaho — for raw beauty. It sits on Lake Pend Oreille (pondo-RAY), which is surrounded by verdant mountains and runs 43 miles long and nearly 1,200 feet deep. “The Navy tests stealth submarines in it,” one gentleman told me. (It’s true.)
Downtown Sandpoint has enough old buildings, dive bars and greasy spoons to offset its new construction, chic lounges and upscale restaurants. There’s a 1927 movie theater, the Panida, that also hosts shows, concerts and other cultural events; an inviting ice cream parlor (“We heart you un-cone-ditionally”); and an enclave of food trucks selling esoteric cuisine I didn’t expect to find way up in the Panhandle.
The town’s real draw, though, is outdoors: “So many beautiful lakes around here,” one man told me. “None of them are ever crowded.”
That may be changing, though. As my server at a diner bemoaned, housing prices in the area have skyrocketed in the past few years, since, she explained, “someone named Sandpoint the best place to live in the Northwest.”
“Who?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But a lot of people here would like to beat them up.”
Ephrata, Wash.
Population: 8,477
Ephrata (ee-FRAY-tah) sits nearly 200 miles east of Seattle in Grant County, which is larger than Delaware and very different from what locals call “the west side” (that is, of the Cascades). That side is lush and green; this one looks like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner country.
Ephrata is laid-back, with a homey bookstore/cafe, a cozy library and a surprising number of young people, many of whom moved back from the west side after college. (“It rains much less here,” one explained.) But you’re not confined there, because Grant County, as I discovered, has a fine — and free — bus service. First, I rode to the town of Soap Lake (population 1,691), about 10 minutes away, and waded into its eponym, which contains 18 minerals and is said to have healing powers. (I’ll get back to you on that.) Its beaches are crusted white, its far shore framed by molar-shaped russet ridges.
Then I took another free bus 70 miles to the magnificent Grand Coulee Dam, which is larger than the Hoover Dam and generates many times as much electricity but gets fewer than 5 percent of its visitors. (This despite the fact that Woody Guthrie wrote 26 songs about Grand Coulee, and none about Hoover.)
And I still got back in time to catch a movie.
Waiting for the train at about 10:30 p.m., I spotted — atop a hill and surrounded by cell towers — a large electric flag, red, white and blue bulbs shimmering in the darkness.
Most people take the train to get from one point to another. But everyone I met on my 4,000-plus-mile ride-about — either on board or in town — who asked me what had brought me there responded, with delight or wistfulness, that they would love to do the same thing I was doing. Many offered to help me with my bags, or mind them while I explored, or give me a ride someplace they thought was too far to walk. I’d fired their imaginations with my journey; they wanted to be a part of it. And they were.
It all reminded me of another old Amtrak slogan: “There’s something about a train that’s magic.”
There is. It takes you places you didn’t know you wanted to go.
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