Paul waits at the Amtrak Charlottesville train station.
Charlottesville, VA to Chicago, Cardinal, Train No. 51
Paul was standing outside the Charlottesville Amtrak station waiting for the train when I met him. After visiting his son in Florida he was heading home to Charleston, West Virginia. He wore jeans, a light waist-length jacket, glasses and a cap that covered his white gray hair. His posture was bent forward in a slight hunch. He hoped to arrive home at 8:30pm.
“My ex-wife is going to pick me up and take me home,” he said.
“It’s nice to have that kind of relationship,” I responded.
“She’s mellowed out. It wasn’t always that way. I gave her the house and car.”
He told me they have three grown children and that he and his wife have been divorced for eight years.
“I should have waited it out. Two or three years and it would have worked out.”
I asked, “Why do you think that?”
“She joined the Wiccans. She thought she was a witch. Then she thought she was a psychic. I was going to church and she said I was crazy for going to church. I moved out and didn’t go back.”
I’m wondered why he would be revealing this information to me, a stranger at a train station. But a heavy heart needs to heave no matter where it’s traveling.
“It sounds like you still love her,” I hint.
“I do still love her. I think she still loves me. But she won’t admit it. She dropped out of the Wiccans and decided she wasn’t a very good psychic. I think she has a boyfriend.”
On the Cardinal train route, the New River Gorge Bridge is an engineering feat that guys like Paul helped build.
Paul worked as a land surveyor for 42 years before retiring. He helped layout highways, water lines and commercial properties. He went to school to study geodesic science – the art of measuring things.
“Now we have satellites and drones,” he said. “The day of the land surveyor is just about over.”
He changed the conversation to train talk. “I took my first train when I was four or five years old. I grew up in a small town outside of Charleston and attended a two-room school. My favorite train trip is to Orlando. The last airplane I flew in had an engine malfunction and caught on fire. It was a small, privately owned plane. The pilot landed it safely in a tiny airfield. That was 40 years ago and I haven’t been in an airplane since then.”
I imagined him when he was a young, ambitious guy who knew where he was going and with whom. The romantic side of me hopes he and his wife will work it out and live happily ever after. But it’s hard to measure what the chances are for that happening.
