The Town Where No One Got Off

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Crossing the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn't belong, no person who hasn't roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.

I spoke of this to a fellow-passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.

«True,» he said. «People get off in Chicago, everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don't live there go there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to look at it? You? Me? No! I don't know anyone, got no business there, it's no health resort, so why bother?»

«Wouldn't it be a fascianting change,» I said, «some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don't know a soul and go there for the hell of it?»

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