Eat your stolen snacks and do a little thinking

You rustle around in your jacket pockets until you find your ill gotten goods, ripping open the wrapper of one of the granola bars and bite down. It’s a little bit too tough between your teeth to call chewy but it's certainly better than slowly starving on the train.

There’s a crack and for half a second you think that the granola bar might have just broken a tooth, but your tongue finds the offending nut and your teeth are no worse for wear from crappy stolen train station snacks.

You keep eating your granola bars and look out the window at the rolling countryside once more as the train rumbles along through rural Americana. It’s different from where you grew up, out on the western prairie, with more trees and topography than you ever had growing up. You suppose that there is nothing stopping you from waiting until the train pulls into a little town along the way and simply starting anew. People used to do that all the time right? Hop on a freight train, ride over to the next town, jump off and live happy full lives under a new assumed identities like it was nobody’s business. Course, it helps when you have money to support yourself, or even just some marketable skills that some folks in a small town want or need. You on the other hand are a college graduate from out of town with a bad attitude at this time of year you have to imagine is a good way to get a one way starlight tour from the local police.

You sigh hard as you finish off the last granola bar, their wrappers making a small pile on the seat next to yours. You stretch and stand, taking a fist full of wrappers and go searching for somewhere to toss them, which you find as a little trash bin near the end of the car. Looking through to the next car down the train you can see a sign that spells out “Café Car” in block letters. A great idea if you hadn’t just finished off your snacks or if you had money.

You go back to your seat and return to staring out the window, watching hills and valleys give way to the flat river bottom lands. You think back to home, back to your family and what that means to you here and now as the scenery constantly changes before you, the train rocking you softly.

At dusk, the conductor even gives a little announcement as the train glides slowly out over the Mississippi River right as the sun goes down, river barges and their attendant towboats slow boating through the dark muddy waters while framed in the golden hour’s light. All in all, it is a pretty view of the river even in the depths of winter. You feel your eyes grow heavy as purple shadows descend over the flat farmlands of northern Missouri and you drift off again to sleep.