Fulbright riffs, 1991 — day 42, Wednesday July 10th

Rowland drives me to Newark airport to catch the 8:24 Continental flight to Chicago. The plane is only half full and I’ve never boarded a plane more quickly, seldom a more comfortable flight. I get my first glimpse of Chicago during the descent over Lake Michigan. It’s breath-taking, all of thirty miles away, a cluster of crystals gleaming through a wide gap in the clouds.

We land at O’Hare on schedule. It then takes more than forty minutes for the rapid transit to reach the centre. I alight at Union Station to deposit my luggage as it’s several hours before my train leaves for St Louis. There are no lockers and I join a long queue at the left-luggage depot.

I head straight for the Sears Tower, at this time the tallest building in the world, and get a ticket for The Chicago Experience in the visitor centre , a convincing piece of local propaganda by Chicagoans, including Oprah Winfrey, before the seventy-second rush to the Skydeck on floor 1353. The mid-morning air is clear and the view extends to four states, with neighbouring skyscrapers, the railway yards and The Loop district in the foreground.

Leaving the Sears Tower, I walk around The Loop from west through to north admiring the architectural variety and the elegance of Chicagoans dressed for business and commerce. I have lunch at a typical diner — chiliburger, iced-tea and rice pudding. Many of my fellow diners are overweight but those serving are enormous, epitomising the fast-developing obesity problem in America. After lunch I take a look at open-air sculptures by Picasso, Mirò, Chagall’s mural and Calder’s mobile and Flamingo.

Too soon, it’s time to return to Union Station. I look forward to the return visit at the end of next week.

My seat reservation on the train to St Louis is several cars along the low platform, the walk made more unpleasant in the afternoon heat by the gagging human waste smells along the tracks. The train departs on time but dawdles out through Chicago’s redundant stockyard and industrial zone. This is sad to behold, as is the initial Amtrak experience generally. Chicago had once been the US rail centre: from the 1930s through to the end of the 1950s, almost every transcontinental train passed through here. Now the track is buckled and the trackside buildings are dilapidated. Speeds in excess of 20 mph on this stretch risk causing discomfort to passengers.

Soon we cross the Santa Fe river and enter the Illinois heartland, vast prairies of wheat and corn broken up by woodland and small towns: Joliet, Dwight, Pontiac, Lincoln (which has a real wild-west look, complete with early evening whip-poor-wills), Bloomington, Alton, finally crossing the Mississippi to the evident sprawl of St Louis. An interstate highway follows the railroad, while on either side the windows frame blurred images of homesteads, their yards full of junk and abandoned pick-up trucks.

The guard announces the approach of every station stop and also repeatedly asks passengers to ensure they keep their shoes on when walking to the dining car or to the toilets. I notice that most of my fellow passengers removed their footwear as soon as they boarded.

A woman in the seat behind me is unhappy and makes a scene over the provision of a knife at the buffet car. She seems a right pain in the neck, dropping her glass full of ice and persistently moaning and tut-tutting. I pass her on the way back to my seat and she makes a gesture that indicates she’d like to talk with me so I sit down next to her and we start a long chat that helps the time pass more quickly. She was raised in Chicago and tells me about the dances lasting until 5 am and the development of the city. But she’s more attached to Europe and owns homes in London (Little Venice) and Sorrento. We talk a lot more about Europeans — the dull characteristics of many Germans and Swedes (most Illinois settlers were from Germany and Sweden) and the latent fire of Hungarians. She tells me she’s been to Budapest several times and remembers when they turned the city lights back on about six years ago. The thing she admires most about Europe is the BBC.

We pull into St Louis ahead of schedule, the famous arch (gateway to the West) illuminated on the Mississippi bend. The station is a surprising disappointment: we seem to have come to a halt in a siding and the station itself resembles a workmen’s hut on a building site. The lady tells me it’s known locally as “Amshack”. And this is how it’s been for ten years, so the taxi driver tells me, as we drive up the hill to where the railway terminus used to be and which is now converted into the Hyatt Regency hotel, my base for the next two nights.

The hotel reception is courteous and elegant. My room is two floors down, alongside a central garden, just below a magnificent shopping mall and restaurant area where the railway platforms used to be. Nostalgically, the sound system broadcasts the sounds of arriving and departing trains with whistles, bells and cries of “All aboard”.

I order cheesecake and tea from room service and listen to the local jazz radio station, 88.7, playing contemporary sounds of Thurman Barker and some John Coltrane. The TV features some pay videos, including Sex City, which is about ladies of the night in New York. Basically, it plagiarises La Ronde, with English male actors removing their trousers awkwardly in front of exquisitely clad but fake female action.