After four days and three painful nights in coach on Amtrak trains, I got quite sick.
To be expected, given the close quarters and prolonged proximity to so many strangers coughing, breathing, living together inside speeding steel boxes linked together, trying and failing to sleep.
*****
Heading towards the bathrooms on the lower level of our train car, I paused for a man exiting the closest toilet cubicle. He was backing out of the door slowly, bent over as though searching for something. I continued to wait as he occupied the narrow hallway, methodically taking two steps backwards then one step forward with a deeper bend and closer inspection of the floor.
I asked the man if anything was the matter. He replied with audible frustration:
“God, no! Nothing’s wrong, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I need to make sure I didn’t drop or leave anything behind is all. I’m so sick of explaining this to people!”
I was like, “ohhhh … okay. I get it. Having to explain to everyone does sound annoying. Take your time.”
I then apologized to OCD man for my coughing outside the restrooms in the space we were sharing. He then told me I was not sick, or at least that I had not caught my respiratory disease from fellow travelers:
“That’s just the Texas dust – that’s what we’ve all got.”
As he backed out of the vestibule area, bent over, scanning for anything he might have dropped, I silently dismissed his diagnosis. OCD man disappeared around the corner and up the stairs. Backwards.
*****
When I finally got home and texted a fellow traveler from the LA to Dallas portion of the trip to ask if she’d gotten sick too, she confirmed that she had. Complete with delirious hallucinations and pissing her pants.
I told her I was just grateful we’d gotten to see the eclipse without being ill … that I’d anticipated I’d get sick judging from how sick people on the trains seemed to be all around us, and that I’d told “the universe” I was fine with catching everybody’s COVID or whatever as long as it didn’t interfere with viewing the celestial event we were all traveling to see.
“Oh, that’s not COVID. We didn’t get this from anybody. We got this from the sirocco.”
*****
I didn’t say so, but I disagree with this second dusty wind diagnosis, too. Even coming from someone with more authority (she’s a nurse practitioner) and who I know better than OCD bathroom man.
I’m pretty sure my illness was a product of a virus or bacteria or other contagion spread from person to person on the trains. While it may have been worse due to the dust or, even more likely, the fatigue from lack of sleep, those were secondary factors, not the primary cause.
While the train is traveling, almost no air from outside penetrates the cars. The windows do not open. We are trapped inside with each other and our swirling exhalations and droplets of spew. While we could see the Texas dust storming across the desert, I do not think we inhaled noteworthy quantities of it, even when some of us got off the train in El Paso for a “fresh air break” to roam the empty streets and alleyways with nobody out and about but grackles and the whipping wind to interact with us.
*****
Still, I’m seduced by the insistence I’ve been infected by an exotic hot dusty wind. A swirling magic desert mirage that penetrated me and found my weakness, laying me low: forcing me to take cover and swoon in my bed for almost a whole week after getting home.
Haunted by a whirlwind affair with a foreign character in some kind of surreal paranormal weather romance where the entire story is of journeying into and through a spicy storm-cloud programmed to infect our vulnerable wide-eyed heroine with something so potent it takes her breath away, and she continues to taste it long after her return.
*****
I’ll never know for sure what exactly I came down with. It didn’t seem worth springing for a COVID test on my extremely limited budget when I was still able to function on my trip; just barely, but enough. Dragging myself from stations to destinations and back and forth and such. Even being fairly well-vaccinated, there are really so many things it could have been: a flu, RSV, a regular cold … but I guess it’s even possible I just got sick from the sirocco. There are no vaccines available for the dusty winds of Texas.
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