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“Last name?” he asks. Click clack.
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Amtrak ticket agent Bob Marchant watches Monday as a Chicago-bound train leaves the Winona station. After over 20 years as the Winona agent, Marchant will retire with the departure tomorrow's 7:50 p.m. train to Seattle. (Photo by James A. Bowey/Winona Daily News) |
“First name?” Click clack.
He tilts his chin a few degrees upward and squints through bifocals at the screen. “Looks good. Three tickets to Tomah,” he said.
The woman and two teenage boys on the other side of Bob’s rectangle window in the station waited as he printed the tickets, stamped them and handed them over. The woman had tears in her eyes, though she smiled when Bob thanked her for the purchase. The boys were distracted and silent, shuffling their feet until the trio walked out the back door toward the train platform.
Bob doesn’t always ask. Their business. Though he’ll listen. And he’s seen it all, he says, in thousands of people, watching classes of Winona State freshmen become seniors, veteran train riders age and disappear. Someone always coming, someone always leaving. Thousands of goodbyes.
The 60-year-old ticket agent will say one himself Wednesday when he retires from the station.
Bob’s job as the sole station agent for the past 21 years (or is it 22? He can’t recall.) follows the repetition of departures and arrivals, the rituals of greetings and goodbyes, common themes with occasional variations.
He’s wearing the navy work pants and white dress shirt he puts on every morning, though no red bowtie. As he lassoes it around his neck, an Amtrak engineer waiting for the next train says, “Ninety degrees today, way too hot for the bowtie.”
He tucks it in the breast pocket of his shirt. On Monday he’ll put it back on.
He has the bushy gray beard, clear brown eyes and studied patience of a university professor, the sort willing to explain prices and routes two or three times to the occasional blank face gazing back at him from the other side of the window. He doesn’t mind. He took this job for the people he meets.
The first morning customers usually start trickling in about 9 a.m., 56 minutes before the morning train’s scheduled arrival, greeting Bob in the station that resembles a post office, a narrow aisle leading to an open rectangle window bordered by posters announcing traveler alerts and information.
Customers No. 1 through 3 — A visiting college professor, her daughter and an exchange student, all Chinese, with an ambitious monthlong East Coast itinerary. Bob spends 14 minutes printing thick stacks of tickets for every stop from Winona out to Washington, D.C. and back to Chicago. When he smacks the stapler down to bind the first of the three sets, the professor jumps slightly and spins her head toward him. He smiles an apology. She smiles back. The three collect their tickets and wander outside toward the platform.
“You know, she knew the entire geography of her route,” he muses later. “All the mountains, the cities, everything. Pretty impressive. I’d be completely lost in China.”
Customer No. 8: A woman wearing white capris and a rose t-shirt that matches her purse and highlights in her hair. She looks fairly morose at first, but after talking shop for a minute with Bob about the best ways to get the cheapest tickets, she gives him a quick wave of thanks and sits down.
Customer Nos. 9 and 10: An old woman and a younger woman with three bulging suitcases.
“You know, she came here with one suitcase and she’s leaving with two,” the younger woman says to Bob.
“I like to shop,” the older woman acknowledges, and Bob laughs with them, his sing-song laugh mellifluous and long, each repeated pitch starting high and ending low. “I see that all the time.”
Bob speaks to 17 customers before the train whistle’s wail at 9:45 a.m. sets him in action. He liked them all and his self-collected statistics suggest he also will like 82 out of the next 83. Many are regulars, and though he won’t remember their names at first, he can always easily refer to them by their destinations. Woman from Milwaukee. Hey, Rochester route.
As the train brakes hiss outside Bob pulls his window shut, steps out of his room, strides to the shed near the platform, hops into an orange electric cart, and drives back to the station to load the luggage. Not a long journey from station to platform; less than 100 yards. Still, he says, why make the travelers haul their own suitcases? He lines the cart against the ramp outside the station, hops over the railing, enters the station and returns with several bags, pushing each one with his knee over the railing and into the cart in practiced, fluid motions.
The train is loaded at 9:56 a.m. and in the remaining five minutes Bob stands next to it, talking with two conductors. They know him well and will miss him. The whistle blows.
Departure time.
The female conductor, with locks of red hair spilling out from under her cap, steps up to Bob and throws her arms around him.
“Happy trails,” she says, and steps aboard, holding an open palm toward him as the doors close.
Bob stands for a moment and watches the train pull away from the station before he spins on his heels and walks back to the luggage cart. He steps in and drives it at full speed, parallel to the train and just a few feet away, the train headed forward, the cart headed backward.
Back in the station Bob considers trimming the hedges but gets caught up in other things instead. He says hello to a mother who walks through the station with her blond son in tow, no older than five, who has memorized the train’s schedule and drags her to see it nearly every time it arrives.
He talks with two St. Paul travelers about how Amtrak, despite an article one of them read somewhere, is unfortunately not going to modernize its fleet and build bullet trains that rocket across the countryside at 170 mph.
The distractions are easy to rationalize.
“There’s always more work, anyway,” he says. “And I talk with everyone.”
After the couple leaves, Bob glances at the clock. He works a split shift that revolves around the train’s morning and evening departure times.
“Almost 11 o’clock,” he says. “Almost time to go.”
Just then the door opens and an ancient farmer — customer No. 20 — shuffles in, wearing a blue feed cap with the brim so low over his face it almost droops down to his blue jeans. He’s accompanied by a younger man who holds the farmer’s left arm to steady him as they approach the counter. Bob looks at the clock again, shrugs his shoulders, and turns to smile at the pair.
“We’re here to pick up a ticket we reserved,” the younger man says to Bob.
Bob types the confirmation number into the computer. Click clack.
“Headed out to Seattle?” Bob asks.
The farmer nods.
Bob looks at the screen.
“You know, you can save some money pretty easy here,” he says to the farmer.
After a bit of discussion about the necessity of private bathrooms, Bob modifies the reservation and knocks some $800 off the ticket price.
Bob looks at the screen again.
“Looks like you’re coming right back once you get out there.”
“Yep,” the farmer says.
The younger man explains to Bob that the farmer’s destination isn’t Seattle; it’s the train. He wants to ride it there and back, just to see the countryside. Bob nods his head in communion.
“I get people like you,” he says to the farmer. “Just in it for the ride. You’ll enjoy it.”
Reporter Brian Voerding can be reached at (507) 453-3514 or at brian.voerding@winonadailynews.com.
