I don’t remember much about this first train trip. I do remember that we had a room with two pull down beds, one above the other. I was in the top bunk and my little brother shared the lower bunk with our mother. I think we slept for most of the train trip as the boat trip from Honolulu had been pretty harrowing.

There had been a Pacific storm the whole way. That was by design as the convoy Commander was trying to hide the convoy as much as he could. The plan didn’t work as we came under submarine attack anyway. Not much sleep with big guns and depth charges going off at all hours. And then there was that damn orange kapok life jacket we had to wear 24 hours a day. As a little kid, sleeping in one of those is like trying to sleep while draped across a chair bottom. Your head and arms hang, unsupported, off one side and your legs and feet hang, unsupported, off the other side. The thing is as hard as a rock, you can’t turn, you can’t get comfortable, and you can’t sleep. And then there was the way we were actually trying to sleep which was draped over a chair bottom while wearing that damn kapok life jacket. Despite the conditions, you got to the point where you would just about nod off and then the Destroyers would make another run. Now that really wakes you up wide eyed.

We were in one of the earliest convoys to sail from Honolulu to the mainland after Pearl Harbor. This was a new experience for everybody, sailing in wartime conditions. Everyone was hyper-vigilant and hyper-imaginative. After the first contact, periscopes appeared in places they have never appeared in before or since and the Destroyers blew the hell out of all of them.

Little kids in these conditions stay amped until they crash. And with all this excitement going on, it was amped, crash, amped, crash, all the way across the Pacific. The problem was you never had time to crash long enough to fully recover. So, when my brother and I laid our heads down in our bunks on our first train ride, we were so out of it we missed the whole trip.

In the summer of 1943, my father was transferred from making submarine patrols in the Pacific from Honolulu to the coast of Japan to being an instructor at the submarine school in New London, Connecticut. After he found a place for us to live, we began our cross country train adventure.

The trip was to be from Seattle to Chicago where we would change trains, then from Chicago to New York where again we would change trains, then on to New London.

In Seattle, my grandfather took my brother and me up to the head of the train to see the engine. It was a huge steam engine and right behind the engine was the equally huge coal car. There was steam shooting out from different places on the engine and then there were all the noises a steam engine makes when it sits idling. It was a very exciting place to be. After the war, we kids received a Lionel Train set that was a model of this train. If I remember correctly after all these years, we were riding on the Great Northern line.

We left Seattle in the afternoon. Again we had a room with pull down beds. After getting settled and looking out the window for a while we went to the dining car. We went early as my mother wanted to get us in and out before it became busy. I remember all the white linens, heavily starched, and the heavy white plates with letters in the middle. The silverware was also very heavy, stuff you don’t see anymore, and it had letters engraved on the handles.

That was the only time I ate in the dining car on that trip. The next morning when I woke up I had a fresh crop of red spots starting to spread all over me. I had the measles. I spent the rest of the trip in a darkened room with the shade pulled. Periodically, I would surreptitiously peek out under the shade until I got caught. Then, it was a darkened room until the next time. We changed trains in Chicago in the middle of the night. We had to wait in the train station for a number of hours before we could get on the train to New York. In New York, it was the same. Middle of the night arrival – wait – finally the train to New London. I think we arrived in New London in the late morning.

So that was my cross country train adventure and I spent all but the first couple of hours in a darkened room. That was a very difficult trip for someone who is curious about everything.

To this day I don’t know how my mother survived that trip. She had two very curious little boys in tow, one sick. They had a glint in their eyes about all the new things they could see that they could touch or push or pull or especially get dirty playing on. They were not only going in different directions from each other, they were going in different directions from her. And of course she had to round up the suitcases also. I think herding cats might have been easier.

I have made other train trips since then. The last was a 28 hour trip with my now wife from Moscow to her home in Ufa in the Republic of Bashcortistan at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. The trains I was on in Russia were electric, old and slow, but almost always on time. They are a nice, if not very comfortable way to see the Russian countryside and Russia is a place worth seeing.

This seems to have become quite long. I actually didn’t mean for that to happen. Sorry.

The three of us imagine Quiche Moraine as a glare of ice on the Antarctic Continent thinly strew with odd rocks. The rocks are odd because many of them are meteorites that landed on the glacier some time during the last several tens of thousands of years.

We imagine that among these meteorites a small number are actually fragments of Mars, the Angry Red Planet. These bits of the planet Mars were blasted into space by some sort of enormous cosmic collision. (Perhaps that is why Mars is Angry and Red?)

Among these Martian Meteors we imagine that a few demonstrate tantalizing evidence for early life on our neighboring planet. We marvel at the potential irony: Perhaps all life on Mars was wiped out by the very Cosmic Impact that brings us these Martian Meteorites.

There was some free association one night at a bar in Mounds View…

Now a burning question: Exactly what is the origin of the name Quiche Moraine? The first word is an egg dish, and the second is an area strewn with the remnants of a glacier, but I fail to see how they fit together.