Amtrak’s Empire Builder streams over Marias Pass near Glacier National Park. I took this photo from my passenger car. It was a crisp autumn day in Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

(Taken from my journal, written as the Empire Builder passenger train crossed northern Montana.)

We travel on a bench of high plains that unfolds to eternity, as if no one thought of building cities that would spoil the privacy of what stretches before us.

Montana is so big that most people who visit here come to understand what the natives already know – in its forests and its fields, from north to south and in its interminable distance from east to west, it’s a state bigger than the imagination.

The novel ‘Summer of the Black Chevy’ by Kevin S. Giles grew from memories of his hometown. The novel also takes place there, in Deer Lodge, Montana.

There’s romance here. People sit by the train windows and dream. You can look out at that vastness and fill your minds with what you can’t see, can’t know, and it’s calming. Cities today clamor with marketing messages that tell us what we should know – and ultimately, buy – while here, we look at the green land passing, and the agenda is ours.

The imagination is a big place. Train travel takes us there, at least those of us who seek that journey.

(I wrote the following poem at 3 in the morning in the “observation car,” empty except for one other person writing in the illumination of a laptop computer, and the occasional conductor hurrying through on his way to someplace else. As much as I love traveling on trains, I can’t sleep on them.)

Train, train

Into the night

Spilling its light

In dark places

Farmers asleep in their beds

Somewhere out there

Silver bullet

Shooting through their dreams

Coaches full of people

Eyes closed

Horn blares

They don’t hear

Rocking on the rails

Going somewhere

Everyone has a story

Just ask them

Deep in the night

Anonymous

Who do I see at this window

It’s me, staring back

Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.