On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

The title provides the setting for the poem: an Amtrak train travelling from Boston to New York City. The opening lines provide a bit of concrete detail and establish the pattern of contrasts that will continue throughout the poem. The speaker is a Native American man seated across the aisle from a white woman.

She says, “Look at all the history, the house / on the hill there is over two hundred years old,” (Lines 2-3). The information is remarkable to the woman because it is filtered through her limited experience. When she “points out the window past” (Line 4) the speaker, neither her gaze nor her thoughts pause to consider who the speaker is or how different his perspective may be. The speaker suggests the problem is perhaps less a personal failure than a systemic one, as the woman points out the window “into what she has been taught” (Line 5). She likely has not questioned that teaching because her privileged position has never required her to do so. The speaker does not have that luxury and must view the world through multiple lenses.

The speaker says they have not learned much more about American History in their short visit “than what I expected” (Line 7) and has seen “far less / of what we should all know of the tribal stories” (Lines 7-8). The lines suggest the speaker shares a similar knowledge of standard American history with the woman. She, and by extension, mainstream white America, does not reciprocate; the speaker observes that white culture does not acknowledge Native American history, and the lack is telling. For the woman, unaware of all those stories “whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house” (Line 9), two hundred years is impressive. In contrast to lived stories of the Indians around other “Walden Ponds” (Line 14), the old house sits “museumed on the hill” (Line 11), appearing as inert, closed off, and at a distance from the speaker.

The woman continues to talk and asks the speaker if they have seen Walden Pond. The question seems rhetorical as she does not seem to require an answer, and the speaker does not offer her one. Instead, the speaker deliberately keeps quiet and reflects on their motivations, thinking: “I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break / her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds / on my little reservation out West” (Lines 13-15). Those ponds have their own beauty, their own connection to nature, and the people who live around them likely have their own commitment to preservation and meditation. The difference is that those ponds do not have the name-recognition connected to a white, 19th-century author.

The gap here illuminates the presence of one of many counter-narratives. America and the experience of it, for an indigenous person, hold tension. The speaker claims there are more Walden Ponds, “at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,” (Line 16). The fourth quatrain ends there, but the thought spans the gap between and into the first line of the fifth: “the city I pretended to call my home” (Line 17). There isn’t just one Spokane any more than there is just one vision of America.

Spokane is a city that took its name from Native Americans, though it is not tied to the people. It developed along the river that was once part of the Spokane’s ancestral lands, but the city is outside the present reservation and inhabited primarily by white Americans. The speaker may pretend to call it home for simplicity’s sake, or because it does not feel like an actual home for any number of other reasons. The readers are not granted further access to the speaker’s motivations.

Instead, the speaker tells the reader—while saying nothing aloud to the woman—that they do not “give a shit / about Walden” (Lines 18-19) because they “know the Indians were living stories / around that pond” (Lines 19-20) for generations. The assertion emphasizes all the layers of history that had occupied the space long before colonization. The stories were alive, and despite the relative erasure from mainstream history, they still exist. History is written and overwritten.

The speaker’s anger and the tone of the poem escalate with the complaint, “I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too / because that’s redundant” (Lines 22-23). Henley, a rock star, founded the Walden Woods Project in 1990 to protect it from development. Though a laudable goal, the speaker exposes an irony: if white settlers, like Henley’s ancestors, had not “come here in the first place / then nothing would need to be saved” (Lines 24-25). The story would not be a savior story, and Walden Pond would have remained wild and untouched.

The seventh quatrain breaks the line of thinking away from Walden Pond. Despite the inner turmoil that is shared with the reader, the speaker does not share any of their emotions, thoughts, or reactions with the woman. Instead, they keep the peace, as the speaker asserts that she is not the villain here. In fact, the speaker briefly considers bringing her a juice from the food car because she “smiled so much and seemed delighted” (Line 27) and because of their respect for “elders / of every color” (Lines 29-30). There is humor here—a bit of self-deprecation and a lightly satirical look at the somewhat clueless woman. The speaker does not seem to harbor ill-will toward her in particular, but they do not follow through with the gift either.

The speaker does not owe her a thing and does not give her anything of himself beyond common courtesy. Eating in silence, they instead allow her to continue her monologue, nodding along when she points to “another little piece of her country’s history” (Line 33). The separation between the speaker and the woman is made clear once again: While the speaker may live in America, and is indeed part of America, they simultaneously exist outside the constructed story of the white woman’s idea of America. That American narrative privileges only European contributions to American history and culture, and ignores the autonomy and history of Native American people, among many others.

As the white woman talks, the speaker “as all Indians have done / since this war began, made plans” (Lines 34-36). The language shifts into a more combative space. The stakes—identity, community, survival—are high enough to merit the move. The woman may not know the war is still on, but the speaker, unable to forget it, plans for the next confrontation.

The poem ends with a line stating that those plans are for the inevitable next time “somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own” (Line 37). The fierce sentiment resembles a steeling of nerves; it is a clear claiming of identity. The speaker may be sharing a space, but they do not lose their sense of self. This final doubling—the mistaken image and the actual—snaps into focus and maintains its integrity.