One Man’s Love Affair With American Rail--Bumps and All : Lifestyles: Henry Kisor might be the ultimate ‘railfan.’ He’s ridden Amtrak for years and written a book. For a good ride, he says, relax, read or schmooze.

America’s closest approximation to a crack passenger train, the best that’s riding the rails these days, has just pulled into Reno--6 hours, 4 minutes late.

Not to worry, writer Henry Kisor assures a reporter who has been waiting there to join him on-board. Kisor is philosophical as he takes his latest ride over the scenic Chicago-to-Oakland Amtrak route.

Bring a sunny disposition aboard with your luggage, he advises, and maintain it, “no matter what.” Surly attendants? Continually occupied toilets? Horrendous delays? Relax. Enjoy the good stuff: Watch the country slide past, schmooze with a stranger for a change, read.

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The California Zephyr departs Reno station, inching past the jammed-together gambling joints, rolling west toward the blue Sierra.

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From long experience, Kisor arrived at this balanced judgment of the nation’s substandard passenger rail service: It’s worse than it used to be, worse than its foreign counterparts, but still worth the ride.

As a day job, he is book editor and literary columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of that city’s two major daily newspapers. But he has ridden Amtrak across the country for years. He has ridden this 2,416-mile route, his favorite, 15 times in researching his new book, “Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America.”

But experience as a “railfan”--the breed hates the term “train buff”--does not begin to explain the rare perspective Henry Kisor brings to this or any of his endeavors:

Award-winning journalist, storyteller, literary expert, railfan, husband, father--and now at age 53, on the verge of earning his private pilot’s license.

And he is also, as he puts it, deaf as a post--the result of contracting meningitis at 3. He has no memory of what sound is like.

*

The train winds along the Truckee River gorge, flanked by the beige, brush-dotted, first undulations of the leeward Sierra. Kisor, his wife , Debby, and the reporter settle into a first-class compartment for a talk.

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Kisor was raised in the “hearing culture,” meaning he learned to lip read and to speak instead of learning sign language, the province of the “deaf culture” that Kisor rejects, at least for himself. He wrote about his silent world in a 1990 book, “What’s That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness.”

As a professional writer and communicator, Kisor is denied essential tools that others in high-voltage careers take for granted. His lip reading occasionally fails him--which explains the humorous title of the earlier book. His speech, which he describes as “my deaf person’s breathy monotone,” is at once noticeable, and can be a source of hurt.

Riding the train, “When I get into a conversation in the lounge car or the diner, some people are completely buffaloed by a deaf person. They can’t handle it. I will say, ‘Oh, by the way, I am deaf,’ and the person will get up, leave right away.”

Fortunately, just as often, someone else will come along and ask, “Did you say you are deaf?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“I will tell him. Within 20 minutes, we are old friends.”

In “Zephyr,” Kisor picks up all manner of auditory nuance--the woman “with just an occasional Russian-style locution in her precise but melodious speech,” the man who “spoke in that odd, whiny accent which makes questions of statements.”

There is a section on a disoriented, half-drunk woman, page after page of quoted dialogue between the woman and a train attendant, written to show how Amtrak handles confused people (very gently).

How did Kisor get all that?

“I just leaned over with a small recorder concealed in my hand and taped the whole thing.” A professional transcriber going through his tapes later left out the parts “about that drunk woman. Didn’t think you’d want that.”

“Oh, my god,” Kisor recalls saying. “That’s the best part.” He retrieved the tape and had the transcriber do it over.

As for other subtleties, “I pay attention to how writers render sound and I try to imagine what sound is like. When Debby tells me a person has a high, nasal quality of speech, I don’t know what that sounds like. But I can hold my nose and feel what it sounds like by feeling the vibrations.

“I’ll say to people, ‘Give me a metaphor. This person sounds as though he has a gravely voice, you say? What does that mean?’ And someone will say, ‘It sounds like a cement mixer.’ Ah, cement mixer. Now I know.”

*

The Zephyr leaves Truckee on the long crawl toward the 7,032-foot top of Donner Pass. Presenting one of the most scenic rides in American railroading, the double-tracked roadbed cuts through stands of evergreens, across granite-strewn inclines, past patches of weeks-old, graying snow.

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Kisor is a solid, compact-looking guy, square-shouldered and upright. He gazes straight into his interlocutor’s face--the better to read lips--and makes his points forcefully. When he speaks, his artfully shaped, naturally flowing sentences make it seem as if writing should come easily to him--an observation he finds hilarious, given the drafts he describes piling up as he strives to get a single paragraph just right.

A careful thinker with a tough intellect who disparages the phrase “on the other hand,” Kisor does not buy into the notion that he is defined by his deafness.

“This book is not about a deaf man’s travels,” he replies rather testily. “It’s about a man who is a railfan who happens to be deaf.”

In this railfan’s “Zephyr” are found:

The journalist’s nuggets of fact about Zephyr chef John Davis’ struggle, against all odds, to present his movable feasts with tastiness and variety three days, two nights, running.

The literary critic’s invocation of T.S. Eliot to describe people’s dispositions changing for the better on the train, then changing back again as soon as they get off.

The social critic’s complaint of the neglect plaguing the small farmers of the Great Plains, noted as the Zephyr sneaks through Nebraska only after dark, a metaphor for our indifference.

The railfan feeling “the tug of the high iron,” as railroading is romantically described; recognizing the logos on the passing boxcars; steering clear of the “foamers”--the occasional bore on the subject who unfailingly foams at the mouth while pontificating.

And then there is his just plain storytelling. Sex, for instance.

With all those beds on board, men and women traveling alone usually have no trouble arranging get-togethers, if they are so inclined, Kisor reports. As long as one or the other has paid for the compartment, “conductors and attendants will not stand in their way.”

It is their worldly nature.

It is also their nature to pass on their best stories about such trysts. There’s the one about the man booked on a Zephyr sleeper coach on the Oakland-bound portion of the train who took to his bed a woman ticketed to Los Angeles. Her compartment was on a section of the train scheduled to split off at Salt Lake City the next morning.

Failing to remember this detail, she “traversed the dining car, occupied only by waiters setting up for breakfast (and) suddenly spotted daylight through the window of the far door” where her coach had been. “All her baggage and belongings were rolling unaccompanied hundreds of miles southwest toward Los Angeles.”

“My God!” the waiters heard her wail, “What am I going to tell my husband?”

*

The train follows a wide arc, south through canyons of dense new-growth forest, then loops back, again heading west. We are in the dining car now, gazing down from a stupendous height on the sapphire sheen of Donner Lake.

*

Kisor’s deafness, in some small way, seems to have helped steer him to the story of the late-rising woman and to similar yarns. Relating fast tales of the rails, with embellishment, is a tradition of the country’s mostly African American passenger-coach crews.

“Black crew members have a rich storytelling tradition,” Kisor says. “It goes all the way back to the old-time sleeping car porters who had to put up with many indignities.” To help cope, “They would tell each other stories about unreasonable or crazy white passengers.”

Today’s crews, many the sons and grandsons of the old porters, keep the stories coming, always with maximum impact.

That their stories tumbled out one after the other for Kisor, who is white, bears on a mutual bond that developed. For his part, “I think one of the reasons I chose to write a book about trains was that on the train trips Debby and I used to take, we noticed early on that my deafness didn’t bother (the crews). They have seen so many different kinds of people that I was just a man.”

For their part, the service crews talked because someone showed rare serious interest in them. “When people write books about trains, they never think of the crew.”

And finally, he says, as if tightening the bond, he compares himself to “a black person living in a white suburb” because of the isolation he feels as a deaf person.

“To carry the metaphor any further than that would be demeaning to both blacks and the deaf.” But the fact is, Kisor says, black people complain when a white person walking toward them crosses the street to avoid an encounter and “likewise, a number of hearing people I know will see me coming and cross the street . . . because they are afraid of an awkward moment.”

*

The Zephyr is down-mountain bound, toward Emigrant Gap, Colfax in the foothills, Roseville in the valley.

*

Reggie Howard, the conscientious train chief much quoted in Kisor’s book, is aboard. A locomotive breakdown somewhere in the Midwest and a bunch of freight trains piling up in Salt Lake City behind some bent track set the Zephyr’s timetable reeling on this run, he explains. Howard wears the forlorn look of a coach who has lost another one.

There have been worse delays. In his book, Kisor writes of the time the Zephyr limped into Oakland 14 hours late, at 7 a.m. on Christmas Day. The passengers were ready to lynch the train chief because “of course, it was (his) fault.”

Kisor defends the Amtrak crews, among whom are some heroes, such as Howard and the chef, Davis. Amtrak does the best with what it has--shabby equipment, unreliable locomotives--Kisor says, but when the best isn’t good enough, the passengers take it out on the crew members. It is not surprising that some become “apathetic or downright surly.”

But there is “still enough pride among the people of Amtrak to make it a good railroad if given half a chance,” Kisor says. “It requires money.”

*

The Zephyr reaches Sacramento, deposits Kisor’s visiting reporter at the drab, grimy depot, and heads out into the night, 85 miles to go before arrival in Oakland, end of the line .

Late again.