From Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollmann

    Six hours later the boxcar was still speeding and roaring toward Everywhere. We glimpsed cornfields and the half constructed houses of ever swarming California. It was a dirty sort of day. Just as a river glimpsed between the girders of a trestle bridge may decay into ordinariness when one actually goes swimming in it, so a landscape, particularly one maimed by human beings, will often be reduced by light to the merest concatenation of stunted or even poisonous possibilities. Although the boxcar was still, objectively speaking, huge, now that all the obscene drawings could be seen from one end to the other, our traveling gallery seemed to have shrunk; its grimy floor had grown drearier, and even the fabulous rectangle of real life projected upon its open movie screen was less enchanting, in part because most California cities are ugly, in part because I had hardly slept, and surely in some measure because riding the rails, like any attempt to escape from life, must taste of failure every now and then unless one is willing to die.