Amtrack Advice On Child-Care

MUCH AS right here is nice, it is always good to get away in mid- August.

Especially when getting away involves riding a glassy North County comber, going right as good, goofy-foot friend Rick Gough goes left, with more good friends and family under the umbrella up on the beach. Longboards are the happy guns of August.

But home sounds its siren call all too soon, especially when school starts so early these days. Wednesday was our daughter's first day of high school, and she wanted to get back by mid-afternoon on Tuesday to prepare. Thanks to Amtrak, that's easy right?

Not so fast.

Knowing that there was to be a certain amount of paperwork involved when unaccompanied teens are traveling, we got to the Oceanside station 25 minutes early. I went right to the window, where I was told, somewhat absurdly, by a ticket agent who I recognized and remembered to be a stickler for bureaucracy, that though there were plenty of seats available, Julia and her friend Miya would need a reservation.

Fine, I'll make a reservation.

You'll have to do that on the phone.

Knowing you don't want to tick off what my friend back on the beach, Berkeley artist and architect Keith Wilson, calls a "fingernail farmer' powerful, DMV-style clerks who grow their nails long so as to make it hard to type I didn't complain about her seeming inability to aid with that reservation. I stepped away and phoned Amtrak's computerized "Julie,' always a pleasure to deal with. But when Julie heard we were talking a 14-year-old and a 13- year-old, she transferred me to a live one.

I can get you a reservation, the equally pleasant real person said. But I don't know if your girls will make the train.

It's OK, I said. Still 15 minutes before departure.

Brand-new rules for anyone 13 or under, she warned. You're going to have to fill out even more paperwork, and the station staff is going to have to interview each girl separately. It can take an hour.

Homeland security has made traveling the rails more of an ordeal. But what does that have to do with these girls?

It's not that, she said.

It's child molesters.

But ... I'm the dad, and Miya's mom's picking them up at the platform in L.A., and ...
We fill out the forms, and our bureaucratic friend gives us wrist bands for the girls, and then she asks to interview them separately.

Everything goes swell in the interviews, but a fingernail wags me back to the window. I pay her for the tickets. But there's a problem. Your daughter didn't know the phone number of the lady who's picking her up.

Actually, I made sure to go over that with her, and she has it entered into her cell phone, I replied. Meanwhile, the train has pulled into the station.

But she didn't have it memorized, sir. What if her cell phone didn't work? She smiles and holds the tickets back.
Ma'am, we're going to miss this train.

We're talking parenting issues here, sir. Way more important than the train.

I bite my tongue. She waits a beat, and then two. Slowly, she forks over the ducats and assorted triplicate forms.

We race to the waiting Coastliner. They hop on. We kiss, and they ride, back to the real world, where if the child molesters won't get you, the fingernail farmers will.

Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Write him at larry.wilson@sgvn.com .