ORDINARY BEAUTY, MODEST MIRACLES:
Max’s Travel Journal, summer ’08
St. Louis, then to New Orleans via Amtrak.
Finally, LA via Amtrak, too.

CHAPTER FIVE:
"The Sunset Limited"— New Orleans to Los Angeles

                                             the Sunset Limited in the New Orleans Station      photo by Brandee Crisp

     We’re somewhere in Texas, east of Houston. I’m amazed that it’s only been eighteen hours since I’ve written! It feels as if a world of experience has come down the pike.
     Actually, there have been two “main events” that seem to have organized on-board life. Both have been mealtimes. I broke down and put in a reservation for dinner yesterday. As I’ve written elsewhere, Amtrak holds ours stomachs pretty much captive for the duration of the trip. I brought three Balance bars and three South Beach bars on board with me for this leg. They’ll do for snacks and meal supplements, but they make a very poor substitute for a whole meal. So I sprang for the Dining Car experience. Beyond this practical rationale, of course, I just wanted to see what it was like.

My Dinner with Alice and Ravi and James

     The pleasant hostess sat me at a table with three other people. Thus began my first of the little “encounter groups” that have become for me the meat of this journey. To my right, by the window facing forward, was Alice, a pert seventy year-old who has spent the past five and a half weeks crisscrossing the country to visit relatives, starting from from Redding, California, a couple hundred miles north of the bay area, where she lives. First she went to Philadelphia by way of Chicago; then down to New Orleans. Now she’s heading back to Chicago, and then, I think, Colorado Springs. Then, home—all by train. She and her husband, an inveterate rail-traveling couple, used to make these trips every year. This is her first time since he passed away four years ago. Alice is like a grand dame of the rails. She ordered a chardonnay and the tilapia, one of the “upscale” entrees.

                                          courtesy of Brandee Crisp

     Across from me on the left, a young man of Indian ancestry, around thirty, introduced himself as Ravi. He grew up and learned computer skills in Bangalore, and has been in the US eight years. He lives in San Jose and works in Silicon Valley for Cisco Systems, the heavyweight company with whom Barbara, my wife, has sometimes contracted for her technical writing jobs. Ravi is returning home from a company conference in Orlando, Florida. He had to take a bus to New Orleans to catch this train. The Sunset Limited once originated in Orlando. But Hurricane Katrina washed out a bridge, and the Limited still has not resumed the eastern part of its route. In fact, my friend Bob, from my St. Louis to New Orleans train trip, said Amtrak may soon eliminate this whole Sunset Limited run.
     “How many hours a week do you work at Cisco?” I asked Ravi.
     “About twelve hours a day,” he replied.
     “How do you do it without burning out?” I followed up.
     “There’s just no question. You just do it!”
     “Yes, but some people would go crazy doing that, and you haven’t. What’s your secret?”
     “Just wait a year or two, maybe I will!”

Rice fields in western Louisiana, where we passed grain elevators painted with the Riceland brand logo, rather than the ones I’m used to in the Midwest that are used to store corn or wheat. The fields pictured above had already absorbed the water with which the fields were initially flooded to give the absorbent shoots their start. Some other ones we passed remained flooded.

     Next to Ravi was a young man named James. He had gotten on the train in Lafayette, Louisiana, which is in the middle of Cajun country. James is a tall, thin eighteen year-old, who wears black-rimmed glasses. He's studying computer sciences, and bemoaned the fact that Louisiana is a kind of backwater for that kind of work. He had a slight ambivalence about his home town, population 123,000 and growing fast, because of that alone. Otherwise, he seemed very proud of Lafayette, even a booster: “All the oil in this country comes from Lafayette,” he said. “If our fields and refineries ever go down in another hurricane, it'll make the whole economy tank!”
      Continuing to tout Lafayette, James pulled out his cell phone and began showing us videos he’d taken on it while driving down the street:
“All our streets are 4-laners,” he said. “And our city has 1,000 restaurants! That’s more than New Orleans!”
     “There’s a restaurant!” he continued , pointing at a little spot on the screen, as the traffic and surroundings whizzed by. “There’s another one!” It was hard to see what was really there, and the street itself simply looked to me like any street in any city. But it was his city, and it was dear to him.
     “I’m going out to LA visit my uncle in Northridge. He sells this arthritis medicine you just rub on, and the pain stops. He asked me to help him, and he’s sending a limo to meet me. Really, though, I’m out here to look around at schools and to see if there’s any computer work to be had.”
     “What kind of  training do you have?” Ravi asked him.
     “I taught myself, at first,” James answered. “Then I started taking courses. I know html, mostly, and a little C++. I do web design in Lafayette.”
     “Learn more of the C++,” Ravi said. “Go to school in California.”
     “In Lafayette, the most they pay you for computer work is $10 an hour. I want to see what I can get on the west coast.”
     “Gee, my wife got 55 bucks an hour working for Ravi’s company!” I interjected. “And they paid the intermediary contracting company, that got her the job, a lot more than that!”
     “That’s right,” said Ravi. “They pay the contractor a lot more.”
     “You should go and see the world,” Alice said. “I told all four of my children, ‘Go see the world. You can always come back home after that.’”
     “Where do your children live now?” I asked.
     “Near me, all of them except one,” she said. “My oldest son lives with me now, because my house is so big I can’t take care of it, with my husband gone.”

                                   
                         the kind of west Texas desert we passed through for many, many miles

     After awhile, the talked turned to New Orleans. I remarked what a great time I’d just had there, and how safe I’d felt.
     “The crime is terrible in New Orleans!” James said.
     “My daughter-in-law, whom I stayed with this past week, told me the same thing,” Alice said. “That’s why she and my son bought their home a good ways north of the city.”
     Even Ravi chimed in on this theme: “I had one small incident during my single day there. At the bus station, a van swung around and offered me a ride to my hotel, which was only a few blocks away. When we got to the hotel, he tried to charge me $35! I said, ‘I won’t pay that!’ He looked at my bag and demanded to know, ‘What do you have in there?’ I said ‘Just clothes’, and got out quickly.”
     I realized that whatever I said about my positive experience in the city, the three of them would counter with their negative impressions. And so I kept "my New Orleans" locked away, for the duration of the meal, in the treasure box of my memory. The French Quarter had seemed well-policed to me. I’d even idly wondered whether some Draconian police practice or other might be in place for the homeless, for I’d only encountered one homeless person. In San Francisco, you see such desperate citizens on every corner.

     Our food arrived. Ravi and James had ordered the vegetarian lasagna, Alice the tilapia, and I had the roast game hen, which was excellent. It came too, with some tender and truly delicious vegetables and a mound of saffron rice. For years the Amtrak dinners have all been open-and-microwave meals; but they tasted like real, fresh food! Amtrak must flash-freeze everything, the way Trader Joe’s does its excellent seafood.   
     Besides the entrée and side dish, a small salad and a biscuit came with each meal. Ravi declined his biscuit. As we ate, he told a joke. “They say,” he began, “That one Indian, alone, is a great philosopher; two Indians together, a big argument; and three Indians—total confusion!”
     “How ‘bout a billion Indians?”  I asked. Everyone cracked up.
     Then I told one on myself, mentioning my Jewish background first, so as not to seem anti-Semitic: “Two Jewish guys are walking down the street when they pass a church whose glassed-in marquee says, ‘Come on in and convert. We’ll pay you $400 cash on the spot!’
     “The first guy says to his friend, ‘Wait here for a minute. I want to go in and see what that’s all about.’ Five minutes later, he returns."
     “’Did you get the money?’ his friend asks him.”
     “’Is that all you people think about?’the first guy indignantly replies.”

     James got into the act then, talking about silly laws that have been enacted by the state of Louisiana. Apparently, there is one that prohibits leashing an alligator to a fire hydrant!
     After an hour and a half or so together, Ravi and I excused ourselves and returned to our coach. The good food and conversation, in the somewhat plush atmosphere of the dining car, had been a delightful change from the equally sweet solitude I had been enjoying watching the scenery go by, reading or writing, or listening to a book on CD.

Plight of the Human Pretzel

The Boy Scouts and their Scoutmasters, who occupied at least half a car through most of Texas. I told them how safe I felt with so many “prepared” people around.

     Sleeping was another matter. At Lake Charles, Louisiana, I was assigned a “seat mate”, a pleasant fellow named Robert whose profession is testing new Honda cars, often driving them around a 7-mile track at 130 mph for hours. Until our Houston stop, Robert sprawled out in a vacant 2-seat row across the aisle. At Houston, though, quite a few people got on, including a whole Boy Scout troop bound for a summer camp at Alpine in West Texas. The attendant brought a couple to sit in the two seats where Robert lay, and he came “home” to the seat next to me.
     Houston had an impressive skyline, and since our schedule called for a forty minute stop, I’d planned to go for a walk. I wanted to explore all the places we “landed”, as much as time permitted. The Houston train terminal lay, however, like most, deep in the bowels of the city, as well as amid the myriad arteries of tracks bearing strings of stationary freight cars. There seemed no prospect of even getting out of the yard in half an hour.

      And so, I stayed in the train, which was a good thing, since we wound up leaving after what seemed only ten or fifteen minutes. I pushed the button that made my seat go back. Then, when I saw how Robert was pulling into position a substantial-looking leg-rest panel that had been hidden under the seat, I emulated him. We both settled back.    
     I don’t believe it’s natural for a human being to sleep sitting up. I, at least, was unable to make myself comfortable. As the night went on, I tried propping myself up with my full shoulder bag and laying my head on a big pillow instead of the tiny one Amtrak had handed out. The pillow consisted of my dirty laundry in a big plastic bag whose end was securely tied. The folks at dinner had laughed when I'd mentioned my intended of using this “pillow”. Who knows whether they realized I meant it.
     After an hour or two of squirming under my sleeping mask, I peeked out. Robert had vanished again. His bag was still there, but the seat was once more enticingly vacant. He’d gone, no doubt, to look for another empty “double”, or to the lounge car.
     I stayed on my own side for a little while, but after half an hour it seemed silly, and I sprawled out again, grateful and mostly guiltless. I felt a trifle guilty every time I peeked back out of my sleeping mask and saw that most of the people in the car were still all scrunched together, two in each two-seat row. They were either doing a credible job of faking sleep and trying to convince themselves they’d dozed off; or else they’d actively mastered the enviale art of really letting consciousness go under these challenging conditions. I never knew which was the case.

This is the little “nest” of passengers' cell phones and computers being charged. This is about the average number of them for any one time. One passenger temporarily donated a power strip to meet the need for outlets. There were a of outlets in the Lounge Car, but none on the Sunset Limited coaches. By contrast, the City of New Orleans had had a plug at every row.       At every station on both legs of my journey, I tried to connect to a wifi network near the station. For some reason, however, I succeeded in doing so only once or twice, the whole trip, for a couple minutes each time. So I basically had to do without the Internet. Ravi, on the other hand, had a Data Card in his laptop that would get a wireless signal anywhere, from a satellite. Such cards are available for $60 a month.  I don’t travel enough for that to be worthwhile.

S-a-a-a-a-n Antone!

     Every time I looked out, west of Houston, I’d be confused about where we were. There were too many lights, too much of the time, for the wide open spaces I thought of as rural Texas. But then the outside would go all dark again, dispelling my notion that we’d come to San Antonio.
     We finally started passing through interminable suburbs, obviously leading into the city, which the schedule listed as a two-and-a-half-hour stop. The stop was so long because cars were to be shuffled back and forth between our train and one heading up to Dallas..
     I’d long planned to go for a walk in this city, too. It had a reputation as being picturesque. I wanted to see the famous “Riverwalk”, no matter what time it was. But, just released from a couple hours of upright, enforced insomnia, everything felt different! I wasn’t about to budge from my newly re-acquired comfort. (Mind you, the “comfort” of sprawling across even two coach seats is only relative to the discomfort of trying to sleep in one. A two-seat width remains something of a procrustean bed.)
     Once, while we were stopped at San Antonio, I pulled up my sleeping mask to see a high-powered spotlight blazing at me from the outside like an Eye, directly facing my window! It must have been part of the coupling/re-coupling process. Far more exhausted than curious at ths point, I quickly pulled the mask back down.
     But not before getting out my cell phone to see what time it was. Amazingly, we were on schedule! We had somehow made up the two hours we’d fallen behind while waiting for freights to pass, shortly after leaving New Orleans. This was encouraging! I had around a three-hour window for a meeting with my writing coach, Bruce, in LA. Things I’d heard about the Sunset Limited being as much as eleven hours late had been creeping me out.

the view from the Pecos Bridge, which I believe was announced
as “the highest railroad bridge in the United States.”

    Breakfast was another little encounter group—with a man named Doc, whose NBC Sports gold shirt was accurate as to the company he worked for, but not the department. He was a post-production sound editor for NBC News. He, too, was coming back from a conference in Orlando. They must have a lot of conferenes there! Doc had been impressed the way his company had employed "simulation games" during the conference, to hone their work teams. He said he hadn't known "imaginary" situations could seem so real.
     My other two companions were “Happy”—we had two of the seven dwarves at our table—and John, two brothers from Long Beach, returning home from a family reunion in Texarkana. All four of us had a Long Beach connection: Doc had grown up there, and the two brothers, who still lived there, had too. I was on my way to visit my mother-in-law there. Guess what the topic was, a fair amount of our time together?

     Later, at lunch time, I sat with an older couple and a young Englishman who is a writer for a small British newspaper and is spending three months touring the states, sending back articles and blogs, and working for a week at a time at several small American papers. He’d just finished a week on the staff of the Alpine, Texas one. He’s getting off the train at El Paso, then flying to the Grand Canyon. His name was Jon. He seemed extremely shy, but his eyes had a nice twinkle, and he responded articulately to my questions. I felt a sense of fascination that someone who could seem so verbally reticent, could yet find empowerment with a pen. Here is a link to Jon’s blogs. I think he writes well.  

El Paso

    We’ve reached the western end of Texas. We had almost an hour’s stop here. I got off with a palpable itch to explore, but as my feet touched ground, the conductor said kind of ominously, “Don’t wander off, now. The train won’t wait for you!”
     It still seemed unrealistic, to worry. If I took, say, a half-hour walk, I’d still have twenty minutes’ grace time. But that voice! I conferred with several of the other Amtrak attendants standing on the platform beside the cars. Mainly, I wanted to make certain we weren’t leaving sooner than the scheduled departure, in order to make up our late time.
      “There is no late time! We’re on time!” said the last attendant I asked. “It’s 5:05, Mountain Time! That’s just right. The time zone just changed.”
     Even with such assurances, I set out with trepidation. It was magical, even sacred, to be walking on terra firma under the hot sun after sitting and watching the world go by for more than 24 hours. However, after doing a two-block square rectangle in a warehouse district adjacent to the station, I glanced back and couldn’t see the train!
     As I walked at a quick pace toward where the line of silver cars had been standing, they eventually came back into view, having merely been obscured by a building. But the thought of missing my train; missing Barbara in LA and our flight back to the bay area together; missing my meeting tomorrow with my writing coach; spending hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket; and trying to locate my computer, library CDs, and clothing from a distance by phone, was all too scary. I was the slave of this train!
     Though my walk had been primarily an exploration, I’d organized it around an unsuccessful search for a convenience store, thinking to stockpile a few snacks at a lower price than the train charged. Now that I was back, I remembered hearing someone say something about a snack bar in the station. I searched and found an otherwise empty room containing two vending machines. The prices at this impersonal “snack bar” were lower. I got some Fritos, a diet soda, and a bottle of water, and high-tailed it back to my seat.
     Soon after we pulled away I heard a voice shout, "Is that Tijuana?" I looked out the window and understood why someone could think that. It did resemble Tijuana, only smaller—a colorful, somewhat exotic, but very poor-looking city on a hill. The Rio Grande was on our right, on the other side of the train, but we couldn't have been in Mexico. Then it came into view, the tall, new Border Fence, looking, well, somewhat sinister, and stretching away into the desert.

Part of Cuidad Juarez.
 

The Social Dimension

     There are a private and a social dimension to life on a train, the same as anywhere else. For a time, the lively conversation at meals was enough of what my mother calls “sociability” to sustain me.
     Somewhere in New Mexico, though, I began feeling a little isolated. Riding for two days together, we passengers are developing a miniature society. It has some of the dynamics of a school, with little cliques as well as “geeks” who isolate themselves completely.       
      There were two fellows in the row on the opposite side of the aisle from me when we left New Orleans. One looked like a hippie-ish college student. He’s kept his Ipod plugged into his ears the entire length of our trip. He doesn’t seem to notice that there are other peoplr, although when I first got on and saw him fiddling with his laptop, and I asked, “Aren’t there outlets at every seat on this train?” he did me the courtesy of answering “No”.
     At first I thought the other fellow was his traveling companion. However, when we left New Orleans with lots of vacant rows, each went his own way, and I never did see them speak to one another.
      The second one was wearing a baseball cap that made him look like a perky post-adolescent in search of a youth hostel. Later, when he removed his cap, the change in his appearance was amazing! Without it, he appeared to be forlorn, like a homeless person. I felt sad, looking at him. Then I thought maybe he was the troubled father of the other dude. But he slipped off the train at one of the Texas stations, and his former seat mate is still with us.

the Rio Grande, which doesn't look particularly grand here

     The opposite of these two isolates can be found at a table at the near end of the lounge car. Some time during our first night James, the young Cajun, bonded with Robert and a blonde young woman who got on at Houston. They’ve been sitting together ever since. Like a boy who stays out all the time during summer, Robert never comes back to “our row”.
     The young lady seems perky. As she was boarding, she was part of a long a line of people who'd ben waiting, and she complained ingenuously of having been on her feet so long and wanting her seat, in a way that left me feeling immediate warmth toward her.

     Now, whenever I pass the ranks of these three huddled at “their” table, with their array of laptops, DVDs, and snack boxes, I start to feel left out! I walk past them without looking, trying to insulate and defend myself.
     I find it fascinating that this loneliness seems to be socially determined. As long as people on the train weren’t interacting much—the old couples and the boy scouts talking amongst themselves, people quiet except at meals, friendly smiles and a few words or a few minutes’ conversation with the person next in line or at the next snack table—I felt quite content to mostly stare out the window and do my own thing. The geography was my companion. I phoned Barbara every few hours, and it was as if she was practically beside me, too.
     Now I’ve started to feel like an outsider, helplessness and disempowered.           

Lake Amistad, a large reservoir near Del Rio, Texas

     There’s also someone else I’ve been wanting to talk to. A woman in her thirties, wearing glasses and a head scarf, has been walking around the train reading a book entitled How To Love God, by Depak Chopra. I asked her about the book this morning. She said she'd found it on the train and that it’s pretty good. I asked where she’s heading. She’s moving to Maui, she told me. Since her reading taste establishes her as interested in “Eastern” spirituality, I asked whether she knows Ram Dass is living on Maui.
     “I thought he’d died,” she said, surprised. “He had a stroke…”
     “That was years ago. He mostly recovered from the stroke. I’m sure a friend would have e-mailed me, had Ram Dass died. The last I heard, he still gives workshops, but only on Maui now. He doesn’t travel any more.”
     “Oh, I’m so happy to hear that!" she said. "Thank you for telling me.” Then she excused herself because her breakfast reservation had just been called. “We can talk more later,” she said in a friendly way.
     But it’s not so easy. She’s usually in her seat with a headphone plugged into her ears. One doesn’t want to intrude or to seem to be hounding someone. I’ve watched for the “natural” time to connect more, but it hasn’t come. Now, I'm a married man and I don't "need a relationship", or anything. And yet, I find it impossible to ignore the little social swirls and ripples around me. My wife and I have talked about this phenomenon in life. She's said we all have connections, perhaps from past lifetimes, with lots and lots of people. Feeling their little tugs is inevitable.
     There’s yet another factor that seems to have upped the energy voltage here on the train. At El Paso, a large group of young people and their chaperons got on and took over the car where the boy scouts had been. Asking them about themselves, I learned they're from a Dallas area church that sponsors a week-long event every year for the youth group called “Road Trip”. They travel around the United States doing volunteer work. The young people are never told what they’re going to do until they get to their next destination. In El Paso, they worked for a day on a Habitat for Humanity project.
   
      I’m sitting at the far end of the lounge car, feeling very alone as I try to listen to my Moby Dick CDs. The car is filled with chattering “kids”, and some older people as well. I’m looking out the window at the New Mexico sunset, but that’s no longer much of a consolation. Maybe a stint in the dining car will help.

Arizona, Two Hours Later

                        we had a 1/2 hour Tucson stop      Brandee Crisp

     Well, it all got resolved, in a rather humorous way.
     From the lounge car, I did go into the dining car, but it was toward the end of the dinner hour and the hostess seated me all by myself. Picking up a menu and seeing that it offered the same entrees as the night before, I decided not to eat there, after all.
     The snack bar, which had been closed, re-opened at 8:30, and I bought a big cheeseburger and a soda for $6.50 and felt satisfied. The cheeseburger was fun to eat because they’re not on my usual diet.
     The snack car is downstairs from the lounge car. When I came back up and started walking back toward my seat, I was approached by a disturbed James complaining, “The conductor told us we can’t sit there. He says we’ve been there too long! It’s not fair!”
     “I don’t see why it should be a problem, either” I said, “Unless there are people waiting, who can’t get a table.”
     “He went away for now,” James said. “But we want to go to the dining car, and now we're afraid to leave all our stuff here now without anyone watching it.”
     “Oh, I’ll watch it for you!” I volunteered. “I’ve already eaten.”
     “Would you?” asked the young woman, who said her name was Peggy.
     “Sure. I just need to use the bathroom first. I’ll come right back.”
    
      So I returned, and they went to have dinner. The conductor came back through. James was right. He was angry.
     “I’m just watching these things for some people,” I said. “They’re eating.”
     “They can’t sit at the same table all day long!” he said adamantly. But looking around, he softened. “I see there are vacant tables in here now. As long as that’s the case, I don’t mind.” And he continued on his rounds.
     When the three returned, half an hour later, I rose to leave.
     “You’re certainly welcome to stay,” James said.
     “Oh, thanks!” I said. “Sure, I’ll sit with you for awhile." I was facing Peggy. “What were you doing in Houston?” I asked her, just to start a conversation.
     “Well, my fiance’ was there at the army base,” She said. “My parents didn’t want me there. Now I’m on my way back to Seattle. He did me wrong.” She began unfolding a tale of boy friend, fiancé, parents, job, army base, Seattle, Alaska, and Texas, that went on for a good ten minutes. I knew from my own episodic young adulthood that a ten-minute answer to a simple geographical question indicates a struggling mind, a life out of control.
     “I’m glad you’re going back to see your parents and to finish school,” I said sincerely when she finally paused. “I hope everything goes really well for you.”
     But I didn't want to make any more conversation. I excused myself and told the three of them I needed to go to sleep, and walked back to my seat, freed from all my previous anxiety. It hadn’t been that I’d wanted to be “in”. I just hadn’t wanted to feel “out”.

The Last Morning

the Salton Sea, California

     I peeked out of my sleeping mask again after a fitful night of sleep, rest, shifting positions, and feeling the rails. The sky was a deep crimson. I checked the time on my cell phone. It was 5:30, around the time I usually get up. I ventured out into the lounge car, stopping to take a non-flash photo of a sweet tableau, a mom and her two sons all asleep together in the 2-seat row just in front of mine, the front row of our car.
     Within a few minutes I discovered the snack car was open, and sat at a table with a cup of coffee. The train was going by an enormous body of water. I realized it had to be the Salton Sea, in the California desert. It was picturesque, with high mountains behind it and part of its shore cultivated with plantations of date palms.
     I went upstairs to the lounge car and listened to my Moby Dick  CDs a little while, realized I was hungry and mosied for the last time into the dining car. When the hostess seated my by myself again, my loneliness did a reprise. I looked around the car. There was an animated table of four at the other end, talking away. And not far behind me, I saw the mom and boys who’d all been sleeping all together in my car. The mom was cute and had laughed when they'd passed a little earlier and I'd told her I’d snapped their photo.
     Then I did something that for me, was brave: I walked over to their table and said, “I’m feeling lonely. Do you mind if I join you?” She said “Sure”. And so I wound up getting to know Tracie and her boys Kyle and Justin, six and ten respectively, for the next half hour or so, during which the train passed through, and stopped at, Palm Springs.
     We all laughed a lot, but the main thing for me was that I’d asserted myself. That completed the restoration of my self-respect.
 
    I felt good now. I’d talked to almost everyone I’d wanted to—from Bob and Marlo on the St. Louis-New Orleans trip, to one of the chaperons of the Christian “Road Trip” group, in whom I’d felt a certain creative intensity from the time we'd passed Juarez. She'd been the one saying "Is that Tijuana?", mixing up her names. A little later she'd exclaimed, still looking at Juarez, "That one house on the hill is so green!" I looked, and it was. I thought she might be an artist. This morning, she noticed that I'm wearing a different round necklace than yesterday. When I told her I’m a preschool teacher and that besides liking these necklaces, I pretend to the children that they're my "binky". In response, she shared that she's the Director of a Montessori school back in Dallas. It was just another little connections between people in highly disparate groups. I found the small, mutual, and mostly unspoken acknowledgements fulfilling.
     The only desire I didn’t fulfill was a further conversation with Tanya, the woman who’d been reading the Depak Chopra book. She got off the train somewhere, maybe at Yuma, while I was asleep. But I can accept a certain amount of disappointment.

     Back in the lounge car, which I had to pass through again to get to my own seat, James and Peggy and Robert were up and at their usual stations. Sitting one table down, talking with Robert, was a husky middle-aged man wearing a black sport coat and black beret.
     Soon he and I were gabbing away! It was like flint striking steel, and I don’t even remember the specific exchange that caused the spark. Glenn Gross is a jazz trumpeter on his way to LA for a gig backing up a well-known soul and gospel singer. Joking, I asked him to play for us, and astonishingly, he obliged right then and there, pulling his instrument of shining silver out of its case and doing some quick improvisations, using a mute so no one’s ears got blasted.

This is pretty much how Glenn looked in the
lounge car, except that his trumpet had a mute.

     Glenn is one of those left-brain/right-brain musicians who has acquired “day job” computer skills. He maintains an extensive website, www.clones.net . He and I would talk music awhile, then he and James, across the aisle, would rap about computers.
     “Have you been a professional musician?” I asked.
     “I sure have!” Glenn said. “Lots of times! Once I had a job as the bugler at the race track!”
     “A bugler at the race track? I always thought those were recordings!”
     “Nope, not there!” he said. “In fact, they wanted me to play ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom Time’ after the fifth race one day.” That was one I knew on the harmonica, that I often play for our preschoolers to “freeze dance” to”, and so I pulled my harp out of my pocket and played the song for Glenn.

     It was like a party now. The Sunset Limited was fast closing in on LA, slated to arrive 1/2 hour early, something I believe is almost unheard of! We were barreling through semi-suburban territory backed by more brown mountains. A big cowboy who sat mostly silently with us said we were somewhere around Redlands. Soon we’d be stopping briefly at Ontario, then Pomona, and a little later our journey would be over.
     The attendant came through saying the lounge car would be closing now. The party was over, and we adjourned to our seats. Robert and I rode together in our row now, and Glenn sat down in our car, and the Tracy, Kyle and Justin were in the seat in front of us, and then James came in and sat down, too. The train sailed through Los Angeles. Some of the people who knew the city were pointing out the sights, like Dodger Stadium on top of a hill, to James, and we all gave him pointers about things like transportation in the area, and I told him the story of my first trip there in ’69 and how gravity seemed different in California, almost like I was walking on the moon.
     We came parallel to the Los Angeles River, with its concrete bed covered for hundreds of yards with gang graffiti, and ran alongside it. “Please stay in your seats until the train comes to a complete halt in the station. Thank you for traveling with Amtrak,” came a voice over the PA.
     And then we were in the yard, other trains on both sides of us. Bruce, my writing coach, was on his way into the city. We’d been working together by e-mail for almost a year, and our meeting was an exciting event. After that, I had to come back to the station and find how to take the Metrolink, the local transit, down to Long Beach, where Barbara was attending her niece Amy’s wedding shower.
     I was still rehearsing my moves for the rest of the day, when the train bumped and stopped. Quickly I was in the aisle, down the steps, pulled my bag off the rack, and wheeled it down the platform toward the station. 

Union Station, Los Angeles
     

Postscript: In Defense of Sightseeing

      Is it “mere” sightseeing…only “seeing”, involving a single physical sense, as opposed to “living”, which is textured and multi-dimensional? And what of Sight? It is one of our five physical senses. On might say therefore that an activity centered upon sight alone is superficial.
     But life itself, all the senses and all the rites of passage from birth to growing up to marriage, parenting, work, and death. All are said by the Wise to be “a dream into a dream”…all, equally, Illusion.
     And yet, this world surely has a trace of the Eternal! “God’s handkerchief dropped in the street, ” Whitman calls his percetions. “Eternity is in love with the things of time,” wrote Blake.
     In this sense, there is nothing “mere” about sightseeing, any more than about the rest of living. Through the sense of sight, patterns are glimpsed. Through thought and intuition, they are processed and understood. Through human interactions, even on board a train like this—pilgrims “passing in the night”—they become a backdrop for experience. Through ripening, they take their place in the context that includes all we have ever said, thought, and done.
     Here, life becomes measured in inches on a map, which then take hours to traverse. But it is a proportional process, with a certain order. And, there are exceptions built in. For when the train is delayed on a siding for an hour for a freight train to pass, the precise proportions get disturbed. There is, always, “the part of fate” in life.

     The most spectacular sights in my recent memory were those I took in while driving through Utah, two summers ago. The hundred miles or so between Salinas and Green River brought my consciousness, through awe, into a humble, altered state, at least temporarily.  I remember the white-capped Rockies near Vail from that trip, too, and the glorious sunrise, the paintings of the “Desert Impressionist” in Nevada.

     On this trip, as I’ve said, some of the forests north of Memphis were intriguing. The bayous near New Orleans were exceptionally lush. Vast bodies of water like enormous Lake Ponchartrain always tell upon the consciousness, as Melville wrote at the beginning of MOBY DICK, a book I’m currently listening to on CD. And the rice-growing country, with their tender, bright-green stalks rising out of flooded, or formerly flooded, fields, offered something new for these eyes.

     Now south-central Texas, with its vast scrub-and-cactus-covered plains,  is rolling by on the right. Somewhere on our left, in identical territory, Mexico begins.
     This country was spectacular when it first appeared, not too many miles back. Now it’s become somewhat monotonous. That is the way with most geography. As I wrote in a line of verse at the beginning of this travelogue, Nature unfolds theme by theme. Each theme has a certain, intrinsic interest in itself. But it gains its full due in contact with the other themes, and sometimes the transitional areas.
     The broad topographies that seem to go on repeating themselves, even for hundreds of miles, are like the “dailiness” of life. Their character becomes “submerged” after awhile.  They become “the given”…until the inevitable next change.
     All of this feeds a traveler, I think—the spectacular and the “wallpaper”. All of it is a piece of a great Puzzle, news of the Whole.
     It may be that travel is best, too, when put in relief beside the “daily-ness” of a rooted, responsible life in one place. But there are times, many times, “on the road”— that road that is such an obvious metaphor for living in this transient world, in search of a Home that is ever and only within us—when I feel truly in my element: quickened, inspired, grateful, and free.
    

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