41 - Random Train Trip Notes

Rolled into San Antonio and I have more than an hour before I have to return to the train station, so I located some free wireless internet (I'm resourceful like that) and will post this and take a walk and look for a liquor store and go back. Just one pic though (out of the hundreds taken yesterday and today) because uploading pics is the time-consuming part and I'm not into consuming time tonight.

Refueling at Tucson

1. When you have a train to catch, or an airplane, or anything else with a schedule, and you have several places that must be got to in a specific order by a specific time, it is really annoying to go out to the rental and find the battery is dead.

2. The grizzled and tough-looking old bird with the cowboy hat and heavy accent I mistakenly took for Cajun and who’d been drinking all night and barged into people’s conversations with a voice like a delivery of drainage rock and looked like he could wrestle a bull with one hand tied by a motorcycle chain behind his back appreciated it when a random citizen sat down and asked if he could join the party. His eyes actually softened, and he shook hands, and forgot the random citizen’s name several times, and copped to one career out of obviously many, that of a cook for Paul Prudhomme in N'Orleans, where they told him he was good but would rise too slowly on account of being Mexican, so he quit that shit and was currently going to Maricopa to buy beads.

3. Train travel is romantic and exciting for me, probably because where I live trains are typically museum pieces, but for some it’s just the way to get there. My seatmate for the eight hours from LA to Tucson was a large teenager who looked like a full-blooded Aztec and sat within his earbuds staring quietly forward the entire time. Student? Visiting family? He was so calm I felt I was disturbing him with all my up and down and finally just camped out in the lounge.

4. You never know about people. Girl about twenty, guy a little older, tattoos, in the bar car talking and talking, I figured they were together. Around nine o’clock they got up. She stopped right in front of me to check herself out in the black window glass and leaned forward doing so, which gave me a very clear view of her pretty cleavage, then looked at me and smiled brilliantly as she went aft. Guy followed with a bottle and a smirk. Later they came back and then at Maricopa she disappeared and the guy and I got to talking. He was on his first train trip -- some job in Tucson bought him his ticket -- and just met this girl and bought some pot off her and then they went into one of the restrooms and made out and now she was gone. He finished his beers and poured JD into his coffee and said he figured her for a troublemaker and we talked about developing our writing, being as he had a Kafka book in hand and a notebook.

5. When I first tried to sleep, shortly after Tucson, which was about midnight, an old man gave a peacock feather to the lady in front of me and told her in his slurred accent it would change her life. She gamely said her life needed changing, and he talked on and on, the gist of which I lost, but the central theme surrounded the fact he was here to save the world from 2012. He also spoke of his experience in the Marine Corps and in Vietnam, and how only men who have seen war can truly appreciate life. On and on he went. I willed him to shut the fuck up and eventually he did.

Around four in the morning I heard him speaking loudly, complaining how he wasn’t going to be disrespected. He had harsher words than that. He then came up the stairs and shuffled away down the aisle, muttering angrily. Not long after, security followed, radio-speak crackling. It was then that we slowed to a halt and stayed awhile in some small flag stop, various uniforms passing to and fro, radios quietly barking. I wondered if there was an arrest and a detraining under way. But no local law enforcement were in view outside, and in time we took off again, and someone passed by with a suitcase.

6. I got about three hours of sleep in part because I was FREEZING. All I brought for warmth was a sweatshirt. The air vents at the bases of the windows are spewing refrigerated air and cannot be blocked. I folded out my seat and the one next to it into a flat little nest but there was no nesting material. Lay there curled up and shivering for hours while my brain hammered on like the graveyard shift at a nail factory. At two I asked about blankets but was told they were for sale in the snack bar. Which if course was closed. Bought me one today -- souvenir Amtrak blanket -- fifteen bucks. If it gets me twenty minutes more sleep it will be worth it.

7. From my journal, verbatim (which means I’m too lazy to edit much):

Went downstairs [early in the morning] and did forty pushups -- easy cause I normally have my feet up to do thirty two -- then did eight pullups on the bar over the baggage door, then thirty two more pushups, then took a crap and brushed my teeth and changed my shirt and undershorts. My ass is rank but there’s not a lot to do about it. Came back to my seat and discovered my wallet was missing.

Rifled through my backpack, ran down to the restroom, up and through my backpack again, then ran back to check the seat I had been in for charging. As I returned from there a gentleman saw me and said, “Donald?”

“Yes, sir.”

Handed me my wallet. It had fallen out in the other coach seat [where I was charging batteries]. I shook his hand, said thank you, said I was starting to panic.

“No, no need to panic,” he said. Indeed not.

8. One purpose of this train trip is to chill the fuck out, quiet my mind, get some reflecting and possibly even writing done. From the descriptions of others, I expected the view of Texas in particular to afford me plenty of opportunity to turn inward, and Texas is just about twenty four hours across. But it has not been very uninteresting, not at all. Dry distant mountains and flat scrubland, now and then something vaguely farm-like or the remains of same; broken stony hills, scrubby trees, and rough roads, straight out of Robert E. Howard’s biography; cowboy country, small dusty towns, a dry seasonal river in its sunken bed between white rock walls.

9. The train station at El Paso is just a block or two from the high fence that is patrolled on the northern side of the Rio Grande. The great river is also close to the station at Del Rio. It doesn’t look that great, about Sacramento-sized. One could hit a softball across. But it represents a chasm, a cleavage between worlds as great as any on Earth.

10. Also from the journal, verbatim:

When in line for lunch, a lady got in behind me and started in complaining. She had a cowboy hat and glasses and a southern accent and spoke softly and I really didn’t know what she was going on about but she sighed heavily many times and mumbled on about not getting the right information and stood in line and sighed and looked at me ruefully. I smiled and nodded and said not a damn thing because I had no idea what the problem was except for the fact she was traveling and things never quite work out. In my head I screamed at her: You’re traveling! Shit happens! Relax! Shut the fuck up! I kept smiling, sort of, as I do.

And then when she got to the counter she asked if the snack bar had any cognac. The snack bar girl said she did not. Cowboy hat woman said, what? They sent me down here cause they said you did! Snack bar girl said sorry, I usually do, but they didn’t give me any, you can ask in the dining car. Cowboy hat woman left and later as I carried my lunch down the aisle she passed by with two little bottles of cognac and a happy little smirk and I thought, fuck, you’re as bad as the smokers.

The smokers are having a tough time. This is a smoke-free train so they can only take a drag when at a smoke stop. A smoke stop is any stop where the train sits long enough for people to get out and light up, or if they don’t smoke, walk around in the cigarette fumes and take stupid random pictures and try to chat up the pretty brunette in pointy-heeled boots. Just sayin’. Last night we went into Yuma and it wasn’t a smoke stop and some bearded yahoo with long white hair got all pissed because he missed the Palm Springs smoke stop and there wasn’t going to be another one until Tucson three hours later. Everyone around knew he was pissed. One person at least also thought he was a stupid whining shithead who should either quit smoking or shut the fuck up or, what the hell, both, but this person kept his own counsel.

11. From Del Rio to San Antonio, Texas calms down. Farmland, miles and miles of ugly little scrub trees, and more farmland. Seems the darkness doesn’t hide much after all.  Now, what do you do when you have but one hour and are near the River Walk?  Guess I'll go walk it, and watch the time.