Excerpts from Canyons,
Curveballs and Cornfields
By Jim Loomis
Amtrak’s Train #4, the daily
Southwest Chief, departs Los Angeles on time at 6:45 p.m.,
beginning a two-day, 2,200 mile journey to Chicago. I’ll be leaving the train at Kansas
City, however, to watch the Boston Red Sox in a three-game series
with the Kansas City Royals. It’s my annual summer indulgence of
train travel and baseball.
As soon as the conductor collects
tickets, it’s straight to the dining car for dinner. By the time I
get back to Bedroom 2 in Sleeping Car 31, the bed is made up and
waiting. San Bernardino is behind us, Barstow is just ahead, and all
of Arizona slides quietly by during the night.
Dawn finds the Southwest Chief
crossing a New Mexico desert. We’re in the land of mesas now,
some off in the distance, others in our path and causing the train to
slow as it twists and turns through canyons separating these massive
obstacles. Many have Jeep-sized boulders scattered up and down their
flanks.
Just after a leisurely breakfast in the
dining car, the Chief eases to a stop at Gallup, New Mexico.
The town’s main street – at least the one seen from the train –
is a collection of small buildings of stucco or adobe topped with
large signs, most promoting Indian jewelry and crafts. One offers a
startling opportunity for one-stop shopping: “GUNS & LIQUOR.”
Today the landscape east of Gallup is a
desert in name only for there has clearly been a lot of rain
recently. The wild grasses are green, there are large pools of
standing water, and the usually dry stream beds that crisscross the
landscape are running with brown water. The train sweeps around a
long graceful curve and passes a dozen horses, including two
spindly-legged foals, who look up for a moment, then resume their
grazing.
Lamy, New Mexico, is the station stop
for Santa Fe, the state’s capital, and a dozen or so people get
off. Santa Fe is quaint and interesting and very old, dating back to
the Spanish explorers who settled here in 1607, more than a decade
before the pilgrims stepped off onto Plymouth Rock.
Leaving Lamy, the train climbs up
through Apache Pass, a narrow, twisting cut in the mountains with
steep red-rock sides. Once through, we’re again crossing grassland,
home to several small herds of pronghorn antelope. Off and on for the
next several hours, a rutty dirt path runs alongside the tracks –
the original Santa Fe Trail.
Near Trinidad, Colorado, four men on
horseback are coaxing a dozen steers into the back of a large
semi-trailer truck. They stop for a moment to watch the train pass
and one lifts his dusty cowboy hat rather grandly in response to
waves from passengers in the lounge car.
The Southwest Chief pulls into
the Kansas City station on time the next morning. It’s only 7:30,
but it’s already hot when I step off the train: well over 100
degrees without the hint of a breeze.
I’ve picked a hotel that’s within
walking distance of Kauffman Stadium and it’s full of Red Sox fans
decked out in Boston caps and T-shirts. Checking in just before me is
a father and his young son who have come all the way from Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, to see their team. Three nights later, after the
last-place Royals have somehow managed to win all three games, I
encounter the two of them again in the hotel parking lot. The dad is
trying to console his son. “I know you’re disappointed,” he
says to the boy, “but you might as well get used to it.” Every
serious Red Sox fan knows what he means.
My train-baseball odyssey resumes the
next morning with a five-hour ride to Galesburg, Illinois, once again
aboard the Southwest Chief. East of Kansas City is corn
country, endless rows of man-high stalks running off to the horizon.
The train is really moving now, over 80 miles an hour, flashing
through a small town every ten minutes or so. Most are just clusters
of a few weathered buildings, but the defining feature of each little
community is the water tower, a huge tank perched on 100-foot-high
legs and emblazoned with the name of the town it serves: Marceline,
La Plata, Wyaconda, Argyle.
Where there’s corn there are birds:
black and white magpies, ducks, swallows, and a swarm of small
dark-feathered starlings darting in and out through the exposed
rafters of an abandoned barn. And settled comfortably in some soft
green grass not 50 feet from the tracks, a flock of Canada geese
ignore the train as it thunders by.
Fort Madison is the Southwest
Chief’s last port-of-call before leaving Iowa and crossing the
Mississippi River into Illinois. From here it’s another hour to
Galesburg, where I’ll stop for tonight. There’s a lot of history
in these parts. Abe Lincoln and Steven Douglas held one of their
debates on a street corner right here in Galesburg. A plaque in the
sidewalk marks the spot.
(After a stop to see the baseball field that inspired the film "Field of Dreams", Jim picks up the California Zephyr at Burlington, IA.)
Tonight in the dining car the table is
shared with two sisters, both teachers from New York City enjoying
their first cross-country train ride. Proving the theory that
everybody has at least one interesting story to tell, it turns out
that their father was the chief electrician at the old Polo Grounds
in New York, home of the New York Giants baseball team until it moved
to San Francisco. The older sister says her father installed some
special wiring behind the center field bleachers which he thought
could have been used for a signaling system to tell Giant batters
what pitches were coming. Conspiracy theorists have suspected that
nefarious plot ever since the Giants won the National League pennant
in 1951 with a dramatic last-inning home run by Bobby Thompson,
although Thompson and others in a position to know have always denied
it.
Within minutes of leaving Denver the
next morning, the Zephyr begins a slow, steady climb into the
Rocky Mountains. Off to the right are the Flatirons, huge slabs of
rock, mountains in their own right, that literally lean up against
the Rockies.
It’s 275 rail miles from Denver to
Grand Junction on Colorado’s Western Slope and along the way we
pass though 43 tunnels. The longest, at 6.2 miles, is the Moffat
Tunnel, boring through the mountains at an elevation of 9,000 feet.
It’s the highest point of the Zephyr’s route and, when we
emerge at the far end, we’ve crossed under the Continental Divide.
Back on the Denver side of the tunnel, all the water flows east to
the Mississippi River, eventually ending up in the Gulf of Mexico.
From this point forward, water flows west toward the Pacific Ocean.
After brief stops in Winter Park and
Granby, the train begins following the Colorado River, which will be
off to the left for the next 100 miles or so. All along the way it’s
dotted with people floating in a variety of watercraft ranging from
elaborate inflatable imitations of double-hulled canoes to simple
inner tubes. Many of the rafters cheerfully observe a time-honored
tradition: they moon the train as it passes.
A mid-afternoon stop is Glenwood
Springs where the gunfighter Doc Holiday came hoping his lung disease
would benefit from the natural minerals of the springs. It didn’t
and he’s buried here. This is a refueling stop for our twin
locomotives and, although passengers are invited to step off the
train to stretch their legs, the conductor warns everyone several
times over the P.A. system against straying too far from the
platform.
An hour later, with the Zephyr
underway again, a man in his 40s tells the conductor he thinks his
wife was left behind in Glenwood Springs. Sure enough, she’s paged
several times with no response. With
Grand Junction still some 80 miles
ahead, the husband is ping-ponging back and forth between real
distress over his wife’s predicament and near-rage at her
carelessness. The conductor shrugs. “It happens all the time,” he
says.
I hit the jackpot for dinner companions
tonight: a personable young film animator whose parents emigrated to
Australia from Malta and a Japanese doctor doing research on organ
donations in Boston. He, of course, has become a Red Sox fan and we
happily exchange high-fives across the table. But the laws of
probability are really stretched by the fourth person at our table:
Keith Lewin, a 40-year resident of Kailua before moving to Las Vegas
five years ago. Conversation flows all through dinner and it’s well
past dark by the time everyone heads off to their respective
bedrooms.
It’s still hot and dry the next
morning, but no longer desolate. In fact, the vegetation is green and
wild flowers – yellow and purple and white – are growing in
profusion. There’s a lot more wildlife, too: jack rabbits,
antelope, crows, more magpies, vultures soaring overhead and,
floating placidly on a small lake, white pelicans. From his perch on
top of a fence post, a large golden eagle glares at us as we pass.
Cattle by the hundreds are grazing with heads buried almost out of
sight in the tall lush grass.
By late morning, it’s all changed.
The Humboldt River is alongside now, meandering westward through what
has once again become hot, dry country. How hot and how dry? Well, a
few miles from Reno, Nevada, the river simply gives up. It slows
down, spreads out and quietly disappears into the desert.
After leaving Reno, the Zephyr
crosses into California and begins climbing into the Sierra
Nevada mountains. This is where the Donner Party – some 90 men,
women and children – arrived from Indiana in 1846. It was late in
the year, but they nevertheless attempted to cross the Sierras and
were trapped
by heavy snows. By the time a rescue
team reached them, more than half of the party had died. This stretch
of the Zephyr’s route, overlooking the American River Gorge
at an elevation of some 7,200 feet, is appropriately called Donner
Pass.
Less than three hours later, the train
has descended all the way to sea level and by late afternoon the
California Zephyr reaches its final stop at Emeryville, just
across the bay from San Francisco.
Jim Loomis has crossed the North American continent by train more than twenty times and is the author of All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide.
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