What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been: Tales from the California Zephyr

What kind of way is it to start an adventure if you don’t almost miss your train. Keeping to my lust for excitement, I managed to arrive at Union Station 15 minutes before my train was set to depart, well after the cut-off for checking in baggage. Luckily, I found a take-no-shit southsider in an Amtrak jumpsuit with a soft spot for dames in distress who, after emptying the cash contents on my wallet into his open palm, took my bike boxes down to the loading dock and agreed to send them off on the next day’s train. That freed me up with enough time to run around like a mad woman clumsily swinging my knapsack into harmless Amish families as I sought out track number five. I made it onto the train just as they were preparing to pull out, I was on my way…

It only took an hour upon leaving Chicago to become surrounded by corn, chipped paint silos, pickup trucks, and boarded up town squares draped in American flags. What a little capsule of a world I’ve been living in, how unlike what America really is.
But while a city like Chicago represents the finest of its country, a city is never a true representation of that country. I was in the real America now, and all it's corn glory.

For the first few hours, I hung out in the observation lounge listening to Sufjan Stevens Illinoise and thinking about corn. The uniformity of the corn makes this flatness even more dramatic: If viewed either straight on or directly above, it resembles a lake, the rows wiz by like ripples emanating from a pebble.
I think the Japanese mind would be in rapture if it were to gaze upon an American cornfield; the orderly flatness, abnormally perfect rows of ingeniously cloned superfood. It reminds me of the Japanese phrase, ‘the nail that sticks up must be hammered down’, each stalk of corn like a student from one of the school assemblies standing at full attention; so young, but already growing along a plan of someone else's design.

I was hoping the train accommodations would be similar to the long distance trains I took in China, where we were all filed into our own horizontal cubbyhole, six beds to a door-less room. However, this was not the case, the train instead being set up as two opposing worlds of upper and lower class with a dining car in between to insure our segregation. The coach seat I was in turned out to be quite cozy, despite being slightly bigger than an airline seat. The 'first class', or sleeper car option is an extra $400, and while it ensures that your time can be passed lying on your back, I doubt those up front had quite as much fun as we did.

And so what kind of person buys a coach ticket on Amtrak? "Normal" is not a characteristic you find in the people who ride the rails. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of crazy to decide to put yourself through over fifty hours of train travel when you can fly to your destination for almost the same price these days.
To be fair, there probably are some normal people who have very good reasons to be on the train, but they tend to be the ones who keep to themselves in their assigned seat, gazing at nothing with headphones on. As I don’t have the patience to sit in one place without anything stimulating happening for hours, I decided to make my way into the lounge car armed with a chess set and a smile.
I first fell into conversation with a 'bloke' from Essex who was determined to drink his way across America. I watched in awe as my new friend Simon, who wound up being terrible at chess but an expert at drinking himself into a stupor, went on about how much he loved America, despite our refusal to insert the letter ‘u’ into words such as ‘color’. I’ve noticed time and time again that the things I tend to find the most revolting about this country are the very things foreigners just love: massive trucks, strip malls, billboards, gregarious servings of food… While we love to go to foreign countries and marvel at how old everything is. You know what they say, the grass is always greener. Anyway, my British friend wound up getting belligerent on the poor lunch car server, after repeatedly being told he couldn't smoke inside the car. He excused himself to go pass out on the elderly shoulder of his unfortunate Nebraskan seatmate.
The next friend to drop in was a retired vet from Las Vegas in a Vietnam war trucker hat and camouflage jacket who insisted on calling me ‘toots’ and ‘honey’ for the duration of the trip. He plopped himself down next to me and demanded that we have a game of chess next. But contrary to his affectionate demeanor, he proceeded to insult me for the duration of the game by saying that girls can’t be good chess players (apparently this is a well-established fact) and when I won the game, accused me of moving the pieces when he was in the john.
After that, I pretty much gave up on making friends, and slept the rest of the way until Denver.

I arrived in the mile high city at dawn, met with my sister and cruised over to her house in the outskirts of town. Starving because I refused to eat the hideous train food, I scarfed down some homemade banana bread, changed, and jumped in the car to go hiking at Rocky Mountain national park.
About halfway into the car ride, as we were driving through Lyons, where the hotel that The Shining was filmed in still stands, I started to really feel the altitude. Or, at least I thought it was the altitude. One of the girls said something and I just couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Wait, that wasn’t funny, why am I laughing?’ I thought.
I turned to my sister, “??You didn’t put pot in the banana bread, did you?”
“Oh, sorry. I forgot to tell you.”
“I ate THREE slices!”
Sigh.
Well, I was in Colorado now, one of the states where medicinal is legal.
The afternoon was a pretty heavy haze, lots of frolicking was had. After playing in icy mountain streams, we met up with my brother in Boulder and had a few beers at the Lazy Dog Brewery. Boulder has more brew pubs than I can count on me hands and toes, and is in general a very cute little town. It reminds me of a mix between Santa Fe and Madison.
We worked off our beers on another hike through the foothills, taking in the scent of the Pondorosa Pines, and as the altitude, pot, and general exhaustion caught up with me, passed out on the ride home.
The next day, we headed out again early to meet up with my brother in the mountains. My brother secured a job as a lift operator up at A-Basen for the snow season, one of the best ski resorts in the US. The houses he's looking to rent up in Silverthorne, log cabins with wood burning stoves and hot tubs, go for about the same price as a one bedroom apartment in Chicago if you snatch it up during the off season. I'm glad that all my siblings are following their dreams at the moment, (and I'm eager for a winter of free snowboarding!)
We met up with him at the summit of Loveland Pass, the place where my sister tied the knot last fall. At almost 12,000 feet, just a few steps leaves you feeling out of breath, yet exhilarated.
There was still snow left on the tips of the peaks, and mountain flowers were in bloom on the slopes. Everything was sharp: the air, the light. But eventually you have to come back down from that mountain. We stopped at some old gold mining- turned tourist towns on the ride back down, snapping some photos of the burnt out old west. We were greeted with a traditional New Mexican dinner when we returned, compliments of my sister's husband: Enchiladas, tacos, and of course, fresh roasted green chiles. It was hard to let go and get back on that train, knowing I could just very well stay on longer with the family, play with the baby and watch him grow. For a long time before, I felt very disconnected from any notion of family, but this trip was one of the first times that I knew I'd really miss them when I left. Is that just growing older or maybe wiser?
Back on the train, Monday morning, I waved goodbye knowing that I had found another place I could very well see myself living. I fell into a slumber, and when I opened my eyes, was greeted by my neighboring train passenger bearing down on me with a jovial smile: "Hi."
Thus began 34 hours of train mischief and mayhem.
TO BE CONTINUED...