century held 14 lumber mills and countless saloons and burned down six times in its first 11 years; then Verdi, a tiny community with a large trailer park; and Boca, a once-thriving lumber and ice-harvesting town that went bust when the sawmill shut down and the hydroelectric dams brought electricity, and now all that remains is the ruins of its vaunted brewery and a few crumbling bridges over pretty little trout streams.
This mountain scenery is so infectious that it makes us giddy in the observation car, where we continue to chatter and take pictures. At dinner I sit with two of the friendliest people from our long afternoon over the mountains, Lilly and Jackie, a mother and daughter from California. Lilly lives in Sacramento, her daughter in Stockton, which she staunchly defends, claiming the media has it in for her town.
They are traveling together now on a sort of grand tour, going to see friends and relatives in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Atlanta. Lilly was married for many years to an air force man, and they had seven children and lived all over the world. Jackie remembers being most impressed by the cherry blossoms and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics when their family was stationed in Japan.
Jackie relates stories from her 20 years as a federal corrections officer. She tells us about drug couriers who tried to smuggle their contraband into the country inside dead babies, and about the racketeer Michael Milken, whom she calls a rascal, and Heidi Fleiss, whom she calls ugly and says was stoned when she first reported to prison. She is afraid that she became too paranoid during her years as a guard. She is proud of her knowledge of guns and self-defense, but found that for months after she retired she would catch herself searching her home for places where someone might conceal a weapon.
Â
The scenery changes the moment we get out of the mountains, the way it does so often across America. From the train, most of Nevada looks like exactly what it is, the bed of an ancient sea, a landscape broken only by the remnants of more bridges, tiny clusters of houses, and distant highways on each side of the tracks. The exposed desert rock glows softly in the dusk, a drowsy, pastel sunset after the dramatic landscapes of the Sierra.
The headlines on the bundles of
USA Today
s brought aboard read âHouse, Senate Parry on âObamaCareâ as Shutdown Looms.â Itâs not of much concern on the California Zephyr. At breakfast, I reminisce with Geneâa devout Nebraska Cornhuskers fan wearing a bright red team jacket, on his way back to Lincoln, where he has been teaching mathematics for 53 yearsâover Johnny Rodgersâs greatest game. At lunch, I talk to Leah and John, both of whom have their pilotâs license and have lived and worked all over the world in public health, about Mayor Dick Lee and his struggle with the Model Cities program in New Haven, Connecticut. We speculate about a middle-aged couple who hold hands everywhere they go on the Zephyr, and whom everyone wonders about until we realize that the man is blind. I marvel anew at the range of conversations you can have on the train even as youâre being Archimedied into collectivism.
As it happens, the Zephyr is unable to take its usual scenic route through the Rockies because torrential rains have washed out the track near the Moffat Tunnelâthe second washout due to extreme weather Iâve encountered within a week of travel. Suddenly we are in a tale foretold. Ayn Randâthe devoutly atheist cult leader who has somehow become the prophet of fundamentalist Republicansâloved trains. In her major opus,
Atlas Shrugged
, one of her great heroes of capitalismâher âprime moversââruns a railroad. In doing research for the book, Rand supposedly rode in locomotives of the New York Central and even operated the engine of the 20th Century Limited, later claiming, âNobody touched a lever except
This mountain scenery is so infectious that it makes us giddy in the observation car, where we continue to chatter and take pictures. At dinner I sit with two of the friendliest people from our long afternoon over the mountains, Lilly and Jackie, a mother and daughter from California. Lilly lives in Sacramento, her daughter in Stockton, which she staunchly defends, claiming the media has it in for her town.
They are traveling together now on a sort of grand tour, going to see friends and relatives in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Atlanta. Lilly was married for many years to an air force man, and they had seven children and lived all over the world. Jackie remembers being most impressed by the cherry blossoms and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics when their family was stationed in Japan.
Jackie relates stories from her 20 years as a federal corrections officer. She tells us about drug couriers who tried to smuggle their contraband into the country inside dead babies, and about the racketeer Michael Milken, whom she calls a rascal, and Heidi Fleiss, whom she calls ugly and says was stoned when she first reported to prison. She is afraid that she became too paranoid during her years as a guard. She is proud of her knowledge of guns and self-defense, but found that for months after she retired she would catch herself searching her home for places where someone might conceal a weapon.
Â
The scenery changes the moment we get out of the mountains, the way it does so often across America. From the train, most of Nevada looks like exactly what it is, the bed of an ancient sea, a landscape broken only by the remnants of more bridges, tiny clusters of houses, and distant highways on each side of the tracks. The exposed desert rock glows softly in the dusk, a drowsy, pastel sunset after the dramatic landscapes of the Sierra.
The headlines on the bundles of
USA Today
s brought aboard read âHouse, Senate Parry on âObamaCareâ as Shutdown Looms.â Itâs not of much concern on the California Zephyr. At breakfast, I reminisce with Geneâa devout Nebraska Cornhuskers fan wearing a bright red team jacket, on his way back to Lincoln, where he has been teaching mathematics for 53 yearsâover Johnny Rodgersâs greatest game. At lunch, I talk to Leah and John, both of whom have their pilotâs license and have lived and worked all over the world in public health, about Mayor Dick Lee and his struggle with the Model Cities program in New Haven, Connecticut. We speculate about a middle-aged couple who hold hands everywhere they go on the Zephyr, and whom everyone wonders about until we realize that the man is blind. I marvel anew at the range of conversations you can have on the train even as youâre being Archimedied into collectivism.
As it happens, the Zephyr is unable to take its usual scenic route through the Rockies because torrential rains have washed out the track near the Moffat Tunnelâthe second washout due to extreme weather Iâve encountered within a week of travel. Suddenly we are in a tale foretold. Ayn Randâthe devoutly atheist cult leader who has somehow become the prophet of fundamentalist Republicansâloved trains. In her major opus,
Atlas Shrugged
, one of her great heroes of capitalismâher âprime moversââruns a railroad. In doing research for the book, Rand supposedly rode in locomotives of the New York Central and even operated the engine of the 20th Century Limited, later claiming, âNobody touched a lever except
Similar Books
