[title type="h5"]Sunday, March 16, 2014.[/title]
Day Two of our West Coast journey on The Sunset Limited train began for me at six-thirty. It was still totally dark. Not only are we in the early part of Daylight Saving Time, but Central Time extends father west in Texas than it really should, distorting the times of sunrise and sunset.
I was happy to see Mary Ann in the lower bunk. I knew she had left the sleeper room at least twice overnight, during the long stay in San Antonio. As I got dressed, she told me she wanted sleep more than breakfast, and sent me on my way to the dining car.
There I was seated across from a man who had just arrived from the direction of the coaches. To break the ice, I told him that we soon should cross the Pecos River, which cuts a dramatic canyon through the parched red rocks around here. Getting across that gorge was such a challenge that this is the point where the train line--the second transcontinental--connected east to west in 1883.
Unfortunately for both of us, the train had either already crossed the Pecos, or it did so when it was still too dark to see anything outside. But we had other things to discuss. Here was a well-spoken man who had many holes punched in his life's ticket. He was thinking about New Orleans as a place to go next. He said he had a good bit of experience in the restaurant business, I told him that New Orleans is a great place for that. He asked me how to go about it. I said he should start at a top-notch restaurant--a Brennan family place, or one of John Besh's places. They're always eager to get promising new managers or cooks.
But that wasn't his area of specialty. "I'm looking for a position as a dishwasher," he said. That took me aback, and to another direction of conversation. Then he surprised me again. "I'm seventy-four," he said. He didn't look to be even in his fifties. I had him figured for a man with a lot of plans for the future, already prosperous, and satisfied with his life.
Mary Ann joined us around that time. "Can you believe this man is seventy-four?" I asked her. No, she couldn't. She didn't stay, claiming again that she didn't want to do any eating.
My suspicions about where we were were confirmed when the train pulled into Sanderson, a small town well on the west side of the Pecos. So we had missed it. Nothing much else to see now. I knew from my many past wanderings around here that goats for mohair are widely raised in these parched parts. But not a lot else.
When the ocotillo plants began to appear, we were emphatically in the desert. Ocotillos look like bunches of random sticks jammed into a central hole in the ground, rising up about ten feet high. They are an accurate barometer of the climate, because they pop out their small leaves only after a rainstorm. These were pretty green, but the sun was doing its best to fix that.
Which made the next stop on the train route peculiar. Alpine, Texas--proud of its 4485-foot elevation and its claim to be the gateway to Big Bend National Park--was not only cloudy but shockingly cold. If the temperature wasn't in the forties, it was in the thirties. Where did that come from?
Mary Ann is now hip to the Sunset Limited's schedule of "smoke stops," designed to allow people who cannot abstain from cigarettes to get off the train and light up. This is enough time, MA says, to get off the hated train and tour the area.
In this case, it was well worthwhile. The Holland Hotel, just across US 90 from the train station, looked to be open again. It wasn't the last time I was here, nor for a long time before that. Now it has a gourmet restaurant, a handsome lobby, and a lot of history. It's following in the footsteps of the Gage Hotel, an old cowboy hotel about fifty miles back. About twenty years ago, the Gage became a resort. We resolved to stay at the Holland next time we come out this way.
And I hope we do. Big Bend was the first place I ever took an adventure vacation on my own, in 1976. I am mesmerized by the desert landscapes and mountains, and hiked the area extensively in eight visits. I wonder whether I'm able to get into that again. Maybe the time to do it is in the fall or spring, when it's cooler. If not this cool.
Beyond Alpine is a long, lonely stretch of US 90 paralleled by the train tracks. On both sides, off in the distance, are mountain ranges. In between, it's dry, flat prairie, with a scattering of cattle. I like this part of the planet so much that I use its photo as a computer wallpaper.
But these last miles of US 90 have a new industry. Way out there is a pecan orchard that stretches for many miles and at least a mile back from the road. When I first saw this some twenty years ago, I thought it might have been wine vineyards. (As unlikely as that might seem, west Texas has quite a few wineries of very good quality, although most of those are farther north.) But when the plants grew to tree size, it was clearly something else. It turned out that it wasn't just here that this dry country was irrigated with groundwater and made to grown pecans.
This orchard was only the first of many we saw east and west of El Paso. Pecans are clearly big business.
The train lingers in that westernmost Texas city, not just for the benefit of the smokers but for crew changes and train maintenance. MA and I took a long walk around the neighborhood of the handsome depot with its landmark tower.
[caption id="attachment_41670" align="alignleft" width="480"]
El Paso's train station.[/caption]
This neighborhood is trying to become an arts and entertainment district. It was hard to tell how successful this has been. It was, after all, midday on a Sunday, and not many bars and restaurants would be open. On the other hand, I got the feeling that this was a well-intentioned but unsuccessful effort to inject coolness into the area. And what kind of train station gets only six visits a week, counting both directions?
Lunch. An entree salad for me, with blue cheese and an envelope each of Italian and pepper-parmesan dressing, both from the collection of Paul Newman. Mary Ann skipped lunch, although she took some of my salad. Dessert was a little carton of vanilla gelato.
Time for my afternoon training rituals. I like the somewhat nutty idea of taking a shower on a moving train. Not many passengers do. On this trip, I believe I was the only one. Two shower stalls keep the lines short, if they ever form. One must be careful while showering, but it's not as precarious as it seems. If the train takes a lurch in an unexpected direction, the shower room is too small to slip and fall.
I left the tight enclosure, sharply shaved and smelling nice. Even Mary Ann had to give me that, even as she regards me as incredibly stupid to get a kick out of something so jejune.
I permitted myself an hour-long nap, after which we were passing through the two minuscule stops in New Mexico: Deming and Lordsburg. Both these places, plus the first three stops in Arizona, are all in the Gadsden Purchase, which is something I'll bet you haven't throught about since seventh grade. The Gadsden Purchase was made from Mexico in 1854, for the purpose of building this very railroad.
After a few minutes' thought about that, it was cocktail time. I picked up a gin and tonic from John's Place and returned to our compartment. I recalled how much I enjoy G&T. When I first took up with cocktails in my twenties, it was my default order for a long time. I don't remember why.
I do remember the first time I traveled on the Sunset Limited. It was 1978, on the fourth of eight trains that took me 10,000 miles in two weeks around America. Dinner, at almost exactly the time and place at which this narrative now pauses, was among the most memorable of my life. Not the best by a long way, but one I remember vividly thirty-six years later. As we rolled westward through Eastern Arizona, I packed away a large, astonishingly fine sirloin strip steak with a a baked potato. It was seared to crunchy at the exterior, juicy and good in every way. I think the price was six dollars for the whole meal.
Those were the days before Amtrak began building new cars. The long-distance rolling stock in 1978 was mostly from the 1950s and before, and still powered by steam (!). The dining cars cooked as a restaurant would, with raw food and standard ranges and ovens. No pre-cooked or microwaved dishes (although that was beginning in some of the shorter-distance trains).
Tonight, in memory of that dinner, I ordered the flatiron steak for dinner. This proved to be as fine as the great salmon dish I had yesterday. The steak was tender, cooked accurately, and served with a sauce of mushrooms and demi-glace. Delicious!
[caption id="attachment_41672" align="alignleft" width="319"]
Downtown Tucson.[/caption]It was just turning dark when we arrived in Tucson. The train took another long pause here, and Mary Ann was on solid ground almost before the train came to a full stop. Here we found a successful version of what El Paso whas trying the launch. Tucson's train station and its neighborhood were filled with restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, theaters, and quaint old hotels. Most of them were busy with customers on the young side. Very hip, yet it looked like the downtown of a city this size in the 1950s. They're even bringing back a streetcar line. The tracks and the catenary are already in, and the streetcar will begin running in a few months.
If we had not already had dinner, we probably would have stopped in one of the cafes for supper. We had the time. Maybe Amtrak ought to do more stops like this. After all, when you're on a train that takes two whole days to get from one end to the other, who's in a hurry?
The Sunset Limited doesn't go to Phoenix anymore. The Union Pacific Railroad--whose tracks the Sunset travels for most of its route--moved the main line a little south to Maricopa, a suburb of Phoenix. The station is so small that it the train needs to stop and go four times to discharge passengers and board new ones on board.
We were about ready for bed by then. It was midnight New Orleans time, but only ten Arizona time. Arizona is, this time of year, on Pacific Daylight Time. This caused no end to confusion among both the passengers and the crew. Nobody ever seemed to know what time it really was, or what time one was supposed to go to dinner. Or what time we were supposed to get up the next morning.
But here is one of the great aspects of riding a long-distance train: who cares what time it is?
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]
