[title type="h2"]The Sunset Limited, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco, June 19-28, 2017.[/title]
During two recent weeks I was on vacation in Los Angeles and San Francisco. To and from home, I traveled by rail on the Sunset Limited train, whose route passed through the heart of the American Southwest, a place I love. I kept my Dining Diary rigorously while on the road. That will explain why you haven't received the New Orleans Menu Daily. I was writing like crazy, but couldn't put it out on the web.
Part Two of that reportage begins as I'm awakened from my sleep in Sleeping Car, Roomette #7. I am traveling feet forward and listening to some old recordings of music from the 1940s. I fell asleep around ten in the evening, then went back to sleep and into the next day easily.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 12:55 a.m.--I awaken to more racket, and voices that talk of moving to another train. I know very well that is not what will happen, but in my dreams I imagine that I will be left alone here in the middle of the night. I allow crazy ideas like this to form in my mind entirely too often. I manage to get right back to sleep when I hear two beeps of the locomotive's horn, signifying our departure from San Antonio after several hours there.
6:43 a.m.--The nightmares end when I get up for good at my usual time. We are in Del Rio, Texas, a town of substantial size right on the U.S.-Mexico border. I have never seen Del Rio from a train, even though all dozen or so times I've traveled the Sunset Limited I've passed through the town. The train stays in the small station only briefly.
7:15 a.m.--I make my way to the dining room for breakfast, in which I shared a table with a woman from the coach car. She is in the business of verifying real estate titles, many of which involve mineral rights. We soon move to other topics, one of which is the forbidding terrain. The hills are emphatic in their control of the land, which they share with the distinctive flora of the desert Southwest.
A plant that you see only here is the ocotillo. In dry weather, it looks like tall clusters of dead sticks shoved into the ground by some obsessive maniac. If rain falls, the plant pops out leaves and--if there's a good bit of rain--red flowers. Those and those large assortment of cactus, yucca, and agaves cover only a third or less of the ground. It is desolate, to put it mildly--but it's also something to see.
The most dramatic locale is the Pecos River, which cuts a deep gash into the parched limestone and fills it with water. What an obstacle this must have been for anyone looking for a place to set up shop hundreds of years ago!
7:26 a.m.-- I remain spellbound by all this desert, whose appeal to me is both intrinsic and happenstance. I know the lay of the land along US 90 very well. But a lot of the train route shows me the other side of the numerous--and in some cases amazing--mountain ranges. They aren't familiar, as many times as I've come this way. For almost all previous rides, I was on the south side of US 90, the main road through here. This time I'm on the north side. When we arrive in Alpine, Texas--the biggest town since we left Del Rio--I found the territory unrecognizable.
In Alpine--a hip, cool town by the measures of Big Bend country--the train stops for a crew change. And to and to let smokers relieve their needs for coffin nails. In the meantime the train gets serviced. They allow passengers to get off and walk around a bit. If there's really a lot of time (and there usually isn't), a bold passenger can walk around a little. Charming little place, and one of the main entrances to Big Bend National Park, where I have hiked many times since the 1970s.
1:30 p.m.--During lunch, groves of pecan trees alongside the tracks. This is something new. The trees grow in a very arid area. We will see many miles of these trees between here and El Paso.
I talk about the pecans with the lady who joins me for lunch in the diner. Lunch is being served in Mountain Time, so we it comes an hour later than we expected as the salads come rolling out. In addition to the lettuces we have the same green lima beans and corn as last time.
2:18 p.m.--The train takes a long time in El Paso, then swings into New Mexico to make stops in three minor towns. Then it crosses into Arizona, where the most important stops are Tucson and a suburb of Phoenix. The latter no longer has a mainline connection with the UP, so it's a new vista for me.
But before we get to either of those stops, we pause at Benson, Arizona. I see no visual or other reference to Tom Benson, although this might be a good place for a winter camp for the Saints. Not far from Benson, the train engineer got an off-standard reading from his wheels, something that trains constantly check on the road. We pull off the main to check this out. It's decided that the wheels and axles need to cool off. They do this by slowing down, then slowly picking up speed. Fortunately, the sun is heading downward, the the train can safely pick up speed as it rolls toward Tucson and beyond.
5:03 p.m.--Afternoon nap. Afterwards, I turn my attention to editing this department. I am reminded that the motion on a train makes for many typos. What's more, I am far behind in turning notes into prose.
7:30 p.m.--Dinner with an elderly couple. He says prayers as the first food appears. No further devotions are made. I learn that they do a good deal of Amtrak travel, which they enjoy. They turn out to be the most convivial dining companions I will have on the train. Which is saying something. I find most people I meet on trains to be interesting.
The waiter tells me that the roasted chicken with a thyme and pepper sauce is a better dish than the chicken with a ring of French cookery. But he also tells me that Amtrak is in a good phase in which the fullly-equipped kitchen is plied by actual cooks. Perhaps we can even call them chefs. The chicken is indeed good. It comes with another wave of the unavoidable green beans and corn, with rice.
10:05 p.m.--It's too early for bed, but there's not much else to do. The train makes a number of stops as it aims form Los Angeles. Palm Springs, for example. Yuma. Ontario. Pomona. This was Frank Sinatra's realm during the 1950s.
The towns seem deserted, suggesting that we are approaching the end of the Sunset Route faster than we really are. Neighborhoods glow with ghostly lights that come and go as we keep rolling, ever more slowly. At least twice, I see eerie, fuzzy lights in the distance or right next to the train. I got up a few times to find out what was going on, and found nobody and nothing. The mystery is dissolved when I return home and look out my bedroom window with my glasses off. It's the same fuzzy-light vista.
The attendant in the sleeper, who has proven to be a great help all along, reassures me that he will let me know when it's time to get out of bed. And that there's yet a long while to go. I move in and out of sleep with a puzzling anxiety. I have covered over 100,000 miles on trains, and know that I will not be left behind without luggage, cash, or sense of direction. But I still consider the possibility. I should have had a martini eight hours ago.
Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 4:55 a.m. I notice other passengers trying to dope out the strange lights that seem to drift by in the deep darkness every minute or so. It reaches a point where everybody seems to be standing around the stairs leading to the bottom level of the train. Sooner or later, we all make it out trackside, and the sleeper attendant points the way out, and tells me where to find a shuttle that will will take me and my luggage to the first-class lounge in the terminal. The outbound half of this trip aboard the Sunset Limited has ended, this time for real.
7:08 a.m.--Mary Ann has been in Los Angeles for a few days at the home of our son Jude, his wife Suzanne and their son (and our grandson) Jackson. She and I both know that quiet must reign in that house for a couple more hours yet. I just park myself in the First Class lounge, where I can have coffee and juices and bad pastries. I also get worked up by television reports of tropical storms that might be heading toward New Orleans, perhaps with flooding.
8:45 a.m.--MA picks me up in front of Los Angeles's Central Railroad Terminal. This is the train station you always see in movies made in the 1940s, when everybody traveled by train.
MA knows her way around Los Angeles--she visits here often--so she jumps right onto US 101, a freeway that takes us to Jude & Suzanne's family residence. There I see my grandson for the first time in eight months. Since then he has not only learned to walk, but also to run, which he does constantly. He's also learned a surprisingly good vocabulary.
I had been worried that, since our meetings have been so few, Jackson would not recognize me or trust me. This proved wonderfully false. He and I got along very well, playing with his toys endlessly and staying close behind him during his many and rapid forays. He reminds me a lot of his father. When Jude was Jackson's age he would blast off long distances in search of anything he found interesting. "Where's Jude" is still the most-used phrase in our family.
We have breakfast in the well-designed open kitchen. Jude makes his smooth omelettes for anyone who wants one. Nobody could be more eager than little Jackson, who during my visit never left a scrap of scrambled eggs uneaten. He likes just about every other food that comes his way, notably oatmeal, blueberries, raspberries, and any other red fruit.
Jude has a full day of work before him. Suzanne also works full time, and today she will leave for San Francisco, there to attend a seminar. She leaves the care of Jackson to Mary Ann and the longtime family nanny. There could hardly be better caretakers than those two, both of whom go far beyond changing diapers to entertaining constant play and reading with Jackson. Lucky boy.
1:36 p.m.--Jude picks me up for lunch in a downtown eatery called Otium. It's a wide open space near what he tells me will be a very expensive sub-surface extension of the BART transit operation. The current name--"The Hole" doesn't sound promising.
The clientele in Otium is young and well-groomed by the standards of the times on the West Coast. The women strike me as underdressed. Not in terms of fashion statements, but by square-inches of skin coverage. (I have been told that I have a poor sense of these matters.) The men, on the other hand, are over-bearded. (I have worn a beard since 1972.) All this is true both of the people who dine and those who serve in the restaurants.
Our waiter has a bearded neck, and certainly isn't the only one. He also knows the menu and makes intelligent suggestions. I start with a half-dozen Blue Point raw oysters. But those come from the Atlantic, specifically off Long Island. What are they doing here? They're tasty enough, though, with a shallot mignonette finishing their elegance. The menu at first seemed to be about Middle Eastern food, but the more I read the more Italian it seemed. We wound up with rigatone with an assortment of peppers and guanciale (hog jowls) and fettuccine with wild mushroms, spinach and egg yolks. And we had an order of falafel towards the end.
During our lunch Jude unveils some ideas about how he might get involved in the New Orleans Menu. He already helps me out with the technology of the newsletter, in which his skills greatly exceed mine. MA sometimes suggests that I might be ready for retirement, but I don't see that, let alone expect it anytime soon. That said, this sordid matter is something that probably needs to be addressed at some point.
6:14 p.m.--The first night we spend with JS&J (as they will henceforth be known in this journal), Jude tells me that I created great demand for pasta with pesto the last time I visited them. I am directed to repeat this success tonight, because the herb garden that JS&J grew in their back yard produced a nice crop of fresh basil. Jackson is especially tickled by this effort and the fun of watering the basil it every day. The minions are sent to the supermarket to pick up the other ingredients. We still are left with not quite enough butter, but I make do. I remember the batch that inspired all this months ago, and I'd say this one was not quite as good. But from the littlest to the biggest, everybody loves this batch of pesto with fettuccine. A good first impression for me to have made with my hosts.
Written by Tom Fitzmorris July 05, 2017 10:01 in
