Train: middle and end

[susanstinson]

The train from Austin to Alpine got into San Antonio at 11:30 pm and left at 5:30 the next morning. I've taken the train from Springfield to Dallas before, traveling economy, and knew that the seats were tough for me to sleep in, so I splurged and got a hotel room in San Antonio for that night, one within easy walking distance that I found on the Amtrak site. It made me nervous to leave the train (and some of my stuff), especially because I knew that they were moving the car I was in and attaching it to another train in the night, but it was just so delicious to get to take a shower, change my clothes and sleep for a few hours -- c-pap machine purring away -- stretched out flat on a bed.

When I got back to the train (whole new crew, and it was true, the car was in a different spot), I nodded off again for a little while. When I woke up around six, I opened the little curtain on my window, and there was herd of cattle next to a barbed wire fence, with a calf running and kicking up its heels alongside the train. It was a good sight for sun up. Most of the seats were upstairs, so the desert views were good.

I hopped off the train at Del Rio, one of the world's largest shipping points for wool and mohair, home of the original blue jeans, and station master said that he'd mail two letters for me. No cell phone service for most of the trip, and I love to write letters on trains.

I had printed out a route guide from the Amtrak website, with bits of information about what was passing by out the window, in a table with how many miles it was since the last stop, and how many miles since I got on the train, so I knew, for instance, when we passed Amistad Reservoir, that many caves with ancient paintings had been flooded when they made the lake, and that it was 321 feet down to the Pecos River when we were crossing a high bridge, just outside of Langtry, former home of Judge Roy Bean. And all. It made me popular with a couple of grey-haired men in the observation car, being so thoroughly informed. It was fun talking with Pablo -- a former professor of music, later, linguistics, I think he said, originally from South Dakota -- and Soledad, who was from Peru. They were newlyweds (Pablo had had six wives, and started to wax eloquent on the nature of love, kicked off with by quoting the Willie Nelson/Freddie Fender song, "All the Girls I've Loved Before," but he was cut off by the approach of a particularly interesting sight along the tracks), living in Venezuela, and were travelling the country to see if they might be interested in moving here. They both played the guitar. Less interesting was the guy who sat next to me purely because he wanted in on the route guide, and said he was from Indiana. He thought the desert was ugly and useless, and said, "You couldn't grow any corn and beans out here."

I quoted him to the guy running the little train cafe, and he said, "Corn and beans is why we have Indiana. This is beautful country!"

I had three or four conversations with the conductor about the fact that they had tight space to work with at Alpine, and, since someone was getting off the front of the train and I was in the last car, I would have to wait for four minutes or so after she got off until they pulled the train up to let me off. My friend wasn't there to meet me (turned out that she'd called ahead and been told that the train was late, although it was actually right on time), so I went into the station: beautiful, old wood benches, bathroom, water fountain, pay phone, and, instead of a ticket window, a mural painted on the wall of a friendly, smiling person helping someone at a ticket window as, clearly, they wished they could do if they had a ticket window and a person to staff it.

My friend came before too long. I didn't call my brother to give him the end of the train trip, though, until a few days later, when I was sitting on the steps of the back porch of the house in Marfa, watching the first rain storm in weeks blow in, with warm winds and great octopus tentacles of lightning and big time thunder, like I think of being able to do only in the west, somewhere with dry heat and those long, flat views. That's an old, deep childhood thrill that I don't revisit much here in the New England, although it's almost always a little bit exciting when it rains.

Comments

[ilipodscrill.livejournal.com]

did you grow up in Texas? Marfa is the town that got all the press recently because There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, along with Giant, were all filmed there, giving it triple Oscar cred, am i right? also, the ancient paintings in flooded caves are particularly fascinating to me. a lovely travelogue, thanks susan.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I was born in Amarillo, but our family moved from there to Kansas, and then, when I was six, to Colorado, which is where I grew up. But both of my parents are from Texas, and we went to my grandparents' place every summer; both of my brothers spent their summers doing ranch work for my grandfather there. My parents moved back to my grandparents' place about twenty years ago. Texas has a strong presence in my life, and I'm officially a native Texan, but it's like I've gotten small infusions of the place and its culture all my life, never been immersed.

That's right about Marfa -- the director of There Will Be Blood was giving a free screening to thank everybody from the town who had been in the movie out on a ranch where it was filmed when I was there -- I was sorry to miss it -- and I heard two guys talking in a (great) burrito place in Alpine about whether they'd seen those two movies.