The Last Word On Nothing

Pete and I just got back from a winter trip to Colorado. It was a real vacation — we drove around the mountains and mesas, hiked up side canyons, went to bed early, slept in, ate our hosts’ homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast. (We also saw Christie, who made us such good pizza, and sang karaoke with her husband Dave and her delightful friends.)

The supposed goal of our trip was to get better at cross-country skiing, which for us meant wobbling, occasionally gliding, falling over, and getting back up until our legs were too tired to ski anymore. But we were just as excited about two 24-ish-hour Amtrak train rides we’d booked to and from Colorado — first going east from Sacramento to Grand Junction, where we rented a car, then west on Amtrak from Grand Junction back to Sacramento.

Neither Pete nor I had ridden an overnight train before. We boarded at 11am the day before Christmas Eve and tucked ourselves into our roomette, a matchbox-sized compartment with two fold-down bunk beds. We opened and closed our tiny storage cubbies and our little tray table, then converted our seats into the lower bunk, and took an 11:30am nap. There was no WiFi, but we didn’t care.

When dinnertime arrived, an Amtrak attendant told us to go sit in the dining car, where we’d be assigned to sit with another group. This came as a surprise — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a meal with strangers. But the young couple from Salt Lake City was lovely: They were competitive bowlers, they told us between bites of rigatoni.

The California Zephyr turned out to be a small and fascinating world. There was a physical therapist who worked with injured coal miners in Utah — she had recently donated her kidney to her husband, a college soccer coach, we learned. We listened (ok eavesdropped) as a teenage boy from Green River, whose favorite words were “weird” and “different,” shyly befriended another boy from Nepal. The boy from Nepal insisted that Colorado’s mountains were as stunning as the Himalayas. “America is just as beautiful,” he said.

We chatted with an older couple headed to visit their son with an entire home-cooked Christmas dinner carefully packed in ice in their carry-on luggage: “He’s a bachelor,” the mother said. “Nothing but a frying pan in his kitchen.”

Only one person, who rode with us on the trip back west to Sacramento, proved genuinely annoying. He had the piercingly nasal sort of voice that cuts through all physical and social barriers, including headphones. His voice was inescapable in the observation deck and dining car, so we heard about his many grievances with the Veteran’s Administration; his disdain for rock musicians who “pretend to be country,” his unsolicited recommendations for places to fish for rainbow, brown, brook, and lake trout, and oh, so much more.

As we passed by a section of the Colorado River called Ruby Canyon, however, something wonderful happened. Everyone in the observation deck fell silent. We were all transfixed by the blue-green river, which seemed to simultaneously ripple and lie still. It flowed under ice, through the white skeletons of dead cottonwoods, around black rock outcrops of Vishnu schist. Those rocks are more than a billion years old, someone quietly said.

The canyon walls and water mirrored one another as the sun set, turning vermillion, gold, purple. Watching the light flare and melt, I kept thinking, don’t go, not yet.

As we rolled across Nevada that night, I fell asleep off and on, waking up to watch the occasional set of headlights flash by, or constellations slowly pivot overhead. It was strange and deeply restful to let my dreams and the desert blur together.

The next morning we woke up near Reno and ate breakfast with an anthropologist who studies disaster recovery and a pathologist working on Alzheimer’s treatments. We talked about science, attempting, once again, to tune out the sounds of the loud man who was holding forth at the next table, something about shooting wild pigs.  

The pathologist rolled her eyes and took a sip of her apple juice. I made a similar face; we both found him obnoxious. By the end of breakfast Pete and I were ready for the privacy of our roomette, and grateful we’d been able to afford to be alone and quiet for at least part of the trip. The train was great, but we were looking forward to get back to our own car and our own house with its bathroom and shower.

Since our train ride, though, I’ve been thinking about a recent Political Gabfest interview I heard with the journalist Amanda Ripley, about how to survive the coming election year. She made three suggestions in a recent newsletter post, inspired by her own conversations with Venezuelan journalist Victor Hugo Febres: First, not to get hijacked by political polarization. Second, not to take on too much anguish, or mistake merely witnessing tragedy for doing something useful. Third, to look for opportunities to make a difference, while accepting that the difference may be small.

I really like that recipe for staying sane in 2024. But I’d add one more ingredient, for myself: From time to time, ditch the car, and travel somewhere by Amtrak. I’ll still reserve a roomette if I can afford it – the rooms aren’t cheap, but having the option to retreat is awfully nice. I won’t spend the whole trip cocooned, though. I’ll also sit in the observation deck and the dining car and talk to strangers and think of two things that the man with the nasal voice said:

1. “I’ve seen a lot. And I’ve known good people of every persuasion.”
2. “You want to write music? Ride the rails. Go learn some shit.”