By G. Walker - Purple & Gray

Dear Home,

Whenever I am away from you I begin to think of you as sort of human, extant - a noun with thoughts and feelings and above all, associations. Therefore, I’ve decided to write to you about the great Other that you will never know - that is, anything that is not you as defined by my emotional recognition of your place. You, strange though it may sound, have no true existence. There’s not even a word for you in French. You can and will and have been many different locations; you have been a thin walled tract house built circa 1953 in Carmichael, California. You have been a clapboard Victorian bedecked in mold that, in my two year old memory, was blue though in reality was yellow. You have been a cottage-cheese ceilinged apartment in Los Angeles, a few doors down from Gramma Shirley with pickled eggs and bacon and “hobo coffee.” You have had a lush garden, a rooftop view, a designated parking space, a claw foot tub and bars on your windows. You are a storybook. You are a story about what your walls have looked like - true - but maybe even more accurately, you are a story of what I have done when away from those walls. I have never told you about these adventures that have defined you so explicitly and sensually. Until now - I am going to take you on a train ride from your current locus in Oakland, California, to Denver, Colorado. I think this will be of particular interest to you as you have never known yourself to be a transitive (or even an intransitive) verb the likes of your distant cousin “traveling.”

It began in the cool, though clear, Sacramento morning when we set out for the train station. At 11:30 pm the night before we had dragged our tired asses to my mom’s house, having left right from work an hour and a half before. In the morning Mom drove us to the station after a big potato breakfast at the Tower Café (no Italian Scramble, “all out” at 8:30 am).

At the station we waited for two hours and I puzzled over the polyester pants and bright colored shirts of an Amish family. Airplanes, though a wonderfully colorful mixer of people, are not quite the same kind of social skimmer as a train which puts on display the contents of an indistinct demographic: the slow travelers, the poor, the rejectors of technology, the uninformed, the adventurers... A social fish net dragged idly across the very middle of the pond.

The train began its sloshing chug out of Sacramento and for some reason I thought of Watership Down, or rather I thought of the cover of a copy I owned (having neglected to ever read the book): rabbits tucked in tall grass, a thick cream of fog slathered over the horizon. The train, I thought, was pushing through that morning fog and the bunnies were bouncing off through the fields. Everything felt more cheerful from the train’s interior.

It was sudden - we were traversing the Sierras and red earth had been replaced by a more rugged, hardy ochre and blotched white snow. Pines scaled the hills which quickly became mountains. We passed through a wooden tunnel and the daylight dashed in between the slots - a staccato of sunshine.

The town of Truckee came to a slow stop beside us. A man wearing Protective Green and a pony tail with the tan of a road worker waved to the slowing train, a childlike glee as he lifted his shocking green shirt to expose a sunburned belly and a nipple which he proceeded to rub as he laughed and waved. I never saw to whom he had been waving.

Seated across from us on the train was an American and her American daughter who must have been five or maybe size. Probably five. The mom wore denim capris, flip-flops with a delicate black band straddling her foot, and a black t-shirt that indulged every curve of her ample bosom, back and tummy. “An overabundance of embonpoint, as the French might put it” I thought to myself as if reading from a script. She ate taquitos with guacamole chased by a Pepsi and double chased by sugared almonds. Her daughter was nursing a mini-Alhambra shaped bottle of pink lemonade and ate something from a package. Then there were granola bars and cheese puffs and before they could say “digestion” it was time for dinner - hot dogs and more soda. This was where all the statistics about American diets come from, I mused. I thought about my own upbringing.

The ground leveled again, becoming white with salt, and the sun began to set on our first day aboard the Long Ride from California to Colorado.

On the way back from the bathroom I saw one of the Amish men talking to a Christian woman in the hallway and my footsteps faltered when I thought I heard, “they put so much money into the adoption and then they got a little black girl...” Excuse me? The voices had trailed off and I was counting stairs on the way back to my seat.

As I walked to the the snack bar for tea (futile attempt by the way) two nondescript white men men were talking to two of the Amish men, “a good back cracking... BACK CRACKING,” the nondescript man reiterated.

At 7:30 pm we were in Winnemucca, Nevada (I thought of Tales of the City, Mother Mucca of Winnemucca). The Winnemucca station looked like a double-wide telephone booth.

The Americans had hot chocolate. Mom made daughter take her medicine with a gulp of the pink lemonade. Mom ate her sugared almonds while each watched a movie on her own portable device.

The bathroom smelled like ass mixed with cigarettes. Or a cig-ass air freshener. I crouched over the seat, trying not to touch anything as the train shimmied back and forth.

The night was horrible - every time I thought I had slept it through my watch told me it hadn’t been more than two hours, neck pinned to a vicious 45 degree angle (This, Home, was when you were most distinct and most missed). When the hollow sleep dreams finally curled the corners of the train seats, the baby - in her perfect amish bonnet and dress - woke up to scream and scream and scream until mom rushed back from wherever she had gone to rock her calm again. No words, just motion. Once I heard a faint murmur of a song sung in Pennsylvania Dutch. Two hours later, my jaw loose again, a flashlight painted the car red searching for the passengers getting off at Somewhere-in-the-Desert, 3:00 am.

The landscape had just begun to pale in the morning light when we decided to give up on sleep and head to the “observatory” car. Mostly dark, the Utah mountains  wrapped around every part of the train visible through the ceiling-high windows. The ethereal knocks and squeaks of the train accompanied the landscape, an ambience that struck a deeply sentimental note.

Snow flecked hillocks made way to loping meadows and craggy buttes that turned pink with the onset of morning - then orange, then yellow. Stalks of reedy grass were flanked by silver scrub and red gray dirt. You’ve never known snow Home - it is beautiful.

We crested Mountain Time at 6:00 am, which of course became, respectively 7:00 am, and as the announcement for the time change was made I looked at over at my companion and asked, “want coffee?” At roughly 11:00 am We stopped at Grand Junction, Colorado. At the station store, red and green and yellow streamers from a fiesta perhaps ten years ago hung from rough-hewn roof beams. Inside the shop were faux turquoise earrings, feather dream catchers, post-cards, snickers bars and native american figurines - the ménage à trois brick-a-brack of a country that doesn’t know its origins or to whom it owes its cultural allegiance. The scrubbed linoleum floors betrayed the solitude that generally inhabited the store. Two coffee pots sat near the door, a stack of white styrofoam cups and a hand written sign that said, “Free Coffee” neighbored by another that read “creamer $.50.”

The mountains slid into a wide valley revealing our destination. Denver, one of my favorite cities, was crisp and inviting. Denver also happens to be where my dear friend lives so I won’t bore you, Home, with the details of our stay other than to tell you that it was a wonderful time.

The Return Trip

Leaving Union Station, Denver Colorado

The state that we tracked through was blanketed in snow on our way back to you - a completely new scape than the one we entered four days ago. A herd of elk mewled across spongy whiteness, a few mounted by magpies stationed as sentinels atop their rears.

The train was so packed we had to sit in the lounge car, hoping that seats would open up by the time we got to Frassier where the skiers usually de-train. The general populace was prettier than on the way in - these were the weekenders: the high cheek-boned and matching jump-suited, the well groomed nails and the facials, eyeliner and down jacketed. These were the ones that wouldn’t follow us over the state line.

The snow came down in thick tufts but still just a whisper - heavy nothingness. The tree branches and slab rock outcroppings were iced in delicate flakes. The landscape had been so transformed since we passed through it, it felt like a dream.

The train came to a slow halt somewhere in the Rockies as the conductor announced that a rock slide had crossed our path and we were going to have to wait until the tracks had been cleared. A little while later the engine stopped and a silence descended over us, a silence so deafening after having been saturated in the thick puffing rumbles of the train that I was forced to pay great attention. Outside the window the furry of the snowflakes rhythmically vaulted to earth causing a tension between the inert train and the moving sky - it was as if physics was revealed to the naked eye and the tension of sitting still could be felt. But for the threat of delay, I was deeply grateful for the interlude.

An hour later we pushed through the little valley - the snow had already receded and to our right a freeway came into view - a giant chasm was left where a boulder had toppled from the mountains above.

9:47 pm Mountain Time: A taciturn night descended, a velvet waltz of hills and distant lights drifted past the windows.

We awoke to 7:40 am Pacific Standard Time, just before we would pull into lonesome Winnemucca once again - beautifully fringed in white peeks, the little town rose in my appreciation of it.

Mercifully I had slept through most of the night, waking only occasionally and falling back to sleep quickly. I had awoken at one point, in time to see the girl with the pinched face, dirty blond hair pulled into a too-tight pony-tail, get off at Helper, Nevada. I had seen her smoke at every stop since Denver. I watched her finger a fresh tattoo on her stomach in Frassier before she squatted to protect herself from the cold wind. She pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head. I looked at her Vans sneakers, her tight jeans that piled at the ankle and stretched tight over thick thighs and hips, knees turned in slightly. She had the bones of someone meant to be scrawny. She had a stud in her eyebrow. It made me sad or scared or pretentious to think how well I thought I knew her. She wheeled her suitcase into Helper where the lights of a bar winked and a pinkness clung to the horizon. Dirt even puffed a little from the wheels on her suitcase as she dragged it behind her. Her Home and her life stitched like a little knot somewhere in the middle of the country; a little knot stitched into my knowing.

At the thin-air level once again our train lollygagged around Donner Lake, through Tunnel #1 - the “amazing engineering feet by Governor Stanford!” the volunteer from the Union Pacific Railroad based-out-of-old-Sacramento informed us in his antique, jowly, bed-time-story voice. On the train with us were the spiked-hair, very bronzed women of sixty-ish and their dapper husbands who, that-one-over-there announced, “served in Belgium and oh we loved it!” They were all drooling over the well built Dutch boy with a closely trimmed haircut. Drinks angling downward, eyebrows up they leaned out of their seats, the tips of their white Keds tennis shoes just touching the ground, mouths open slightly in case they needed to laugh or comment. These women were the gamblers, the ones that knew this part of the train ride as well as their grocery store isles and the rims of their pools. They had probably been making the trip from Sacramento to Reno every month or weekend for twenty years. My step-grandma could almost have been one of those women, had she not been so disdainful and lost her friends to petty fallouts or vicious greed and underhanded remarks. I wondered if one day I would be part of a little group like this one, but I doubted it.

And at last the train ride that used thirty hours in each direction, ended. In Sacramento the surviving passengers oozed out the doors. As I too melted and then reformed on the other side of the train doors I thought of you Home and was reminded of how important you were - without you I would never have been able to go on this trip, having had no Home to get away from and to so sweetly return.

With love,

Your Counterpart in transit