Day One: Amtrak Journey West: Colorado's Western Slope

After weeks and months of planning and anticipation, we're finally on the California Zephyr, bound for San Francisco, a city I haven't seen in more than passing for 23 years!  It's my first time in an Amtrak sleeper, and I'm tingling with vintage excitement at the idea of travelling like folks did in the 1940s movies I became obsessed with at age 11 or 12, while watching TV with Dad in the musty club basement of my mustier youth. Today we mounted the massive Rockies and passed through the canyons and valleys along the Colorado River of the Western Slope.  The river is low; it snakes and bends and inhabits the soil through which it passes.  They become one - sand, soil, water, rock, burnt low grasses that never get green but remain always greyish, sage I believe it's called.  Striated red shale cliffs give way to washed out white, streaked here and there with black, the color having something to do with the mineral composition of the soil.  The soil is sandy and the rocks are fracturous, yet these mountains have stood for millions of years.  The guide in the observation car said these mountains are actually the second set of Rockies to cleave Colorado in two, the first set having emerged from the molitnous Earth the first time tectonic plates shifted and pushed everything below into daylight, like giving birth to an unformed mass that would harden, taking shape, becoming the Rocky Mountains we in Denver take for granted daily, a lumpy shadow on the city's horizon.  We love to look at them but they're trecherous, cold and barren, a wasteland that could eaily take the live of this lifelong city-dweller.  I like looking at them through the window of a climate-controlled passenger train. Travelling by train produces great short-term friendships, the communal seating arrangement in the dining car making a byproduct of getting-to-know-you.  Most, though not all, fellow travellers comply.  At breakfast we were joined by a retired South African couple who now call Hilton Head, South Carolina home.  The man was liver-spotted and pasty, with white hair and whiter, bushy eyebrows.  The woman looked, though likely wasn't, younger than he, open-faced and smiling, with a sweep of thick blond hair and clear blue eyes that laughed and searched for points at which to connect with us, her fellow diners.  She was a housewife, he a retired architect, professional, a little uppity, loaded with opinions.  As he started into a story of travelling by plane once from Johannesburg to Atlanta, a story of airline debaucles and airline employee rudeness, his wife pressed her fingertips to her temples in an effort to steady herself (She seemed nearly to tremble!), and exclaimed, "He was livid!" as though to excuse his boorishness aforehand.  So sure she seemed that we, too, would be patience-tried by the righteous indigation with which he told a tale she'd no doubt heard many times before.   Later in the conversation. John and I told them we were transit workers, and they seemed a bit surprised.  I banter intellectually with the best of them and John keeps pace, too.  The man said he thought my split shift job seemed bottom of the totem pole (my phrase -- I'd used in earlier in the conversation when describing the seniority-based bidding that determines my schedule).  I replied "It's not so bad, really," but later wished I'd said "Beg your pardon, but no element of my life is bottom of anything.  Later, as I passed back through the dining car enroute to our sleeper, they happily waved, ensuring me I needn't say everything that passes through my own self-righteous mind. Later:  Sitting in the window of our sleeper, our window on the world, watching the Rockies fly by, I thought, in gratitude, of how I'd done so much with this one life.  I've been to Windows on the World at the World Trade Center in NYC.  Been to the observation deck of that gone forever-now building not once but twice, once with Mom in 1982, again some ten years later with my first husband.  Mom took me also to Tavern on the Green.  It occurs to me now more than 30 years later, 6 months after her death, that Mom loved to show me things, her need to be the center of my world satisfied by showing me worldly things.   As for me, I'm satisfied that my life has been full of lessons like these.