(Sydney – Los Angeles – Albuquerque – Kansas City - Chicago)
On Air New Zealand one needs to respond in "techno-Kiwi": food and duty free orders and regular announcements are on your lovely new, wide, Boeing at-seat-interactive-screen requiring you to press the: "Got That!" button to make them go away. At the back of the plane are the overnight crew, following dinner service, relaxing until an order and seat number and name appear on their fast-food telescreen. So one crew member jumps to collect the order and deliver it, like a rather grand takeaway-in-the-sky with at-seat service.
The adjacent pair of passenger toilets is interrrresting: if both doors open at once they completely block the aisle that you need to grope your way back to your seat in the dark. "Sod's law!" laughs a tiny woman who just squeezes through. And Air NZ, for all their high-tech present, still has matronly hosties bringing sweeties around in huge baskets just before we come in to land. Nice.
It's amazingly clear over Los Angeles, from Fullerton in the south to the HOLLYWOOD sign in the hilly northern distance. And it's a warm 16 degrees Celsius.
If you've seen "Flying High", you'll remember an extended sequence near the beginning where the relentlessly perky airport announcements about parking and drop off zones become a kind of parody of themselves. I couldn't help but enjoy the real thing: "The kerbside lane is for drop off only..." And so on, in that same upbeat, perky voice, ending with: "Have an exceptional day!" (Which is probably the one thing you do NOT want to have these days at an airport).
Standing in the untidy queue for the Flyaway Bus, you are soon reminded that the words: "excuse me" and "pardon me" when spoken by Americans are more commanding statements of assertive intent than something apologetic that you may have been used to hearing...
And while waiting on my bus (and avoiding the "competition" with alluring destinations of Long Beach, or Disney Resort, or something called "Wally Park") I got chatting to a local from San Luis Obispo who had bought land 100 miles north of Bangkok to build his dream home, only to find it is regularly flooded. He's now designing something on a pontoon to rise and drop with any flood waters rather than admit he was done over by the Thai estate agent.
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The "South West Chief" is the direct train from Los Angeles to Chicago: 2+ days in a sleeper with all meals, and about the same cost as a holiday season 4 hour direct flight on some no-frills American carrier. The route follows (more or less) that of the old Santa Fe Trail first used by native Americans then by Spanish conquistadors... later becoming parts of Route 66. This train replaced the Santa Fe Railroad's "Super Chief" - one of America's finest and most stylish trains from 1937 - when that honest old socialist, Richard Nixon, relieved the private US railroads of their loss-making passenger trains in 1971. Santa Fe Railroad wouldn't allow an inferior product to carry the "Super Chief" name, so "South West Chief" it is: comfortable, friendly, with attendants allocated to and watching over every car, (and DO tip them as you leave the train...). The travel guide ensures that you will know about famous births along the way: Nixon, Olmstead Ferris (the inventor of popcorn) and Macdonalds fast food are among them.
There is a mass of images and memories (from history, Hollywood cowboy flicks, and bad kids' TV Westerns, popular music, and the post-war history atomic and missile developments...) linked to names on this journey such as: Winslow, New Mexico (Eagles: "Take it easy"?), Gallup, New Mexico ("Get your Kicks on Route 66"?) and Santa Fe or Albuquerque NM, Dodge City, and Topeka, Kansas. The new Interstate freeway system killed off "Route 66" in 1985 as well as many of its small towns (after effectively putting US passenger trains through a near-death experience while the burgeoning airlines made a two to three day train trip From LA to Chicago look like more of a chore than an adventure...).
The train rolled into the Arizona sunrise through bare brown mesa country with snowy remnants, cresting low ridges between brown tussocks under a broad brown-grey sky. The long distance trains are all quasi-governmental AMTRAK now, a shoestring operation maintaining a skeleton of what was, and regularly threatened with its own near-death experience from grumpy Republicans in Congressional Budget Hearings. When military spending doubled under Reagan and was increasingly outsourced (at great cost) by subsequent presidents, why would funding passenger trains be a conservative priority?
Breakfast: a huge and freshly cooked omelette, vegetable hash and breakfast biscuit (actually a kind of soft, sweet, brown scone) was with three taciturn blokes-of-a-certain age saying not much until one commented that environmentalists are against everything and oil would keep driving the US and nothing would change that. He found himself quickly in a minority of one. I love a good environmental argument over hash and grits while passing scrappy isolated motels with gas stations and billboards advertising moccasins and Indian ruins...
Albuquerque: a centre for "business, government and the military", and only 60 miles from Los Alamos. There's more than cacti bristling beyond them there mountains... (Or maybe my view was coloured by reading Rachel Maddow's: "DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power", a somewhat scary narrative of the untethering and privatisation of the US military as Eisenhower's warnings of a Military Industrial Complex came to pass under Reagan, Clinton, and a pair of Bushes. Somehow the need for CONGRESS to democratically vote and support the declaration of a war has been usurped by Presidential power...
We approached Albuquerque through brown suburbia of Adobe style housing amongst scattered dusty California bungalows and many trailer homes... Local Navajo Indian sellers of woven clothing, jewellery, second hand books and lurid Chinese acrylic blankets clustered down the western end of the platform near local trains with their huge grinning roadrunner stickers (as the "Rail Runner" commuter train to Santa Fe).
More ponderosa and scrub oak scattered across the rolling snowy mountains as we left mid-afternoon Lamy (with an old Santa Fe "Super Chief" vista dome car tethered in the station museum to remind passing trains of past and faded glamour). The train climbs into the Goleta Pass and Apache Canyon with the slow speed of a Queensland local train on a somnolent summer Sunday, twisting along a part-frozen river with white scattered snow on orange dirt and brown spindly winter trees.
Las Vegas (the sleepy one in New Mexico) was briefly disturbed as we rolled into the second night. If you have seen "No Country for Old Men" you would know this as a town largely bypassed by recent developments, maintaining its 1960's atmosphere, making it a suitably marginalised looking border town for a 1970's flick. By this time, new passengers on the station were in rugged up with cowboy hats and puffer jackets. It was a bit of a rough night on track in need of repair: Santa Fe no longer wants it for freight trains, Amtrak lacks the money to make repairs, so intense negotiations continue with local communities to help fund the local passenger train's tracks, or to lose the service (and the history).
Morning: a "fresh air" stop and platform stroll in concrete Kansas City, Missouri. The glitzy skyscrapers of Kansas City, Kansas, are beyond the oil and double-stack container trains, on the far side of the Missouri River. Many passengers are boarding with puffer jackets, beanies and blankets for the 8 more hours to Chicago over dark ploughed cornfields relieved by a long, slow morning crossing of the Missouri River. After passing through small-town rural and riverside America - farm towns of two storied clapboard houses cluster around white wooden churches - the longer slow lunchtime rumbling over the Mississippi from Fort Madison leads into the brown ploughed cornfields of Illinois.
Chicago's western suburbs are manicured, well-housed green and street-lamp-lit "Brady-Bunch” / “Leave it to Beaver" territory, gradually becoming something more two-storeyed-wooden-desperate as you approach downtown through copious railway junctions and freight yards. When five out of every six houses has been demolished in many street blocks and many of the remainder are boarded up, it's not saying anything prosperous or safe...
LARGE graffiti greets arriving trains at Chicago Union Station: "KEEP HAVIN A GOOD DAY".
So, layered, booted, beanied and puffer jacketed, I wander down Adams St through flecks of snow, against the tide of homebound Christmas commuters rushing through late afternoon darkness to Union Station, gift-wrapped-package laden, as I search for my pub and its "English Pub Food in the Elephant and Castle".
And "HAPPY HOLIDAYS", as all the Chicago Transit Authority buses indicate, to y'all!
