(Across America by Amtrak - 2. San Francisco to Denver CO to Chicago
by “California Zephyr”: 13 – 17 October, 2024)
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San Francisco: Sunday, 6.20am:
Not much is happening at the very modest, unsheltered, Amtrak bus stop at Mission and Fremont. Vast new Salesforce skyscrapers (replacing the former Transbay transit terminal) are largely silent: the clicking of trolley bus poles crossing junction wires echoes over a scattered collection of passengers, mostly tourists, who await the shuttle bus across Oakland Bay Bridge to industrial Emeryville. This is where where the California Zephyr commences its two night cross-country train journey to Chicago. The mood is subdued… apart from that of one fat guy in tight blue shorts and Crocs who is mansplaining, wrongly, all that is about to happen before we get on to our respective trains. Publicly corrected by an arriving bus driver, he takes his humiliation to the far side of the square.
The gentle bus ride sees the lights of San Francisco Embarcadero, far below, disappearing into a milky dawn.
Driving into Oakland is significantly less pretty: tired industry, freight yards; the woken homeless.
Baggage check in at Emeryville: “Here is your ticket, Sir, bag tag, and this is the PIN if you need to use the station rest room”.
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“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
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Our double-deck sleeping car attendant is Curtis, a tall, world-weary 60’s bloke: smoker at all of the “fresh air” stops, calmly wrangling 30 passengers in his car with morning coffee, hand-holding in and out of the train at stops, and a nice line in dry humour:
“There are rest rooms at the top near the stairs and on the lower floor along with the showers and change rooms. The jacuzzi and pool are on the third floor. If you cannot find the escalator, look for the elevator…”
I didn’t write much on the train: between the increasingly spectacular scenery along the coast and the Sierra Mountains and Donner Lake on Day 1; through the immensity of the Rocky Mountains and Glenwood Canyon and Fraser Canyon for nearly all of Day 2, and the massive dining car set meals, and the naps to recover from the massive dining car set meals (I quickly learned to stick to salads and avoid gluey desserts). I spent my time at the windows, soaking up those views…. (If you are on Facebook, you have glanced at the modest results) or getting out at “fresh air stops” at places like Grand Junction, or Reno, or Winnemucca, Nevada.
Between Reno NV and Winnemucca NV
At each meal, the scurrying staff seat you with different “new Amtrak friends” to encourage conversations. This can be a mixed blessing:
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“New Amtrak Friends” #1:
Breakfast with Tom from Petaluma - whose face looks like it really has been slept in, as we lumbered into the unlovely service town of Green River before the mountain scenery commenced:
“You’re Australian. Do you know of OUD players called James and Joseph Tawadros from Australia. Amazing! I’ve just been listening to them.”
Self (barely awake, pretending breadth of musical knowledge that barely exists but having just happened to stumble onto a concert by these guys with the Gregorian brothers at a recent visit to Adelaide). “Oh yes. They are really good.” I describe that one concert. Over rather good freshly made omelettes he describes the hours of online music he’s heard overnight (so face not actually slept in, then)… before explaining that he’s come east to babysit his grand kids while his daughter (a National Parks guide) takes respite from the kids to go canoeing for a week. Before getting off at Grand Junction he describes the great hikes and river trips, “…just behind those ridges in the distance which are the foothills of the Rocky Mountains”.
Departing Green River, Utah
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Lunch:
An ex-US Navy chef (straggly beard down to his waistline; moustache approaching chin line) and his lively wife are planning to visit every state in the US in their retirement. “We’ve never left the US,” his wife pipes up, …” except for him, when he was in service.” The slight man in the beige cap sitting next to me is from Wisconsin and has worked in travel promotion. Navy couple grill him about what to see in Wisconsin and “Will there be real mooses?” Over a long lunch, we get some quietly extensive travel advice about northern Wisconsin and driving from Eau Claire and Green Bay to Chicago before flying back to Sacramento.
Dinner:
Greg and Peg are doing a long train ride across the states. They travelled from western Oregon (“the dry bit”) down to Sacramento on the Coast Starlight train. Now they are training all the way to Chicago on the California Zephyr. Greg knows his geology so is explaining the rock formations in stoic detail; his wife: the trees. Peg didn’t want to retire as a grade-school teacher, so took on the role of visiting schools as the call-in environmental education “Tree Lady”. She’s loving the job. Greg confesses that he is a high school maths teacher (he is forgiven) and also does science, sport… and is retired but regularly asked back as a relief teacher. His enthusiasm is waning. Our fourth “Amtrak Friend” at the table is a retired small-town mayor from California, leading to a hilarious discussion about small-town politics, getting baled up for difficult conversations in the supermarket… and who really wields power. (It’s not really the Mayor, or a school Principal, for that matter… but that won’t surprise anyone receiving this email.) __________________________________________________________________________________
“Travel doesn’t actually broaden the mind; it tends to broaden another part of the anatomy”
- Dita Cobb
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Colorado River, east of Glenwood Springs CO
Over the afternoon of the second day, the local train conductor had been providing good commentary on where we were and what to look for as we’d negotiated the Rocky Mountains through a series of rugged gorges. As the train took a final long curve into Glenwood Springs, the announcement for our fresh air stop also included advice:
“You really don’t want to wander too far and be left behind here. The next train is tomorrow and the fare into Denver is $108. The cheapest hotel room in this town will be over $400. Please don’t leave the station and do listen for the train horn and be back on board as quickly as you can for an on time departure. Otherwise we WILL leave you behind!”
He needn’t have been too concerned. There were more than 150 people on the platform waiting to be allocated their seats in the ten minute stop. (Amtrak tickets mean you will get a seat, but don’t tell you which one, leading to long boarding times as train managers allocate and hand-write individual seat tickets on the platform… unless you have paid an allocated business class seat or sleeper fare. This seems to foreigners to be an overly cumbersome way to book and run trains; in most other countries, a seat booking means you are speedily pre-allocated a car and seat number…).
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New Amtrak Friends #2:
Another meal with the rather retiring Mr Wisconsin Tourism. Our companions introduced themselves as a Lymphoma-survivor-by-God’s-will (and several years of intense treatment) Pastor from Detroit and his wife: “God has provided us with 6 children and 18 grandchildren. Shall we say grace before lunch?” He was a teacher in Detroit middle schools, which seem to have driven him towards God. Apart from delivering and nurturing children, his wife has a genuinely interesting job as a community information contact. As enquiries come into her office, she deals with advising on local laws, building-service providers, botanical identifications (“that can be interesting”) and directing people to other local services. Lunch conviviality derailed a bit when she declared: “You know, once upon a time, governments couldn’t make statements about religion; now it’s gone too far the other way…”
In the silence that followed, Mr Wisconsin Tourism took a sudden interest in reading the label on his ginger ale can; I apologised for being a tourist and aimed my camera at the lovely fall colours along the river beyond my window.
The California Zephyr exits the Moffatt Tunnel on the edge of the Rockies, overlooking the plains: distant suburban Denver, and beyond, in the pale purples and reds of early sunset purple. It takes another hour for the train to wander down parallel ridges and valleys of South Boulder Creek through Mammouth Gulch and Moon Gulch towards the city. __________________________________________________________________________________
Denver: Sunday Night
I was last at Denver Union station in 1979.
It was dank, very dark and a little dangerous.
It’s changed.
Union station (vastly upgraded into a ritzy hotel with glossy restaurants) is humming with celebrations and diners, as are the surrounding streets. The gentrification of what was an intimidating part of town seems complete. Along with shiny new suburban trains and surrounding loft apartment developments, the modest Amtrak station is tucked in to the right of extensive ground floor bars behind the rear doors of the station house. The bars will be doing even better for the next hour as the California Zephyr full of eastbound passengers has arrived over an hour early for a “fresh air break”.
One thing has not changed: helpful drivers on the RTD buses: I’m quickly directed to a bus stop towards my pub on the eastern edge of the CBD. It’s a free ride. The driver assessed my relative youth as “just above 65 years”. Nice.
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Monday: temporarily absolved of the need to make new “Amtrak friends” I’m exploring Denver. This is the place where, in 1979, I first walked in snow. This is the place where I first saw a laser beam in the science museum. This is the place where I first saw the Earth’s rotation around its axis through a Foucalt Pendulum (in the same warm museum: wet snowy feet on an increasingly freezing day had not been a great plan). This is the first place I ever saw seriously uniformed and armed guards in a bus station (my first - of many - departures on Greyhound, towards Flagstaff AZ. The joke among Australian backpackers at the time was: “Go Greyhound and see the arse end of America”… it was quite the education).
A wander around the state Capitol on a quiet Monday, amid frolicking pre-winter squirrels in the parklands, vacant lots and shopfronts (not at all threatening as were those in San Francisco) feels clean; organised. There was NO graffiti: not even the smallest tag, anywhere that I travelled in Denver (or a few days later in Milwaukee as well). The alternative “artwork” on show in the buses and trains is live: looking like intricate facial spider webs, gang or jail tags in full-face tattoos of a lot of Denver men. These were first evident when travelling through Garrison, Lakewood and Oak: down-at-heel suburbs between the shiny new condos on the edge of the CBD, and the subsequent triple-garage-brick-bungalows leading to a Federal Centre of enormous medical malls and strip-parked shops in the Rockies foothills. The few potentially photogenic places were immediately reconsidered when face-tatts leered through train windows.
“Golden” is the redolent hillside destination of this train: nice views back down to Denver… but the destination is a soulless car park, a major courthouse complex in isolation from anything “real world” and a mini bus threatening to go somewhere more interesting.
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Wandering back to the pub after a passable downtown ramen dinner, I dropped into a Subway store to buy juice and water. Paying by card now involves persuading, inserting, pressing a button that requests three options for a tip (starting at 18%), then fingering your mark on a screen. Since Covid and general card use, EVERYONE in a shop or business is asking for tips, not just those in the badly paid service professions ($2.75 an hour…). Two bottles in a speedy over-the-counter transaction at Subway? “No Tip” was the button of choice (done as the server was slyly watching….).
Tuesday: More interesting Denver:
I took a streetcar up to 30th and Downing, an infrequent roadside single track shuttle, passing crumbling or repurposed industrial buildings, a couple of nightclubs not looking their best in daylight, then a streetscape lined with well-cared-for two-floor houses to and old shopfronts to the west: small offices and eateries to the east. The west side is the signposted: National Historical Area of Five Points. By 1920 most of Denver’s African-Americans lived in this area, having been barred from white-owned businesses and institutions and housing. By the end of the ‘20’s, dozens of African-American businesses and professions were thriving here along Welton St.
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“Starting from 23rd Street and travelling northeast on Welton, we have all the necessary elements for substandard existence, from a ball park to shoeshine parlours to nightclubs and cafes.”
- Shelley Rhym, CASI Club owner/community leader, 1934
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Welton St, Denver CO
North of the still-existing and intensely green baseball park, the streetscape is largely preserved with additional murals and new businesses celebrating black culture, with shiny cafes and a deli serving modernised businesses and charities as the history of the area pales.
On the other side of downtown, 10th and 11th Avenues have yet to be demolished for acres of soulless, boxy apartments. The flat and tree-lined suburban streetscape is modest suburban bungalows and two-storey clapboard houses from the first decades of the 20th century, mostly intact and much loved. Modest good taste is extensively relieved by ghoulish Halloween decorations. These included a glossy black corner-block house displaying a full Gothic front-yard grave yard, at least I HOPE it was decorative…. The two-floor, turn-of-the-century, turreted house was also draped from tower to ornate-noir verandah in vast acrylic spider webbing.
More colourful Santa Fe Drive, just around the corner, is an official “Arts District” crawling with galleries, work-spaces, colleges and cafes. The unassuming Museo de Los Americas has diverse art and installations referencing northbound refugee experiences. Installations include a wheel of unlikely fortune (take a spin and see your difficult future) and a lonely cluster of abandoned shoe-pairs on straw, facing an endless video of an empty, upward escalator to nowhere, sheltered by a wall of grey cocaine bricks. Mission art, where local natives were encouraged to adapt their craft to Texas’ Spanish Missionaries’ tastes and demands, is presented very much as the church may have wished in its own subdued room. It is exquisite. And sad.
Lunch is at a charity cafe, rescuing street people and skilling them in professional hospitality. I decline the offer of a “Jesus Loves You” T shirt.
Back downtown: somewhat more traditionally bourgeois is The American Museum of Western Art (“Western”, meaning “Frontier”). Housed in a genteel 19th century wooden mansion, dwarfed by giant surrounding hotels, this is a spectacular private collection and parallels many of the subjects and techniques and colour palettes of Australian artists of the time. It all looks way more jolly than history suggests. From vast, grand, spiritual, unspoilt landscapes ripe for exploitation, there followed many images of horses and settlers’ wagons and cow-persons. There were no black faces; there were no Asian faces (but there was one study of “Half caste”). First Nations subjects tended to range from distant anonymous images in vast landscapes to Noble Savage/Handsome Warrior imagery, gradually merging into entertaining spectacles for new settlers then assimilating into the cowboy culture. First Nations’ dispossession? Not so much.
No-one serviced my hotel room in Denver. Someone did place a polite card with the name of a distant housemaid and a QR code requesting a tip-by-phone.
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New Amtrak Friends #3
On arrival into the sleeper on the California Zephyr out of Denver, dinner is immediately announced. If you know of the obsessive Californian character of “Bo” from “Ab Fab” you can easily imagine our dinner table as the train crawled out through the spectacularly lit oil refineries and interminable freight yards. Alicia had NEVER been on a TRAIN!!! She had thoroughly and enthusiastically “researched train etiquette” and was excited to practise it on three of us, and the crew, over the diner table. Once she relaxed somewhat (after listing all of the anxiety meds she was taking and the many doctors who watched over her welfare) she was delight: on her way home to see her mother and much-missed dog after many years away, with many online projects on her mind; she had just been “let go” from a 12 year marketing job and needed solid family support….
The dining car crew was struggling. The reason for the head-waiters brusque approach soon became evident: his slight female assistant was obviously not well, moving slowly with a glazed face, unable to quite get the drink orders straight after three attempts. The state of the dining car also suggested some disorder, all falling upon the head waiter to manage during an extended roster of 7 straight days from Chicago to California and back, with occasional stoic support from one of the coach car attendants between his own full-time duties. The menu is unchanging on very long train journeys. I could almost recite it by heart when I was dared to over dinner.
By the following day as dawn crept over rolling farmlands and we approached Ottumwa’ Iowa, there was mild excitement among some passengers of a certain age: “This is where Radar in MASH came from!” It is also the manufacturing source of John Deere farm machinery.
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Wednesday:
New Amtrak Friends #4:
“Are you a foreigner?” enquired the elegant 70’s bloke sitting opposite me at breakfast. William was English - still with a Cornish accent - and had moved to California where he met his wife, Maureen, and had become an American citizen, settling into Silicon Valley, adapting his academic science to the emerging technologies of some 30 years ago. Maureen was a whole different package: slight, with straggly grey haired and a missing front tooth which became increasingly prominent as she ditched travel niceties and launched into anti-Gavin Newsome diatribes and the evils of having one dominant political party in California, or anywhere… because (Governor) “Newsome has wrecked California and we need a functioning two-party system and his crowd have wrecked San Francisco….” You can imagine the rest (if you don’t want me to fill several pages of one-finger typing to outline why breakfast crossing the gentle farmlands of Illinois was a tad fraught). No? Good. I’ll stop here, then.
We did steer Maureen to expand rhapsodically on her green credentials (planting redwood trees around their block in the hills above suburban Menlo Park) and travels to Germany “where they are so organised, not like One Party California…”
On arrival into the dark, extended nether world gloom of narrow low-level platforms and diesel exhaust that passes as Chicago Union Station, the reconstruction program cleverly obscured the Baggage Claim signs from approaching travellers. We stood, obediently, between scaffoldings, under a temporary notice. A distant clanking squeal announced the turning-on of the carousel.
The Station’s massive Great Hall was “Closed for a Private Occasion” so it was a case of push-through the outbound commuters and waiting Amtrakers into the disabled lift, then a brisk gust of wind as the doors parted: welcome to Chicago!
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