Blogs and adventures for August, 2007

August 13: I was so busy getting my stuff together, I totally forgot to watch Enterprise on the telly. Boy, I AM worked up.

August 14 thru 15: I’ve packed too heavy of course. I tried to take out a few things, tossed them on the floor, manfully lugged the over-stuffed duffle bag to the Ranger. Off I goes to Tacoma. I had considered boarding in Seattle, that way I could have ridden the ferry over and hiked to the bus, leaving the car at home. However, that part of Seattle is pretty dodgy at night, and coming home it would be after dark when I arrived back. Not good. So, I parked right at the terminal in Tacoma, and lugged it all to the desk, checked in.

The train arrived. I really had no idea what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. The Amtrak cars are like silver double-decked busses, all linked together. The upper levels are the coach, and you can run between the cars in relative safety and comfort, making your way back and forth to diner cars, or lounge cars, or sleeper cars. I wasn’t expecting so much motion on the train, you practically had to be a dancer to get down the middle aisles and maintain your balance. You DO have to have good balance though, the cars tend to jounce around, and it can be a real challenge jumping between the cars, especially balancing food. (I got some serious bruises on my upper arm bouncing off the walls this way). The commodes had Rest Assured seat covers LOL. There is an observation car where the party tended to be (they sold beer and BAAD wine on the lower deck) it was more open and you got some great views from there. The chairs are nicer than airliners, and there is much more leg room too. I’m a convert, I HATE being crammed into tight airplanes, feeling like SPAM in a can.

The train seems a good way to travel. You can bring bikes if you want. No airplane hum, which is what keeps me from sleeping on the plane (I worked too long around aircraft, that hum has a certain pitch, and jacks me up pretty badly) trains are much more restful than planes.

So many places are really accessible from the train. I think. Ft. Vancouver is only 2 miles to the East of the Vancouver train station, a real historical site. The Portland Union station is very close to OMSI, and the tracks wind picturesquely under old bridges and down rivers. The stations were mostly well kept, but it was a pretty crusty station in Sacramento, clean in Salinas ( I figured out how to get to Cannery Row from the train, and will do that another day). Old abandoned convectors and electrical are all along the tracks, glass insulators by the socres, which are collectibles. Found Schnitzer steel (scrappers!) in Emeryville (near Oakland, and Jack London Square). Some graffiti art was very beautiful on the boxcars. Peter Max wanted to paint the entire world; train graffiti artists have a good start on that mission indeed.

Fellow Travelers: I got lucky going down, they seated me next to this old lady who was dripping in jewelry, and apparently rich as Croesus, she and I talked all the way down. Marge turned out to be a former roller skate competitor! She knew the guy who invented the Heelie, Roger Adams and he had knocked out his front teeth testing them! (which are those little wheels kids attach to the bottom of their tennis shoes, then can retract them, pretty neat). She told me all sorts of stories (she took a liking to me as I use good English, and we were unsurprised to find that each of us had studied Latin). I got a few stories about her 2 lb. Teacup Poodle, which was fine (even though a confirmed cynic, I actually like poodles). The best story she told me, was about being the Shriver’s Music operator! Back in the early years of pop music, there was one lady who sat in a room with racks of 78 RPM records, and as someone dropped "a nickel" at the Chinese restaurant, or the hotel, she would play the music they had selected. She had like 50 turntables I think she said. She wasn’t real hep on how the wiring was done, the technical end of it, but the effect was she was running a huge juke box for all the subscribers in Tacoma who wanted her to pipe in music to their establishment. She could also eavesdrop on people at the other end, which would make life interesting indeed!

My friend Marge alternately talked, or went to the lounge, or slept, and I did much the same, as we were on there for about one and a half days. I met a mad Hawaiian the first day who was telling some pretty raunchy stories to other "guys" in the lounge, and pretty soon I had introduced my seat mate to them. We had a good laugh with them, and then at them, as we agreed the guy was really full of sh** and probably running dope. He was telling about a wild party on the train once when he rode it: the proof was that on the way back several days later, exactly that happened, a bunch of young punks trashed the lounge car in the night while rational people crawled off to quiet places and slept.

I met one young fellow who was enamored of the Romance of the rails, and had brought his guitar. (He was only a beginner, I was polite). I remember discussing "Bobby McGee" on the Isle of Wight video, he didn’t know about that and was off to find it. I met another gal, Linda on train coming back, she had a home for troubled youth in Pomona, she was a real old time hippy and we had some great laughs and talked shop. Kids on train mostly well behaved, parents are parenting, and that was a very good sign; I've seen much worse behaved kids on planes, and that's a fact.

Trains still have a few hazards from other folks. Marge warned me about people going by and groping you in the night <ick!> Someone had such a bad cough they sounded like Gollum!!! Hope I don’t come down with TB! Mostly people seemed nice and innocuous. I passed some young girls sitting with their painted toes up in the air, pretty cute. Some ultimate symbol of relaxation… gorillas sleep with their toes up too.

Scenery: The scenery at times was breathtaking, much as you see while driving, but you can LOOK when on a train. Salinas is very much like the Skagit River Valley near me (where they shot the daffodil scene in Dr. Zhivago). Saw a rainbow from the train, very nice. We cruised by Moffett Field (where I used to work as a coolie on airplanes for the USN), I languidly sipped my beer. This is the life! I felt very grand like looking out at peasants in the fields as I ride by in my coach, especially near Salinas. People waved to the train as it went by! Something about trains makes you want to smile, like you are some part of the Arlo Guthrie road show. The SAC river was cleaner than the Rhine in Koln!! The wetlands were gorgeous, like something from Howl’s Moving Castle (pretty indeed)

The nicest part of the trip was running down the California Coast just north of Santa Barbara; up there the ocean was very grey and sultry, then the sun came out and turned it a deep azure. I couldn’t soak it all in, can you imagine living in such a place and there being no cities to go back to? Just you and nature out on the sand dunes? A good place to go over the edge spiritually. There must be cold water upwelling here, rich with nutrients.

this is somewhere south of Salinas, I'm not sure where

This is up near Lompoc

Back in the 60’s my Dad used to vanish and not talk about where he was working. Later he told us he had been working on military missile gantries up in Lompoc (Vandenberg) which is this area north of SB. There is an entire place like Cape Canaveral right there north of LA, which even today is semi-functional, had a vertical assembly building for missiles. The bad part is, apparently that land is really unstable. Dad says he saw an entire CAT (earth mover) sink down into a hole on site, it’s all clay and sand.

On the other side of the train, there had to have been the bluest water I have seen this side of Diego Garcia. There are kelp beds, and I spotted dolphins both coming and going, a whole pod of them (I think they were spinners, but could have been tursiops too). Close enough to the dolphins to be surprising, were beaches of surfers, and lonely families hiking around, building lean-tos of driftwood………. I had no idea all that area was up there, a wildlife refuge so close to Los Angeles, City of Slime. I think the government owns it all, which is all that keeps it from being developed. Seeing all that was worth the entire trip down. Yes, there are pretty places in California after all.

As the train cruised into the town "proper" we got a splash of bougainvillea. You could see oil rigs doing their thing off shore (absolutely no harm to the critters……….) I've loved Santa Barbara since I went there years ago to see Justin Hayward solo shows; SB (and Lake Havasu) has these seasonal bungalows where people live only part of the year. It's a great place to leave year 'round though.

Train tracks always fascinate me. They look like they are going to fly apart (so many spikes are missing!), but they always hold together somehow, as the train runs over them. There are places, bridges in the Siskyous and Sierras I know the bridges are old, and very very high, I’m just as glad we went over those in the night and I didn’t have to look down into gorges, rickety scaffolding and such. I just hope the Big One (quake) doesn’t happen while I’m on a train, or in a tunnel. Anyway there north of SB I thought the tracks looked very scary. I wonder if the Gandy Dancers ever go out there and do repairs.

August 15 Evening: Everyone knows I’m slightly nuts. I suspect the military is what drove me around the bend, finally. Anyway this night I would begin to believe it myself, as we shall soon see.

People were getting the "late bus" syndrome, some were cackling loudly, saying incongruent things, muttering to themselves (like I was). Trains sped up in LA, having no regard for locals on the tracks probably, but blowing the horn quite loudly. We got into Los Angeles Union station about 9:30 pm, after sweating if some of us would make the connection to other trains. They always run late, but as Marge commented "toward the end they are like a horse headed to the stable, they speed up" and they did, getting in only a half hour late after all.

LA Union is a truly historical land mark, and is used in movies both past and present. (Likewise other stations along the way, namely Portland Union. Tacoma Union Station is no longer a mahjor transfer station llike it was inWWII, and has been turned into a museum, but is just down the street from the new smaller station). SOME of the stations were old and run down, but for the most part, they are cleaned up (There were actually mosaic quilt block parquet in LA Union station), and it was very pleasing to see the historical sites being taken care of. They have old lamps, inlay on ceilings, tile work on the walls, and copper drinking fountains. The LA station is right against the Water company, and their fountains and gardens were wonderful. There was even this fountain with snake-like tiles wrapped around it, like a continuous serpent spouting water……. Very metaphorical.

 

the floor

When I got back, my parents told me stories about trains. Dad said when he went to bootcamp in San Diego, they put him in with the guys from Oklahoma and Texas naturally, and then they got put on with MORE recruits from Mississippi and Alabama! Naturally fights broke out, as each state defended their "honor". They were such hooligans, the conductor actually had their car uncoupled, and they put them on a side track in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and left them there for a day. Since our country was in need of such energy, they came for the young men eventually and tootled them on into San Diego. Mom said she was in Union Station long long ago too, and still remembered it. I'm really super glad I finally decided to take the train, there is so much history wrapped up in it.

While I waited in Union Station, there was one nut yelling odd things in the station, well groomed gal too, wonder if it was a diabetic reaction? I pointed her out to security and they chivvied her on out the door. Hope she got home ok. It could have been drugs too....... or schizophrenia.

Many of us were going on the Surfliner, which is a run that has been there a LONG time, ran in the 60’s through Fullerton and Anaheim (my towns, and Disneyland of course) and on down to Oceanside where the good beaches are. It was a regular hippy run indeed. ANYWAY I made the Anaheim connection. It wasn’t the way I originally planned, I wanted to get off in Salinas, and pick up a rental car there, and then drive on down thru Tehachipi to Escondido to see the Wild Animal Park. There wasn’t a car to be had on the Monterey peninsula! JEEZE probably some damn golf tourney in going on. Thus I had to X off my stop on Cannery Row, both coming and going. Another day I guess.

>>>>go onward to the next day