Before that drink with Gabriel, I had to make it from the mountains to the city.
Back then, I didn’t drive and had time on my hands, a precious gift. I was on no one’s schedule, no boss to satisfy, no hours to bill.
Just hours to kill.
The train was cheap: for a seat in coach, just 200 bucks. I would read and knit. I would see the unknown, possibly mythical, states. Utah! Nebraska!
The train was an adventure.
Plus, I fucking hate to fly.
Rashly, I booked the cross-country ticket and, rashly, informed room mates I was leaving. That evening, Tyler lit the grill and we sat out back, watching stars lift out of the pine trees.
I told Sally the next day. Sally worked up at the ski mountain with me, in the gift shop.
She always said she could never understand why I wanted to work outside, in the snow and cold. I said I could never understand why she wanted to sit inside, in the mountains.
“I’m leaving,” I announced.
We were sitting in my room, knitting companionably. She thought I meant leaving as in leaving to walk up to the General Store to get something for dinner.
“Ok,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”
“Wait, what?” I was confused for a second.
“Yeah, just come get me in like 15 minutes. I’m gonna go masturbate and then we can go.”
Ah.
I explained I meant “leave” as in “leave June Lake, for good”.
She shrugged. “You still need dinner, right? Come get me in like 15 minutes, we’ll go get food.”
15 minutes wasn’t enough time, it turned out, because when I went to get her, she hadn’t quite finished yet.
—
That was the first time I did the cross-country Amtrak. I liked it so much I did it again, another three times.
California is hard to shake, turns out.
Each train ride took me through Colorado. The train would fly down from the Rockies towards Denver or else crank slowly up the incline the other way.
Every time, in the back of my mind, I would imagine him boarding the train in Colorado.
Him means Luke, obviously.
He would have just left Breckenridge, I imagined, snow-dusted shoulders, maybe snowboard and climbing gear strapped to his pack.
In this reverie, I would conveniently forget that he had a truck and a dog and was very unlikely to board a cross-country train.
Oh shit, I’d say. Fancy meeting you here.
By summer 2008 though, it had receded to dream shadow. I knew he’d already left Breckenridge and headed back east.
So then I corrected the dream and imagined it instead when the train started coasting towards Albany, or sliding down the Hudson with the setting sun, towards New York. I could sense his shack, marvel at its physical proximity, just squatting over the ridgeline there, in the woods behind Route 22.
I associate those cross-country train rides with him so much. Four days sitting on a train thinking about Luke, wondering if there was a world, among the infinite worlds, in which we were happy together.
I’d sent him a Myspace message from Mammoth when I first got out west, in late 2006 or early 07. He was on Myspace, not Facebook. I made sure my Myspace profile picture was smoking hot, in that jade-green halterneck backless number. The same top I wore that night he never showed up.
Hey, I’m out here. Would be cool to see you, maybe, if you’re ever in CA.
He wrote back the next day. Sounds good. Breckenridge is rad, not sure how much longer I’ll stay but let me know if you’re passing through. Would be good to see you too.
I didn’t have a car and drew the line at the desperation of just turning up in Breckenridge, three states over, with no job, no car, no place to stay and just being like, hey, I’m here.
I’ll never stop thinking about you, please put me out of my misery.
Instead, I wrote back something breezy and non-committal. Cool, sounds good, I’ll let you know. Peace out.
Such bullshit. I was trying to play it cool, as if we would somehow casually bump into each other if I didn’t engineer it. As if we might somehow cross paths on a cross-country train through the same state.
I’d have been in Colorado in a fucking flash if he’d crooked a finger.
Or even if I’d had a car, perhaps I’d have driven myself and pitched up at his door, desperation dripping from every pore.
But I didn’t have a car, or I had just about enough self-respect not to do that, or maybe a bit of both.
Anyway, by summer 2008, like I said, I heard he’d already gone back east. He was studying birds in Central America.
He’d shacked up with an ex from college, people said. They were married, she was pregnant.
The world had moved on.
Man, those Facebook messages from Gabriel were burning a hole in my pocket.
So just after Burning Man in August 2008, right after the car crash, I packed as much as I could fit into my 60L (in those days my vertebrae were still thick and juicy enough to hoist a pack) and caught a lift up to Tuolumne with a friend who worked at the Meadows Grill.
I had to leave some stuff in June Lake with my friend Carson: much-loved bike called the Pink Zebra, loads of books. The Papasan chair I picked up in the thrift store for a dollar (I said she could have it) and the bookshelf that Tyler made me out of a piece of 150-year-old reclaimed barn wood (I said she could not have it).
I wanted that shelf back someday, I said. I loved it.
Yeah right. Sally moved it into her room before I’d even cleared Tioga Pass. Last I heard, it was adorning her parents’ wall in Sacramento. I’ll never see it again.
If you’ve ever wondered where my “things left behind” obsession comes from, wonder no more.
Anyway, I hitched a ride from Tuolumne campground up at eight and a half thousand feet down to half that in the Valley. Like, thumb out, actually hitching. I hitched everywhere in those days, thumbing lifts into Mammoth, around the June Lake Loop, to work at the ski hill or down at the fancy spa restaurant under Carson Peak.
I know.
Wouldn’t do it today but in those days I was inured to the danger. I was 23 and blithely unconcerned with my own well-being. I had no responsibilities. I would leave no children behind if some deranged lunatic spirited my peripatetic, unwashed self away.
Luckily, none did.
Instead, I climbed aboard an RV with a lovely family, two kids in the back on Gameboys.
Chatting to the parents, they nodded indulgently when I said I had a law degree from Oxford. They definitely thought I was deluded—but in a harmless, rather than violently schizophrenic, way.
Down in the Valley, I found a buddy (friend of a friend, really) named Jackson. He was a park ranger, with a long ponytail. Word of mouth, I had heard he was a bit in love with me. Batting my crusty eyelashes, I got him to agree to give me a ride all the way to the Amtrak station in Sanfran on his day off.
I slept in his cabin that night. We walked up to the Yosemite falls trailhead and saw a buck deer with enormous antlers, standing in Cook’s Meadow under a full moon.
It would have been romantic as fuck if I had been with anyone but Jackson, a guy I had almost zero interest in. This was not a guy who grew up barefoot, the kind of guy I wanted. I could practically smell the city on him. He was from some boring city in some boring state. Being a park ranger was a yearning, a mask, a charade.
I was grateful for the lift to Sanfran though.
Back at his cabin, we started fooling around but it was so awful and unappealing. It was the only time I’ve ever fully climbed out from underneath a dude and been like “this isn’t happening”. I just didn’t fancy him. That same old story of paunchy softness about the middle that I find so unappealing.
We want what we want.
He gave me a lift to Sanfran the next morning anyway (bless his rejected, blue-balled heart). At the station, the next eastbound train was not until 6am the next morning.
I sensed Jackson would hang around (possibly indefinitely if I allowed it) so I said goodbye pretty firmly and checked myself into a Hilton next to the station. A hundred bucks for a room with a shower but I figured worth it to wash Jackson off me and get clean before four days on a train.
Pitching up the next morning, there was a trim conductor with a cap, greeting passengers warmly (“welcome to the California Zephyr, folks”).
His main concern was passengers with actual roomettes (did I have a roomette? Reader, I did not) so I found myself two seats in coach and spread my stuff all over them: box of crackers, a couple tins of tuna with ring pulls, pillow, pack, knitting.
Pro tip: they don’t assign seats in coach (or at least in 2008 they didn’t) so you’ve got to take up two seats and—this is key—vanish at each stop. If you’re sitting there solo when someone’s looking for a seat, they might ask you if the other seat’s free. Then you’re fucked. But if you hide in the bathroom while the train’s stopped, they’ll just walk past your piled up crap, assuming two people are sitting there but off in the viewing car or something.
Works every time. You’re welcome.
The caveat of course is that you can’t do this if you have anything that looks worth stealing. This only works for the true dirtbags, with dirty ass bags. It sure worked for me. I never had to share seats and no one stole my manky pillow, Saltines or battered copy of Ed Abbey. Every evening, I stretched out in parsimonious luxury and slept like a baby.
It’s four days and three nights from San Francisco to New York. There’s a dining car where you can make a reservation and be served something akin to microwaved TV dinners at $30 a pop. There’s a viewing car with seats facing outwards and wrap-around curved plastic windows. The train passes through some of the most stunning landscapes in the continental US—but it is impossible to photograph anything without also capturing the internal reflection of forty other train-dwellers.
I didn’t care. After the year I’d had, four days sitting alone on a train sounded dreamy.
I would hibernate. I would regenerate. I would pupate.
I would emerge in NY on the other side like a fucking butterfly.
—
TO BE CONTINUED.
Pair this piece with Thin Blue Flame by Josh Ritter.
As a city boy of 62 reading this I became conscious of my middle––how paunchy, how soft? Do I get an age "allowance" or is it an absolute measure? I still wear my shirts tucked, which sounds like a discarded line from Prufrock. Yes, narcissism alert.
Looking forward to the next installment.
.
“A discarded line from Prufrock” 🎯 thanks David, I’m working on it.