Dispatch XXI

Catching the California Zephyr in Denver

Day 64 - 72 November 30 - December 7, 2021

With Thanksgiving behind us, we spent November’s final evening in Denver, then rolled ourselves and our bags down 17th Street toward Union Station (Union appears to be the universal name for train stations in the U.S.).

Downtown Denver was suffering in the midst of COVID’s current retreat. The place looked dirty, and there was an unfortunate number of homeless on the streets. The city looked battered. We later found this to be true in nearly every large city we visited in the United States. COVID hadn’t helped, but I wondered how a nation as wealthy as ours couldn’t better help folks who were suffering like this. I could give everyone I passed a few dollars, but would that really help? It didn’t matter if people had drug problems or drinking problems or mental or emotional issues or if they were simply down and out. These people were struggling, and they needed help. Some might call “help” handouts, or gaming the system, but most people want the same things we all want: health, happiness, love. Judging may make some people feel good, even superior, but it doesn’t solve problems.  

The purpose of a government, of any advanced society, is to support ALL people, and in the United States in particular, we have prided ourselves on the belief that everyone deserves a shot. If they have a problem, it does no good to kick them to the curb or turn our heads, we should put the resources in place to understand what their problem is and give them the means necessary to get on their feet. Is that expensive? Yes, but not as expensive as shoving people in jail or pushing them to limits of self-abuse or harm to others. After all, what are the medical and healthcare costs of stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, robbery, battery, murder? We ALL pay for those too in the public coffers. This wasn’t only true in Denver. We saw, or would see, the same issues in major cities throughout the United States, but I noticed, not as much in Canada, or in the cities we visited in Mexico. That surprised me.

Denver’s Union station is handsome - broad shouldered and heavy with wood, but not overly done. It’s just properly western. We enjoyed waiting for our train with an older man named Joe O’Brien with delightful blue eyes and wispy gray hair who wanted to know all about our decision to travel all seven continents without getting in a jet along the way. He had just arrived that morning from Roanoke Virginia after spending Thanksgiving with his sister. He liked the idea of railroading back and now was waiting for his ride home.

We told him we’d be boarding the California Zephyr. He knew of it, he said: one of AMTRAK’s more famous trains, the one that would take us through the Rocky Mountains and eventually San Francisco? Not exactly, we said. We wouldn’t be going to the coast, only to Grand Junction, a day’s journey over the Rockies where we would pick up a car and follow the Colorado River to Moab and Arches National Park, our next big goals.

With a bow and a handshake, we parted ways with Joe and at 8:27 am, boarded a comfortable roomette to await the views coming our way. Slowly the Zephyr twisted and turned out of Denver, past the city traffic and interstates and into the broad western plains. The ground was still golden in the November fall with small clusters of trees clinging to what leaves remained.  As the train swung up into the foothills, we seemed to be able to see everything in the world, and then we were in the mountains, among cliffs and bluffs and ancient stone, high pine forests and uplifted craggy ridges with portents of higher mountains to come. The train creaked and moaned as we slowly ascended. Relentlessly, through the morning the locomotive pulled us like a rope over the rugged earth and toward higher summits, the pine clinging to the unrepentant rocks for dear life. Now and again we would flatten out as we passed towns like Fraser and Granby and Glenwood Springs, but then rise up higher through tunnels and into snow.

The Rockies came into the world thanks to the crashing 50 million years ago of two tectonic plates, one disappearing between the other, the second thrusted up, folded and crumpled. Though I couldn’t see them, I knew that in those rock walls passing by were layered with the fossils of uncounted and ancient creatures that had once swum the vast sea that stretched from Pittsburgh to Denver. Now here, they were rock encased more than a mile high.

Before Fraser, the train snaked into a six mile hole in the ground called Moffat Tunnel and for 10 minutes we disappeared into blackness. Half way into the tunnel, our conductor announced that we were as deep beneath the ground as anyone one on earth could be. Above us sat 2000 feet of solid rock.  To create it engineers had blasted the tunnel right through the continental divide between 1923 and 1928. As we entered the tunnel all snow, rain, water, creeks and rivers tumbled to the Platte and the Missouri Rivers onto the Mississippi and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. But on the other side, every drop of water would flow to the Pacific.

At the little town of Fraser the Zephyr reached 8500 feet, the highest elevation on the Amtrak system. Not long after that, outside of Granby, I noticed a creek about 20 feet wide flowing slowly west. These were the unassuming headwaters of the mighty Colorado River. Earlier in its life it had been known as the Grand River before it was renamed in 1921. For 1,450 miles it would gather speed and volume through Utah and Arizona, onward past the borders of Nevada and California, providing most of the western United States with the water (which was quickly evaporating) that it would need until it at last trickled across the Mexican border, into the Gulf of California, and, eventually the Pacific.

By late afternoon, we had rumbled alongside the broadening Colorado, through precarious parapets and eventually into open valleys of scrub and rock until we slowed to a stop at Grand Junction. There we would pick up a car, find a room for the night and then hug the Colorado to Moab, Utah.

Grand Junction

Alison at Enterprise Car Rentals met us. She was a fast-talking, compact young woman with curly hair and the alert eyes of a bird. She too was a travel lover. It was in her blood, she said. Her parents had biked across Europe and the Soviet Union into China before she was born. “Luckily my dad spoke fluent Russian during the Cold War and they made it alive.”  Biking across Asia through two continents behind the Iron Curtain? That, I thought, was well above my pay grade.

After dinner we met Margie Wilson at the Grand Valley Bookstore, a woman as quiet and in command of the big store as a Zen monk. She loved travel and books and, when she heard what we were up to, told us to visit the Back of Beyond Bookstore in Moab. “They’ll have good information on Utah and Butch Cassidy,” she said, a subject I wanted to learn more about. Then she returned from her shelves to hand me Farley Mowat’s book Never Cry Wolf. “I think you might enjoy it,” she said. When I offered to pay, she said, “It’s a gift.”

I’m telling you, people everywhere are mostly good.

In the Company of the Colorado

Our Enterprise Rent-A-Car took us out of Grand Junction and along the Colorado (the word comes from the Sanskrit varnah meaning color). Gazing at it. Watching its expanding banks as we drove, I wondered at the power of water, and its obstinate ways. How in dribs and drabs it did its yeoman’s work, destroying mountains and carving canyons, yet leaving beauty in its wake. Uncounted tons of rock have fallen beneath its blade since these mountains had risen up.

Later at the Trailhead Public House and Eatery in Moab, we met Travis, a thickly bearded bartender with gleaming teeth, and he told us the drive we had made from Grand Junction to Moab was the second most beautiful drive in the United States. He wasn’t sure who said it, but he was sure it was true. “What was the most beautiful?” I asked. “The drive up the California Coast,” he said. I thought it was a close call - which was easier on the eyes, and decided a final answer would require more thought.

The story around Moab is that its name stands for the Mother Of All Bombs because it’s near Cisco, home to the largest seam of uranium in the United States, and therefore the source of most of the world’s nuclear weapons. We had seen a sign for Cisco as we headed to Moab. We didn’t take it, but it made me think how metals all kinds have driven the human greed that often shaped history, whether it was gold or silver, bronze or iron. For hundreds of thousands of years the human race made do with wood and skins and rock, but now we mined the earth like a petrified tree morphs from wood to stone, absorbing the metals around us until we have transformed them into cities, jets, cell phones and machines of every kinds. Was this a good thing? Maybe it wasn’t so much a question of the mining itself, but how we went about it; how much we destroyed the land we excavated and how we used the metals we took. Uranium for bombs? Probably a bad idea. Copper and titanium to make hydrogen powered cars? Probably better. The big lesson seemed to be to think through the consequences of our actions - all 8 billion of us.

Arches

After a night in Moab, we entered Arches National Park. Our car looked picayune against the massive, upheaved slabs of rock around us. For miles we wove through its famous formations: Park Avenue, Courthouse Towers, The Three Gossips, Balanced Rock, Delicate Arch, Partition Arch, Tunnel Arch, Navajo Arch — so many arches that the wind and rain had carved over the eons out of the 119 square miles of sandstone — 2000 of them by a recent count. At the Moab Fault where millions of years ago a floor of the valley had dropped like a broken elevator, the word colossal took on new meaning. If you dropped a section of the Great Wall of China beside it, the wall would look like nothing more than a doily’s border along its massive base.

Everywhere we stood in the park, I saw silent messengers in the layers of the ancient and mangled earth. The place was a geological shambles; a wreck delivered by time and dimension yet a feast for the eyes. Out of this destruction had come some of the most beautiful formations possible, almost unearthly in their beauty, as if some sort of sorcery had shaken all the red-golden earth up and down against a perfect cobalt sky: volcanic domes that never quite erupted, massive flood zones, rocks of precarious and stunning beauty, cliffs shear and immense, petrified sand dunes and blasted lava fields strewn with primeval dust.

For days we drove and hiked and showed ourselves off against the glorious backdrops. At night we wandered through the Back of Beyond Book Shop (which did have an excellent biography of Butch Cassidy and a rich library of wild west books). At the local restaurants we ate lots of meat and potatoes and noted that beardless men seemed to be in short supply in Moab.  Eventually, though, we needed to move on. But where?

We decided on the little town of Monticello where I was desperate to get in some writing time before we made for Canyonlands National Park and Mesa Verde, Four Corners and Monument Valley.

Monticello

Monticello is famous for nothing in particular which was perfect for a writer desperate for writing time. A great place to avoid distractions. It was a younger yet more tired Moab, with streets wide enough for a four lane highway, even if hardly anyone used it  We found a unique B&B called The Grist Mill, off the main drag, a throwback to the farmlands and ranches of the 19th century that still surrounded it. The town was still reeling from the effects of COVID and when we dropped our bags at twilight, there was one place, and one place only, to eat - The Ja Raen Thai Restaurant a mile way.

The Ja Raen seemed somehow out of sync with itself. The sign said Asian, but the old clapboard building said cowboy, with an 1800’s era buggy sitting outside the porch. The interior was right out of a Wild West scene from central casting, festooned to the teeth with Christmas trimmings. At first I thought it was simply bad design,  but then realized this was a real fusion of Asian and American and the Cowboy West. When we sat down, we found two men of Asian decent. One behind the sushi bar, the other walking our way to accept our order. He spoke with a western accent eager to provide us the finest Asian food as long as we didn’t mind eating it out of take-out containers. “COVID,” he shugged. The place wasn’t out of sync, it was a mosaic of formerly different food and cultures now fitted nicely together; perfectly comfortable with itself. And the food was excellent.

On the way to the 7 Eleven for coffee the wind howled. Black clouds swirled around Blue Mountain, the rocky behemoth that loomed over the town, making the bright moon appear and disappear as though it was riding the sky like a ghost. It was unseasonably dry and warm for December. The temperatures were in the 50s and 60s and even Blue Mountain at 7,000 feet was only thinly powdered. “We usually have a foot or a foot and a half by now,” said the man at the 7 Eleven, “but right now no more than a few wisps.” He shook his head. Snow pack in Colorado and Utah has been way down.

I thought about the drought and it occurred to me that out here, these people — ranchers and farmers —really needed mother nature to come through for them. The livelihood of people like me and Cyn, at least in the short term, didn’t depend on such things, but theirs did.  Its was a tough life and that, we learned, made the people who lived in the American West a little more fierce, a little more independent, but also a little more sympathetic to the woes and troubles of others.

At the 7 Eleven, we grabbed some popcorn and headed back to the Grist Hotel in the black night. Soon we had settled into our little room, and under the quilted bed watched an old episode of Gunsmoke on the tiny TV and fell asleep.

We stayed a few days while I pecked away at my computer. Food remained in short supply. At the Maverick gas station one morning I grabbed us some coffee and microwaved egg sandwiches for breakfast. For lunch it was either Ja Rain or Thatzza Pizza. Sometimes we just used the B&B’s hot water to whip up the oatmeal packs we always kept handy.

One night, I found a bookstore with several little known books about the west and smiled as I thought what great names came out of the old west. Places like No Man’s Canyon, Robbers Roost, Dirty Devil, Hole in the Wall, Cleopatra’s Chair and Candlestick Tower. And that made me think of the tall tales that had arisen in those lands; the stories of Pecos Bill and John Henry, Paul Bunyan and Big Foot Wallace. But those stories would have to be told another day. Now it was time to head south to Mesa Verde, the land where according to the Hopi people, the “ancient ones” had once lived. And of course we did not want to miss the location near Canyon Lands National Park where Thelma and Louis met their Hollywood demise.

Soon to come…

Meantime, crack on!

C-Squared

This is a series about a Vagabond’s Adventures - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.