My Land

Every seat was occupied and Amtrak waiters were doing burly pirouettes with plates aloft, the whole scene swaying and jerking. The dining car had the curvelinear shape of the lounge, with white table cloths and more carnations ajiggle in crystal bud vases. A maitre d' showed me to a place at the end of a bench, completing a foursome with greasy-haired guy next to me, an elderly couple across. As she passed down the aisle, the gray-striped woman said hi. I watched her slide into a booth and commence an animated exchange with table mates, all gestures and expansive smiles. She would talk to anyone, that woman.

Pancakes, omelettes, French toast. Across the Amtrak table a 65ish woman loved Universal City on her sweatshirt. She stared out the window, then eyed the sugar packets one by one. Her husband, gray chest hair popping out of a black work shirt, held his menu like a fallen road sign. The man next to me lounged against the window, his greasy head blocking my view. Thus, our table. We considered the menus in silence. Down the aisle, the woman with the gray streak had people laughing.

At least I was not the only single person stashed at a table. With one restaurant car for the whole train, diners rotated in and out of seats the way sailors moved in and out of bunks on a submarine. No empty booths.

Something sad about our breakfast table of television-watching, conversation-phobic Americans. It fell to me to get things going. Hi, I'm Paul. This was Bill and Joyce. And that was Joe, with an accent. I joked about being jobless. Bill and Joyce had jobs, resident managers of a bible camp in Oklahoma. Did the Sacramento River look big to them? No. Lots of rivers in Oklahoma this big. No kidding, I said, thinking this land is your land, this land is my land. But maybe not Joe's land. He had comment about the river being big or small, just a shrug. Nevermind, for now we were ordering omelettes, every last one of us, even Joe, looking surly with unwashed hair drooping over his forehead. The waiter was pleased with our unanimity in the breakfast order department.

Next, discussion of the night's bumpy ride. Was it hard to sleep? At first, according to Joyce. No problem, said Bill. Sleep okay, Joe? Is very late train, he said, eyes wandering in search of a better table. I wanted to point out that Joe was not addressing the question and he was not addressing the table, that we were the table, all four of us. Nevermind, for Joyce was into her grandchildren, even one great granddaughter, near Corvallis, Oregon.

That's some dry, Bill observed, watching dust rise in a distant field. I didn't know what he was really seeing. Big farm machinery doing something on the other side of a row of poplar trees, churning California topsoil into the air. Some dry. This land is our land. Which is why I wasn't going to venture into abortion, family values or Republicans uber alles. We were going to enjoy our omelettes.

Awful jiggly, said Joyce. The diner had just lurched in a direction opposite that of my coffee. The cup had been on a sound neurological trajectory toward my lips, but now brown liquid slurped onto the white tablecloth. I placed the cup on the saucer, feigning nonchalance.

"This no good." Joe, roused from his omelette, held the bottle of ketchup. Joyce smiled and said it was for his hash browns. I asked where he was from, like maybe the Crimea. Joe cut his bacon and glowered. Los Angeles, he said, now going to Portland. Is much business in Portland, much biotechnology.

I stared at the persistent Sacramento River. Kids chasing their dogs and others riding bikes along the opposite bank. A distant sign for a Ford dealership slipped behind houses. We slipped into Redding. This was a freeway town, but not now. The train revealed Redding's riverfront and railfront and now its old station, sloping mission style, with a bit of lawn and several people waiting for a train scheduled to arrive at 4:30 a.m. It was now 10 a.m. The double-paned train windows in thick steel walls muffled the sound. A silent movie of an elderly couple getting off, two getting on, then Redding's station sliding away.

Redding dropped, the river view opened. Maybe crossing a bridge, though on a train overhanging the rails and jutting into the scenery, it was hard to tell. The view was turning. We were aloft on a curving viaduct, the Starlight climbing and banking. Snowy peaks loomed in the distance, many miles, possibly hours away. Redding spread up a circular sweep of foothills, a bowl, massed with poplars and aspens and elms, riparian and lush. California's arid flatlands were running out, watery slopes taking over.

The high train arced like a bird over this green butt end of the hot San Joaquin Valley. Water, just out of reach, made shady big-leafed trees wave like fan dancers over sparse neighborhoods. Redding was modest and wooden. Paint peeled and screen doors hung askew, cars sagged and the green rustled overhead. We were picking up speed, running straight and level, houses thinning, trees gathering force. Then blackness. We had entered a tunnel.

The darkness pounded. We were leaving unseen the Redding along Interstate 5 whose exit signs delivered exactly the same experience as they did 300 miles earlier, where ads on your motel's TV screen urged you to eat and sleep exactly where you were. In the rail tunnel darkness, Joe was eating the last of his omelette. Bill polished off his side order of grits, light yellow and gruel-like.

Grits aren't California. Neither was this train, but an Amtrak bubble moving through California with the nation's citizenry, including Joe, from Los Angeles' Slavic quarter, his cheekbones high and flat as a Tartar plain. Russian mafia, perhaps, bound for Portland where is much business.

The train shot out of one tunnel, through forest, and into another. We emerged to cross the waters of Shasta Lake on a causeway. Then into another tunnel, the journey shaking and pounding with change, biological zones shuffled like a deck of eco-cards. Big investment opportunities, Joe said, in biotechnology, in Portland. We were now out of tunnels and into canyons. A wide stream bounded beside the tracks. Did I know interleukin is still opportunities, Joe said, his words prodding like an I-beam. A wide mountain stream burst crisp and splashy, burbling and fumbling over boulders, spitting at the trees, smacking itself like a three year old on a play date. Everything was lightness and foam. A fly fisher in classic long boots stood in the current, casting and reeling. The train sped along the banks, curving into the river bends, shifting the light sideways for a better view of that thrust of trees, this foaming eddy. So this was the upper Sacramento River. With trout ready to leap into your frying pan, a postcard of heart-wrenching mountain stream perfection, viewed from the overhanging-into-the-scenery window of a banking train. The stuff of Isaac Walton. Joe was saying something about limited partnerships.

Bending closer to the window, I could see the train itself, high, silvery and long, snaking behind us. Joe's head was still in my way, and he made no effort to move, lounging even more broadly against the glass, staring at the dumb waiter in the kitchen area. Bill and Joyce would give him a church-camp wallop. But I could only crane my head at the river, thinking how Russian novel heroes loved birches, frozen lakes, and a land of tundra, and why didn't he? Joe, you dumb fuck, move your head.

Now he was saying something about Probinol and how the clinical trials were going well and you could get in on the ground floor. Joe, shut the fuck up and look at the ground, not the ground floor. He inclined his head closer, literally getting in my face. Had I read about Probinol?

"Joe, would you mind moving your head?"

He wiggled his neck. "Is okay, no stiff." Joe leaned forward to block a Kodak moment of the Starlight in a tight curve, river frothing beneath a steel bridge. "You are familiar with limited partnership?"

I was about to tell Joe that the river was full of genetically engineered fish. Special striped bass. Genetically engineered. See the barcode on that ketchup bottle, Joe? Scientists have genetically engineered barcodes into the bass. They look like stripes, Joe, normal stripes. What won't they think of next? The miracle of recombinant DNA, recombining stripes on a bass with stripes on a package. So you've got pricing information barcoded on each and every fish. Want to invest?

Shooting above the tree line and rising like the space shuttle was Mount Shasta, stark as the Matterhorn. Good fortune had placed me here. And the bad fortune, that I could no longer drive distances, so what? I was roadless in this Canyon of the Sacramento, off-road, on the railroad. Amtrak, the nation's off-road vehicle. And we were, after all, a nation. Like the lost family a divorced child endlessly tries to re-create, at parties, around a dining car table, anywhere. A nation of Bill and his grits, Joyce and her sweatshirt and, yes, the immigrant and his roughhewn avarice. Sorry, I told Joe, can't talk limited partnerships on limited sleep. Have to go.

"Can you please to write name and e-mail." Joe produced a pen and scrap of paper.

I left a tip by my plate, meals being free for those of us in the sleepers. I wished everyone a warm farewell and told Joe my phone number which happened to be the same as Amtrak's 800 number.

I swiveled my legs into the aisle, and fought my way back up the aisle, grabbing table edges to steady myself. In the lounge, Mount Shasta?s surrounding black lava badlands were rotating into view. Here it was treeless black rubble, behind me it was distant hazy valleys, and straight up, the white shard of Shasta hulking and looming. A disabled person's wilderness moment, roadless and reckless. I stood holding the edge of an etched glass partition that said California Parlour Car. Up and down the lounge the sculpted lights glowed, curtains swayed, carnations sang. A bar slanted across the car, a bartender behind it drying glasses. He smiled. I wanted to tell him that his was a sacred task, priestly in his care of the curving glass and the sharpening mountain. This land is our land.