My eyes were as wide as the sky.
Western Nebraska (if it wasn't actually Eastern Colorado) was flat enough to make Illinois and rural Minnesota look like corrugated cardboard. There were no hills, no trees, only a vast expanse of land, land, land and green things nowhere. Nary a tree, nor low rise, stopped you from contemplating the far horizon, and the sky was a vast playground for fluffy clouds. I lost myself in it for long moments, watching it roll by, the only break in this post-glacial wonderland being the occasional farm, silo, or grain elevator.
I had, actually, seen one place flatter than this, with less relief of scenery. It was a couple years ago, now...
Alex wanted to move in with Mike and I into our house in Mountain View. I volunteered to fly out and help drive the truck home from Denver, some fourteen hundred miles. We caught I-80 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I'd never been in a place with so few people and yet so few trees.
Three hours to Cheyenne, then you turn left and keep going. Cheyenne's a bustling metropolis by Wyoming standards, but nothing to sneeze at if you're even used to Denver, let along New York. Out west of Cheyenne, the Rockies have paused, and I-80 flows between long high hills. This is practically open range country, and after awhile the only exits are ranches, not roads: Circle K, Lazy O, and the like. There aren't even many billboards out here, except for this place called Little America, and whatever that is, they tout some aspect of it every five miles, until the billboard's huckstering itself gains a surreal tinge. It turns out to be a sodding huge truck stop almost exactly between Cheyenne and Salt Lake City, but it's got its own cachet; we stopped there for dinner.
Just outside Little America was a billboard advertising in deliberate imitation that, hey, it was only eleven hundred miles to Jubilex in Portland, just hang a right on I-5 in Sacramento, good buddy. We ignored it, and slept in Salt Lake that night after, well, another anecdote-worthy tale which is for another time.
Starting just west of Salt Lake City and extending about sixty miles to the feet of the mountains that hide both the Utah/Nevada border and the time zone line are the Bonneville Salt Flats. Once part of the inland sea that dried to give us the Great Salt Lake, the Salt Flats are wide, white, and flat -- salt as far as you care to see, save for the occasional rock.
Salt mines dig at it from underneath, drivers set land speed records on top, and people use the rocks to spell out messages along the side of I-80. Most were two letters pledging eternal love to another two letters, but there was a smattering of other things, with the most concise one being "UTAH SUCKS." It's flatter and emptier than Nebraska, but with Bonneville, you can at least see the mountains holding up the far end of the sky. Nebraska and Colorado offered you no such option until you were near to Denver.
Before I finally pulled myself away from the sights outside my window long enough for breakfast, the ground has slipped out of view -- some local analogue to the Tulle fog of California's Central Valley, which renders that dry, flat land into pea soup without any apparent water sources nearby. The best cure for Tulle fog is to gain altitude, and with Denver at its fabled five thousand two hundred eighty feet only a couple hours ahead, altitude was something we were due to gain fairly quickly -- by comparison, Chicago is at about one-tenth that altitude, and most of the Bay Area's communities are essentially at sea level.
Biscuits and gravy were on the breakfast menu -- but not on the train, very sad. Had two eggs, over medium with wheat toast and potatoes, and a parfait of granola, yogurt, and fresh fruit. I'll probably just have that latter for breakfast tomorrow.
The scenery freshened up a bit once we were out of the Tulle fog and back to something more like what I'd seen in Illinois: the occasional low rise, trees near water sources, and only mostly flat instead of wholly flat.
We neared Denver, and my cell phone had signal. We were in Mountain Time now, insofar as clocks were concerned -- Lorrie was on Rubber Time as far as her mind was concerned. While we were in Denver, workers echoed the past of the California Zephyr, compared to which my current trip was but a pale shadow trying to recall past greatness, by washing all the windows so we could see better -- originally, it was the whole train. I called Mike, we were cute for several minutes, then the train climbed out of Denver and approached the first of many tunnels that would see it through the Rockies.
... and with that we were thrust into great beauty.
I took rather too many pictures to tack up here, I've had to limit it to just this handful. Lunch was a mediocre chicken sandwich, but I was hardly interested in my mealtime companions as I just continued to stare, placidly, out the window for most of the time.
These are all in Colorado; it was long after dark before we reached Utah. I believe the river is the Grand River, but I may be wrong. All of these were taken after we passed through the Moffat Tunnel, six and a quarter miles of still darkness that straddled the Continental Divide at ninety-to hundred feet -- the train followed the river, parallelled by old telegraph lines and I-70, down the western side of the Rocky Mountains.
I'm not going to bother captioning most of these.
I didn't retouch this, nor is it sunset -- the rocks spanned all colours, from grey and tan through to terra cotta.
We were descending into more populated valleys by the time dinner rolled around. The fish dish tonight was rainbow trout, stuffed with shrimp, capers, and I don't know what-all, but it was great. The cooked vegetables presented alongside were lackluster, though.
The train is currently just over an hour late, which is still within the bounds of our ability to make up. I have now totally caught up on journal-writing, which is fortunate because I have to do my homework for Laurel's rune class tomorrow (sorry, Laurel, I didn't get the time to devote to this properly until, well, now.
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