Riders on the Storm

7 March, 2001
(Aboard the Sunset Limited thorough Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas)

Note: This page is long; I have a comfortable seat and few distractions. I want to ramble about me awhile, and Beki F tells me her husband is train-mad, so he gets a large bone thrown to him, and we have to mull over the scenery awhile, so there you are.

I really have to admire Angela's stamina: one night of trying to sleep in coach was all right, two was going right downhill (and this with a real bed in between!), and three would've been a Bad Idea. Happily, once we were past Deming, I could move into the sleeper car I'd reserved for this leg from the beginning.

I woke briefly during the night to see us stop in Palm Springs, CA, and Yuma, Arizona. The rest of my night was spent in a fitful doze, until six (Pacific), when I sat straight up and stared out the window.

See, I'd never been to the American Southwest before, and was quite startled by the change in climate. Oh, I'd been to Nevada a couple of times, up near Reno, but the climate change is more gradual in a car. That gap for sleep made an awful lot of difference; we were now in mostly undeveloped high desert.

After adjusting my clocks (crossing into Arizona put us on Mountain Time), I realized that as it was really seven AM MST, the dining car would be open. Two eggs over medium, sausage, hash browns, and wheat toast. The eggs, at least, were fresh, but the sausage somewhat overdone and the toast and potatoes a bit on the cold side. It proves that they make rather a lot of their food on the train, at the very least.

I was happy to find out my phone had been enabled for roaming (it hadn't been until a week before I left), and I merrily called Mike and cooed at him for awhile, then called Arlie at work to surprise her utterly as well as convey something topical about an e-mail list we moderate together, whose threads had recently turned toward the recent San Diego school shooting.

Oh, Rowan and her mum woke up sometime before Tuscon, and I took their picture for posterity:

Rowan also single-handedly enacted this graceful piece of modern art, including a cow as a symbol of the most commonly seen non-human on our trip through Arizona and New Mexico: the cow.

Tuscon was a big stop: the choir from Wilberforce got off, bound for a tour, leaving their car utterly empty. It wasn't refilled, either: it and the car behind would comprise the part that would become the Texas Eagle and split from us in San Antonio to head for Chicago. Tuscon also heralded the boarding of another fellow who actually intended to get off in Deming. None of the three who were bound for Deming had ever been on a long-distance train before, so I showed them around.

During one of the seat and ticket checks the attendants and conductor run, I asked if my sleeping compartment would become available before Deming so I could move in. I was told that it would be ready for me soon, and if I were willing to wait until just after the next stop after Tuscon (Benson, Arizona), I'd have help with my luggage, also. Not that I'm not capable of schlepping it myself, but the attendant would add an air of legitimacy to the whole affair. A couple other of the rapidly-dwindling flock of Coast Starlight strandees wondered if they could have my off-hand bunk (in fact, I think the Cajun would've liked to share the bed, but I digress), but I made no promises until I saw how big (or small) the actual compartment was.

After Benson, the attendant and I moved forward, with that cheesy theme song to "The Jeffersons" stuck in my head.

See, on the Superliner fleet, the sleepers are fore of the dining car, which is itself fore of coach. As this was an eastbound train, we literally were movin' on up to the east side.

I'm allowed groaner of a pun per day. Thank you.

But wow! Even the smallest sleeper accomodations are leagues beyond what you get in coach. In all sleeper configurations, all meals and soft drinks are included in your accomodations, as well as some supplemental activities like wine tasting. The attendants are still placed one per car, but as there has to be enough room for a large complement of compartments, that attendant will have far fewer passengers to supervise. All sleeper cars have showers; no coach cars do (a serious concern if you plan to be onboard more than a day).

David F, the following embarrasingly complete description of my humble accomodations is for you in particular, on your wife's request. Hope you enjoy!

Amtrak has four sleeper compartment choices on its Superliner fleet, which is what runs on all the long-haul routes west of Chicago as well as the Sunset Limited. I was in a standard sleeper, which is basically wide enough for two seats to face each other with a large picture window between. The seats combine into a narrow bed (the size of Diana's), and another bunk drops down from the ceiling. You can't really bring a decent-sized suitcase in here full-time, but there's stowage on the bottom floor. The compartment has curtains and a door for privacy, and the attendants can help you with all the mechanical bits and bedtime mints. Here are some pictures:

On the right is a view of one end of the upper bunk. It's a few inches narrower than the top bunk. The small size of the compartment as a whole makes taking pictures of it difficult. Amtrak provides standard-sized pillows and rather thin blankets -- I added another blanket of my own and that made things warm enough. One person travelling alone could conceivably sleep in the top bunk and so not need to stow everything that was out for common use in the bottom of the compartment, but you can't work the light switches from the top bunk, aside from a small personal spotlight.

Oh, yes, and about the decor... sleeper cars come in orange, too! It's not my fault it's all blue! Okay, I'd be wrinkling my nose if it were Shocking Orange, but I didn't specifically pick blueness; blueness sought me out.

The next step up from this is the Deluxe Compartment, which are all on the upper level, making it the... all together, now... "De-luxe Compartment, in the sky-yi-yi." (I didn't use my alloted pun for yesterday, see) The lower bunk (left) converts from a sofa and is a good eight inches wider than in the Standard, the room has an armchair, and the compartment has a dedicated combined shower and toilet (right, the shower nozzle is out of frame to the right). A pair of these can be combined into a suite to sleep four. I didn't take any pictures of these on the seventh, but there were some empty deluxes the next day, so I walked into one and took these.

A possible drawback to being in first class is that the social interaction is quite different -- usually there's less of it. I don't mind my little rolling monastic cell; it's giving me rather an introverted turn, which I'm finding I rather like.

Diana has a theory about geography and mindset. She puts it much more prettily than I do, but the bottom line is that wider spaces make broader minds, so you find more acceptably strange (in the open-minded sense) people out West, where the vistas are broader and so are the attitudes. Back East, by contrast, the cities crowd people and their mindsets into narrow concrete canyons for miles all around, with little possible escape.

My aunt Tanya has another one: the best scenic views involve drastic height change.

Here in the Southwest those theories intersect. More than once, I looked out my window, or up from a platform, and was awed by how much sky there was. So rarely, even in California, do you get that 'horizon to horizon' feeling -- unless one is messing around in boats, naturally! Still, the storm we'd ridden south and east was just ahead of us as we rolled into Arizona, causing some odd effects in the normally arid desert.

This was the view outside the window of my coach seat as I awoke this morning:

Hardly stereotypically desert here, is it? The wave of the approaching clouds has broken over the mountains of the far distance, although it's currently sunny here. The sand is liberally sprinkled with brush: shrubs and grasses with no trees. If it weren't so wide, it'd remind me more of the side of a freeway than Arizona... but the side of the road tends to feature poor soil and little rain, so that's probably not altogether inaccurate. Note, however, that there is a saguaro cactus in the left third of the picture, which firmly nails this down as a desert.

The rains fell hard across the desert, and it didn't always have a handy place to go. We passed by almost an hour of freshly-made lake near the Arizona-New Mexico border, which we knew shouldn't've been that way from all the things sticking out of it.

The Sunset Limited makes two stops in New Mexico, although both of them are 'optional' and will only cause the train to stop if they know someone wants to get on or off. All three of these pictures were taken before Deming, the second of those optional stops, and they don't really need much more caption than that; they're pretty breaktaking of themselves.

As I said before, several people wanted to get off in Deming. The train arrived a couple hours late, but it did stop. I'm just sorry I couldn't get off the train for longer than to snap this picture of the station:

The next stop was in El Paso, Texas, at Texas's far west end. It and its suburbs are in the Mountain Time Zone, unlike the rest of Texas. We were here the better part of half an hour taking on more water and other such things. The conductor pointed out, as we arrived, that you could see into Cuidad Juarez, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, from here, so I stood in the train's vestible (Mexico was to starboard, my compartment was on the port side) and had my first actual look into a foreign country.

Actually, I wasn't all that impressed. Cuidad Juarez, at least down by the border, is a rickety shanty town, definitely belonging in the Third World. The continuing corporate trend of stuffing all the 'dirty' jobs into Mexico was blatantly apparent here, with gigantic phallic smokestacks rearing hundreds of feet into the air -- thankfully, they weren't producing anything visible that day, or I'd say something about that, too. It was quite depressing to think that that side of the river was like that partly due to the American disposable lifestyle, but mostly I was quietly happy for the luck to have been born on this side of the Rio Grande: even the worst slums in Cleveland, even her steel mills that once set the river on fire, didn't look like this.

Okay, enough naïvely idealistic outrage for one page; it likely chases people away faster than the puns. I snapped one picture during the leg-stretching and train-watering stop in El Paso, that of the station sign, then we moved on.

The high desert of Texas rolled on after El Paso as I tucked away a decently prepared half-slab of ribs in the dining car. The time zone flipped again, making it twice in one day, and after my poor sleep in coach I was happy to curl up with a book for awhile (Neal Stephenson's Zodiac) and turn in relatively early.

I glanced through the timetable for tomorrow... San Antonio in the middle of the night when the trains split, Houston, a couple more small stops... hey, what this?

A three hour layover in N'awlins?! That means I can have dinner there, a lack of which had been a profound shortcoming of the route as devised! I'll have to mail Laurel and Stefn when I'm back in range tomorrow, and ask where to go.