The title's from a Lovecraftian filk -- the next line is "Cthulhu just ate Texas!" Sung, naturally, to the obvious tune. Anyway...
The night before still saw us descending from the high desert of West Texas as I drifted off to sleep, still rejoicing the wonders of a flat bed in a quiet, private place. When I awoke, there'd been a bit of a climate shift: we'd lost a few thousand feet and were now in the green beauty of the Texas Hill Country, garbed in her Spring best. I took a couple pictures from my seat, which means they'll be blurry and somewhat dark from the tinted windows. The sky, however, was grey throughout most of the day, as it had been most of the trip.
I was reminded, favorably, of the gig I'd flown to with Gaia's Voice (a pagan chorus) when I was still with them. We'd been invited as the musical guests of honor to the Beltane campout/festival of the Council of Magickal Arts, Texas's biggest pan-pagan umbrella organization. The site, about two hours' drive from Austin, was in a similar part of Texas and was simply lovely -- except for the lack of potable water and the below-freezing nighttime temperatures, but the people were all quite friendly and more than polite. They were also a helluva lot more organized and cohesive at organizing this sort of thing than the California crew tends to be. I think it's the adversity: it's a lot easier to be an Us when there's a very definite Them.
There had been a bit of railroad ballet in the night: the last two coach-class cars were decoupled and left behind in San Antonio, where they would receive a different engine and proceed to Chicago. It was a one-hour stop for us, five hours for them -- not that I know other than by looking at the timetable, for I slept through it. Anyway, at such times the train takes on water and a few provisions, including local newspapers, which are left in all occupied sleeping compartments. I stretched, sat up, and found the San Antonio paper at my feet.
I didn't know Billy Graham had a newspaper column. It makes sense; from the fundamentalist side of the family, I gather he's pretty much a name brand. My paternal grandmother, one of my dearest blood kin, encouraged me to go to one of his 'Crusades' once, in Philadelphia some ten years ago. It was all right, I suppose: he does preach a genuinely Christian line of tolerance, but you don't get as close to the mainstream as he has without a likeable polish. Mostly, I remember enjoying snooping around Veterans' Stadium, being amused at how the 'free' stadium admission was being more than offset by booktables and love offerings, and the intense peer pressure I felt when he encouraged everyone to troop down to the field and dedicate themselves to Christ.
If any pagan path had half as good a PR polish, we'd be dangerous.
Anyway, he has a column, probably run all over the South, but inclusive of the San Antonio paper, which they ran next to the comics, Ann Landers, and Miss Manners, where he peddles non-offensive Christianity. I read it with one eyebrow stuck in the Spock Position, then tromped off to breakfast -- where, Constant Reader, I was true to my previous declaration and had oatmeal with a few raisins and some brown sugar with a bowl of fruit.
The Texas Hill Country flattened into plains as the train rolled on, with the occasional house or farm emerging from the land, whose green was such a welcome surprise after the tawny high desert:
When unbroken by lines of trees, I looked at the sky, as I had several times the day before. It's just so... it's big. This seems a simple and obvious thing, like 'water is wet,' but there's a difference between reading that the Pacific covers such-and-so many square miles and sitting out on a sailboat and getting walloped by the immense blue to all sides, where it hits you that there's nothing but that water between you and, say, Hawaii. So it was with the sky: horizon to horizon, with no mountains to hold it up. It was even more dramatic when the overcast parted to partly cloudy, so the sky above the clouds could reveal itself in brilliant blue glory.
After breakfast was another leg-stretched in Houston, which was associated with two things for me: a country tune ("Heeeeeeew-ston / Houston means that I'm one day closer to you!") and Johnson Space Center, home of Mission Control. Unfortunately, all we got to see was, well, the train station. But, as we were in an urban area, my cell phone worked, so I tried to nail down the names of some good restaurants in New Orleans for our projected three-hour layover.
Laurel pulled through, bless her, coming up with a half-dozen names within fifteen minutes. I tried and failed to get reservations, and just as I lost signal, figuring I'd only lose it for a few minutes, tried to mail Mike from my phone asking him if he could help me find out which restaurants were close.
Then I waited, wrote yesterday's page, and watched the show roll by my window -- this latter quite often, as it's a source of endless fascination. Eric and I -- I think it was Eric -- were watching a group of houses once, long ago. I peered over them and murmured, half to myself, "I wonder what all those people are doing, right now."
Eric brightened, and nodded in agreement, "I always think, when I look at a group of houses or people or cars, 'Think of all the stories in there!'"
I do, now, and have ever since he crystallized it for me. I think of it particularly when I'm on a train, whickerclacking from one town to the next, horn heralding our approach. Every time someone hears that horn and looks up, every truck stopping at a railroad crossing: I have touched that story. They have touched my story. Just a brief touch, the lighting of a flower petal, then gone, off again to its own weaving. Think of all the stories in there!
I had met a charming young girl named Alex and Bryce, her father, over breakfast. Alex was four years of red-headed beauty, and her smile was like the sun rising. I fell in love with her on sight, I'm afraid, and took my meals with her and her father for the rest of this leg, when I could find them. Alex's mother had died of cancer quite recently, and she and her father were headed to Disneyworld. Bryce hadn't been on a long-distance train in some time, and didn't know you couldn't access your checked baggage once you were onboard, but he had joined us in San Antonio during the railroad ballet, which meant, at least, he only had two days in the same clothes, and he had had the forethought to at least bring an extra outfit for young Alex, in case she did a predictably four-year-old thing like get ketchup on her pretty travelling dress. Alex also vastly enjoyed the salt shaker, which had Bryce and I doing everything we could to keep it away from her.
After lunch and some more tinkering, I pulled out the Amber omnibus volume. I'd heard of Zelazny's magnum opus, naturally, but had never had the chance to read it, mostly because I don't like reading a series from the start unless I have all of it -- an omnibus volume solved that problem nicely, so I was soon well-settled into an expansive world of courtly intrigue. I'd hate to see what happened if the Amberites got into the continuity of Heinlein's later work, but thankfully all involved authors are now dead -- that way, I'm sure, lies madness.
Soon after Houston, Texas finally relinquished its thousand-mile hold on us, giving way to Louisiana. We were firmly out of broad dry plains and associated range and farmland, and firmly in the swamps, bayous, and otherwise wet part that characterises the truly Deep South. It was also, unfortunately, chock-full of houses in disrepair. I had, numerous times, heard of some of Lousiana's peculiarities: the above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans, and houses on stilts -- and here were many houses on stilts. We passed one above-ground cemetery in the late afternoon, too, but mostly it was houses on stilts, interspersed with swamps whose standing water bore, I must admit, a striking resemblance to Laurel's gumbo.
One of the other passengers in my part of the sleeping compartment was a disabled lady travelling with her sister as her attendant and a daschund as a companion animal. At at least one Louisanan whistle-stop, we had to let the dog out to do her business in a bit of lawn.
It wasn't long after Houston when my cell phone let out again, but I figured it would come back when we were near to New Orleans, and I could make some dinner arrangements for that layover. I slipped upstairs when dinner just started, ate a bit of fish to tide me over, and eagerly awaited a return to service, and made sure we were due to arrive just about on time.
Unfortunately, we were an hour and a half late in arriving, and the right people hadn't been bribed in New Orleans, apparently: My cell phone was about as useful as a nutcracker throughout the eastern half of Louisiana. And, with the layover cut in half, there was no way I could reasonably leave the station and go to a restaurant, not and get back before the train pulled out. Damn and blast! I was rather fussy as the train pulled up the five-mile-long Huey P. Long bridge and backed gingerly into the station.
I decided to go into the station anyway, on the off-chance that there was a kitschy tourist shop or restaurant available. I carefully took most things of value out of my pack, including my train tickets, and detrained.
What a charming place this station was! There were no less than three uniformed police officers and a drug-sniffing dog in attendance, and this was still on the platform. I thought briefly of Stefn's encounter with the drug-sniffing dogs in the Louisville airport and smiled -- a story I shan't relate here, as it's not mine to tell. I proceeded into the station proper, to find the following:
The unusually high number of New Orleans's Finest patrolling the station convinced me that, had I had any inclination left to strike out on my own, I was probably too pale to be out alone in such an amusing neighborhood, although upon reflection they were probably just there to catch anyone who was found holding in their luggage. After chatting with Mike via a collect call from a payphone, I picked up a six-inch sandwich from the Subway, sat with the disabled lady, her sister, and the dog (the latter in a mesh-sided totebag-style carrier), and sulked until it was time to get back on the train.
We pulled out of New Orleans, which I am apparently not fated to enjoy, In the darkness, I could still see out the window if I closed the curtains in the hallway and shut off the compartment's lights, and so I did. Cell service returned as we neared the Mississippi border, and I couldn't help but notice Old Man River when we started to cross it.
Sweet Mother, that thing was several miles across, as befitted the lifeblood of two-thirds the continent. It also marked the border into Mississippi. I watched it roll by beneath the train, raised a water bottle to its spirit, and called first Laurel to inform her of my misfortune, then Mike to let him know I had cell service back. Service maps, apparently, predicted a consistent blanket of service all the way unto the eastern sea, not that I'd need it too terribly often. We made our first Mississippi stop, Bay St. Louis, and I tried to stay up long enough to see Alabama, whose southern fringes we would whisk through in the night, but drifted off to sleep instead, not far short of my goal. Oh, well. Tomorrow would see us through the Florida panhandle, and to my father's house, a sojourn that definitely required a well-rested heathen... but more on that tomorrow.
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