I am now being sad at Fisher's Peak, which will clearly be the last piece of what I came to see before it's dark. I'll wake up where the corn side is crispier, I guess, nobody's idea of scenery. I seem to be harping on this. My dread of the Midwest is not much of a secret.
Today was nothing. We went for breakfast burritos and I told M that there was some argument, so I had heard, over whether breakfast tacos and I guess by extension breakfast burritos were invented in Austin or Albuquerque. (Austin ones are better. Sorry M if you are reading! I liked all my New Mexico food!)
It occurs to me the main thing I wanted the universe to cough up on this trip that it did not cough up was an overwhelming sunset such as one theoretically sees in the west. This seems like a pretty minor omission.
We were in the town called Trinidad under Fisher's Peak however right at "the golden hour" and it looked like a more intriguing place than one would imagine it is. The usual perverse fantasies of getting off the train without even my bags.
...and then at some point I fell asleep. J asked me what characterized the train-riding public and I said I wasn't sure except they seemed to maybe make less money than the flying public. I will add that they are on the whole somewhat unattractive. Also a lot of them are retired.
Made it into Chicago right on time and managed to have dinner with old friends at The Red Apple, the Polish buffet up on Milwaukee. The staff seems to speak English these days, for which I should launch some hipster lament. It was a fine ending to my vacation and now I'm waiting to depart again in half an hour.
Something flashed through my head as I was falling asleep about travel and object permanence and I kind of wish I could remember what it was, but then the stupidest things seem pithy when you're falling asleep. Blah blah three weeks blah sense of self blah.
I have flipped the last page of my packet of e-tickets, schedules, maps, car reservations. It's all over but the getting home. New York in sixteen hours! -as the song says, only it's nineteen these days, thanks I guess to the decline of rail travel and the staying-put of freight rail.
Speaking of that song, I will have to listen to "On the Twentieth Century" tonight, as I am on the Lakeshore Limited which once was the Twentieth Century. So: the Twentieth Century is my favorite train route, my favorite cocktail, my favorite musical, and probably my favorite century.
The disconnect for me that I keep wailing about has to do with the Twentieth Century and my insistence on imagining a little of that glamor is preserved in the Lakeshore, even if it really isn't. I dreamily fancy myself a little cosmopolitan for traveling this way, and then I snap out of it and remember to everyone else it's essentially a very long Greyhound Bus I'm on.
Well, Lily Garland and Oscar Jaffe didn't think so and they are the company I'm keeping tonight. So alright then.
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