The Mysterious California Zephyr

by Douglas McDaniel

Mythville MetaMedia

G21 Staff Writer

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Douglas McDaniel

The California Zephyr, which crashed this week, was a happy enough ride for me a month ago, but then Amtrak is always a little dicey. Even my own safe trip was not without grim possibilities, or, even, consequences.

That it is now crashed only lends to the deeper mystery of its long traverse across the continent -- well, at least from Chicago, through the Rockies, onward to San Francisco. The cause of the crash is still up in the air, but even if ruled as an accident it must mean -- something.

Maybe one of the golden spikes for the continental railroad gave out. Or, something else. One could just as easily imagine a group of barn-storming right wingers, as a kind of vigil and protest for Timothy McVeigh, America's least wanted murderous youth -- one could just as easily imagine something from out of the Turner Diaries. Such has been in the case in Arizona, where Nazi youth calling themselves the Vipers derailed a train in the boon-dock desert of that state. When we were kids we used to say you could derail a train by putting a quarter on a railroad track. I never tried, but we could imagine the sparks that might make.

The "accident" being in the Midwest, in Iowa, where the train derailed for reasons unknown, with one dead and 90 injured, it's easy enough to see: It can happen here.

But such was the nature of the aura of this train. At least on my own life's trip. Which had become strange in other quarters. Leaving the Mordor of Boston, the gloomy post-election winter, where the very human face of the city seemed to cry out in a sort of despondency and anguish. Switching trains in Chicago, Ill.

"Most likely at great terror," I wrote. But I don't know why.

Carrying myself across the long distances always seems to sound a death rattle in me.

Nonetheless, as we moved West on this fabled line that would eventually take me to the Rockies, all of the way to Grand Junction, Colorado, at the base of Grand Mesa, where the Colorado River winds its own sacred trail southwesterly. My destination, a personal Mythville: Telluride, Colorado. Which would require a bus jaunt to Montrose, with a driver who turned out to be a real asshole (but who wouldn't be, taking these routes over and over through such climes?) From there a helpful hitch with a local Jack Jehovah Ute, Leroy Morales, in a big green pickup up the San Miguel River Canyon to this mountain resort town, isolated as it is in rocky highlands of the San Juans of southwestern Colorado.

A latter-day Zephyr rider from Telluride didn't fare so well. His experience this week in the coach car, which ended up on its side, after sliding down a 20-foot embankment, was more harrowing.

"I was just lying down to sleep when I heard a rumbling and a screeching sound----the brakes maybe," said Noah McKittrick, who had also been bound for Grand Junction. "The lights flickered off and the car tumbled over. We were thrown about. It was incredibly disorienting. When we stopped, I was lying on the windows, which was now the floor of the car. People were crying and their kids were screaming for their parents. It was over in five seconds."

The Zephyr was traveling at 53 miles per hour, which is a lot slower than its usual 80 miles per hour, but anyone who has taken an Amtrak line from Boston to New York, or on the Eastern Seaboard at all, knows fully well the fallen nature of its infrastructure.

Before the crash, McKittrick said his dinner companions, experienced train travelers, were commenting on how bad the tracks in Iowa were. "For two hours before the crash, the train was shaking like turbulence on a plane." You get these kinds of impressions when you are traveling across the states: bad bridges in New England; course roads in Missouri, federal highways even; tolls and tolls in Pennsylvania; whole highway networks mangled in a maze of cars, entropy and chaos theory.

For myself, Toledo, Ohio is where the long strange trip on the Zephyr really took its first strange turn. Nothing so dramatic as a derailment, mind you, but enough to dislodge the mind, anyway.

I remember the sunlight fading as we headed west through the Berkshires, a cigarette along the plank in Springfield, Mass., supposed birthplace of basketball, and I most certainly remember all the attendant regrets of leaving home after two years of dot-com life, as well as a family, in Boston.

Across the white carpeted forests of the east we moved, with the train sounding off a warning and celebration in each small burgh along the line. With each hour, the light seemed friendlier, less closed in as we left the horizonless maze of New England.

That first night we stopped for a couple of hours in Albany, New York. A line was broken on one of the cars. There was a lot of commotion and confusion about hook-ups and connectivity. The conductors told stories and smoked. I walked the length of the interior to the dining car, which was pitch black but still serving by candlelight. I thought of the last and only voyage of the Titanic. An elderly woman and a little girl sat down to dinner. It was a bit uncomfortable, at first, but I eased into it. I told the story of how the dragon slain by St. Patrick was really a dinosaur, the last of it's kind.

"In hindsight," I said, playing on the part of the worldly storyteller, "the pre-historic lizard, which had only come out for one brief gasp of air after living for so, so long, deep beneath the earth. Perhaps he would have been more appreciated as a relic from some ancient time, a novelty to draw the crowds. But preservation efforts were unheard of then. And so, the only remaining information about the dragon is this: He tasted a lot like chicken."

Always one to attempt to blow a small child's mind, even I hesitated at the telling of the story of Joseph of Arimethea, who I had been reading about on that headlight into the night toward Chicago, about how he had lost the Holy Grail during sea travel on the way to Albion, as in England.

Another book, Rex Deus, a capably written historical tome, revealed the mysteries of the ancient Rosencruz, or at least that's my version of it. The revelations of the book, that Jesus had sired two children, and may have survived his apparent execution, and that the ruling monarchies of France, England and Scotland were connected to the bloodline of Jesus and King David and so on -- the kind of ancient mystery that makes a Steven Spielberg film laughably imprecise, in terms of the larger universe around us.

Then we were off again. The train's horn is a safety and comfort for all traders in the deal. That such peace could lead anyone disaster, at that point, especially after a couple of bourbons on the rocks in the observation deck, was well beyond all of the hocus pocus I could imagine.

Until Toledo.

A town for which hocus pocus has no practical use.

It was 7:57 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2001, dawn at the Amtrak Station in Toledo, Ohio. Drug interdiction hour. Five Federal Agents, although they didn't show much ID to anyone, since the passengers were asleep, rousting the train awake. They hit mostly the latin-looking men, many of whom could not speak English. They were asked about drugs, about where they were going. Asked if they had tickets. A conductor's job. The latinos only gave scared but incomprehending nods. Racial profiling was the technique here, even if the agents also rousted the white punk with the blue hair, it was still an alternative tribe to whatever passes for the social norm in the center of god-forsaken Ohio, the ice floes of the river completely encasing the town in a grimy industrial cesspool of grey, bleak permanence.

But I know my Fourth Amendment rights, and figured the guys sleeping on the train might have access to the same.

"Improbable cause," I said out loud, in the direction of the melee. "You can't do that. It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment."

They all looked up at me. The evil eye like a scanner. "You a lawyer or something?" said one.

"Watching too much TV," said the other.

"Yes," I smarted back. "I went to Harvard." A lie. I attended a seminar once. "You can't do this." I repeated. "You don't have probable cause."

One of the interdicks, wearing a nice suede leather jacket, like the kind a rancher might wear, who said I had been watching too much TV -- when I had in fact been reading too much Alexis de Tocqueville -- started asking me questions.

Such as: "How would you like to get off the train and stay in Toledo?"

I looked out the window. Morning was frozen and the river was one great ice floe covering the state. "No, I won't be staying here," I said. "But you will."

He said, "Yeah," sighing.

So then I left before my disruptors really started to show, hurrying out of the train to smoke, thinking about the Pretenders, "Hey, o, way to go Ohi-I-I-o." And I thought the land of Thomas Paine was bad. That's what I was trying to get away from.

Back on the train, a West Indian woman started asking me questions, said she wanted to file a report about the raid, and it became on ongoing matter of conversation during the day. She was some kind of freedom fighter from Berkeley, and what had happened had fit a paper she had been writing. The feds had found nothing, and the same group of what turned out to be Mexicans under the supervision of an interpreter was still anxiously awaiting for whatever might await them in Chicago.

The remainder of that morning's ride consisted of reading the headlines in the smoking car, on the observation deck or in the kitchen. "Bush ends overseas abortion funding," reads the headline for Tuesday, Jan. 23, "President revives plan on family-planning abroad." Just as I note this, a guy in the observation car tells his friend, "That dang Bush, he's going to let them drill new oil wells in Alaska."

Another headline: "Four escapees caught, one dead." This is in Colorado, where I am headed. The Great Plains all too well included in the disasters going on from Coast to Coast, but I think about adding a few more words, another deck, "and one more at large heading home."

The California Zephyr begins in Chicago and makes its way toward Denver. By nightfall I meet one of two or three of the strangest characters, including the zen-master man, a drunk cowboy artist named Charlie, who discussed Reiki therapy, meditation and Swedenborgian metaphysics. He disappeared somewhere in the night, in Iowa, I believe.

Then, the next morning, in Denver, I noticed two men, one with a Masonic emblem on his coat, the other leading a doddering elderly gentleman onto the train. Curious about the Freemasons after a lot of study and amazement about it in Boston, I asked who the elderly man was. The large man in the coat said he was the Grandmaster of the Freemasons for the entire United States of America.

So once we headed up a winding trail into the Rockies, I handed him my copy of Rex Deus.

"Did Jesus survive," I asked him.

"Oh, that's what some say," he said, reading the book for a couple of hours with great interest. But there seemed to be something on this mystery train that was more than he could perceive, his work on this world pretty much accomplished.

At one other point toward the end of the line, the train stopped for some time, in order to avoid an accident. In the canyons near Gunnison, the observation deck announcer pointed us to a cave in the wall, high up on the cliff. Safe enough place for anything, from anyone, anywhere, be it the President of the United States, or, the DEA. I suppose you could worry about rock slides. No place is really safe, I guess.

COMMENTS? QUESTIONS? Go ahead and e-mail Doug.