Andrew Ashdown
Great Rail Tour 2010
Coda: Travelling through America
Travelling through America ... a series of mise-en-scenes, tableaux, instagrams ... each in stark contrast to the one before. From the all too familiar film-set of New York, its grimy inconvenience and unexpected tropical heat and humidity .... the crush of humanity in the glass and concrete canyons .... to the translucent blue sky and the ordered calm of Washington, the diplomatic enclave, whited sepulchre, anaesthetic for the sins of America, sins buried in its burgeoning cemeteries and the colossal sarcophagi that circle the lakes and close relentless vistas .... thence making our escape, through the nightmare hillbilly backwoods of the Adirondaks, to arrive at the acme of the American dream .... pristine, shining, sleek, untrammelled, blasted by the sun, the glinting glass surfaces of corporate America, rising sharp-edged from the lake's iron bound shore .... Chicago, where we felt at last we had reached the threshold of the authentic America we sought .... and thence across the unremitting, text book panorama which is the grain belt of the Mid-West, the remorseless, unvariegated cornfields, dotted with the iconic grain elevators, water towers and farmsteads, before night closed in upon us.
We awoke on the high grass savannah under even crisper, cleaner skies - Denver, the cowboy, buckskin, Bucking Bronco town that tartly wears its cosmetic skin of culture, mantle of modernity (Libeskind Gallery, Michael Graves Library, conference centre), simmering in the dry basking heat of the gridded plain ....
And, after a detour into the Rockies (no animals to be seen) the train took us clean through the tunnel .... along the appallingly beautiful river gorge - more mise-en-scenes: tumbling water and layers of stratified rock.
And we had reached our goal ....
The Red Rocks, exposed geological strata and the fragile, capricious layers of humanity deposited thereon: frontier post below mining town below mission station below military redoubt below commercial hub ... then ghost town and crime scene; now, finally, tourist trap - the film set that is the true West
A bus with cowboy driver to greet us.
And at dawn, the dry rind of earth .... the road ascending to beguiling prospects: an out of season ski resort and the dry hills of mining country ... polychromatic soils and abandoned winding gear ... before the absurd wild west town and Butch Cassidy steam train that took us through the gorge to the resonance of 'Durango'.
Another dawn and another bus ... but now descending into the coffee-table landscape of dry eroded gullies and residual table tops, last vestiges of green ebbing away, each new turn and promontory revealing yet drier and gratifyingly yellower 'Tom & Jerry' scenery, 'Bart Simpson' skies ... into this blue vortex of ungaugeable scale, the horizons pushed back, racing to vanishing point, the tiny distant outcrops - actually colossal features reduced to the miniscule - neatly placed as if by a giant’s hand to shape our view as iteratively we edged forward, winding our way like ants across the painted, sculpted scene, a giant slanted table, the gorges deep rust red and the hills like outsize gravel workings ...
Much later, an incrementally elevated incline took us back to the familiarity of green, albeit a somewhat exotic version of dotted juniper over yellow sage brush. A night in a hotel with a pool - at last!
We then hit the great fissure itself - very much as tourists. You see, we never left the cacoon of Great Rail Tours ...
The denouement came on the platform at Flagstaff - our journey was over, though we did not know it, for beyond lay anticlimax, the elusive, intangible so-called 'City of the Angels' and the beached whale of the 'Queen Mary', our discombobulating billet for the night.
From there, up the spray and spume coast to the city of Saint Francis - another latter day Jerusalem bursting at the seams.
A cold fog on the Golden Gate and we headed home to Blighty.