CHAPTER 6

On the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe

I had only been on the Super Chief for part of a day, a night, and a morning—but it was starting to feel like I had never been anywhere else. I knew all the porters and conductors, and waiters, and a lot of the passengers. The rumbling, rattling, and the rolling of the train had become like my breathing and my heartbeat.

Back at home, in Chicago, which seemed a long time ago, my job, if you want to put it that way, was going to school, playing with my friends, listening to Superman and Captain Midnight on the radio, reading books, seeing movies at the Julian, and sort of observing what went on in the neighborhood. On the Super Chief, my job was watching out the windows. It was an interesting job. There were times when I got sleepy—it was the movement of the train, and the fact that we were a lot higher above sea level than I had ever been—but I fought to stay awake, because I didn’t dare miss anything.

About the time we left La Junta, something happened to the land, the unexpected colors and the rock formations and all. The stuff I was looking at started to make sense in a weird way. This is hard to explain, but I thought the actual land we were traveling through was telling a story. Watching it all go past the windows of the train was like reading a book, one you don’t understand but one good to read just the same. There was the history story, and the stories Colonel Ken Krenwinkle told—and those were good to think about—but what I’m talking about is something about the actual rocks that can’t be translated into words. One of those scientists who studies rocks, and how the earth was formed, might be able to explain it—part of it, anyway. I hope it doesn’t sound too crazy to say that some of those mountains, and mesas, and towers were like . . . alive. Like alive and like animals or people, with personalities, and memories, and . . . well, that is the best I can do. I just knew I didn’t want to miss any of it.

There were cattle too, and herds of elk, and Indian guys taking care of sheep. And the train went through people’s backyards, Indian people, with outdoor dome-shaped ovens for baking bread, making pots—I didn’t know. Someone pointed out to me the ruts left by the old Conestoga wagons where the trail ran alongside the rail bed. I saw a big rattlesnake coiled on a rock, and a longhorn steer that had fallen down a ravine and broken its neck. And I saw cowboys! Real ones! Those guys had a way of sitting on a horse that made it look so easy, so comfortable!

And everything was sharper, brighter, clearer—I don’t know if it was because the air was purer, or because we were high up, or why, but everything I saw was cranked up, realer than real. I loved my looking-out-the-window job.

There were more meals in the diner, and more stories from Colonel Ken Krenwinkle. I had begun to catch on that some of what he said was fact and some was not. But I didn’t care—they were all good stories. And there was sitting around in the double drawing room, looking after the parakeets and listening to cowboy music on my father’s Wave Magnet radio, from the radio station in Trinidad, Colorado.