Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #7

Leaving Grand Junction


We were, with a slight lurch, moving forward, moving west. The train seemed to pause slightly just as the station was behind us, and there was a slight moan from the other end of the observation car. Moans aside, we were moving.

"Not a place I want to return to," Steven said.

"A good place to leave," Margie said.

"There are worse places," my father added, always optimistic.

The observation car was full of much activity--the comings and goings of people who had been on the train for hours but who now apparently felt the need to move.

"I'm hungry," Dad said.

"We've got a seating time in the dining car," Margie said. "I reserved a table for all of us in about half an hour."

"I'll give up my seat," I said. "I'm not hungry."

"You might be later," Margie said.

"Then I'll eat later," I said.

"Dumb kids," Steven said. "I saw Cousin Mark downstairs. I'll ask him if he wants to join us." Mark was Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet's oldest child. He and I were close in age, but he was the learned type and had found reasonable success as a college professor and a writer. I admired him for the writing, and I wondered if he would be interested in the notebook. Cathy, his sister, would be joining the train in Salt Lake City where she lived with her Mormon family.

"You'll be missing a nice dinner," Dad said to me when Steven was gone.

"Don't humor him, Dad," Margie said.

Half an hour later they were all gone, eating in the dining car while I left the noisy observation car for my seat toward the rear of the train. Leafing through Rhodia, I saw how some people had taken the writing assignment quite seriously, while others seemed to have leaned toward graffiti. One entry, "Nebraska," was written in the same hand as others, and all were signed with the letters "MK."

Nebraska

There is nothing there.
But you have to see it to believe it.

Zephyr rolls hard and fast determined to leave Nebraska at night. With passengers flopped half asleep in all contorted positions, like refugees fleeing the park land of fields, broken by grain silos hiding missiles aimed at evil empires, lit only by Pepsi and Coca Cola machines glowing red and white and sometimes blue against filling stations. Don't lose a minute--just keep humping until Nebraska is done--until we've checked McCook, Holdrege, Hastings, Lincoln, and Omaha off our list of grudging stops. Ride on through the Nebraska corn husking and soy gleaning night. Cross the Missouri and ride on.

I liked it--for the mood as much as the words. I have driven across Nebraska, and it's a drive that never seems to end. It's one of the seemingly endless bad filmstrips among the country's 50 states' worth of travelogues. And something in it made me think of Peggy again, how she and I were young enough to see glamour in so many bad motels when we took to the road. We both enjoyed getting on the road a couple of hours before dawn and letting the day open up to us. Then we'd find someplace to sleep in the afternoon, sometimes simply parking our car in Walmart parking lots along with the RVs, and try to be driving again as the day ended. "How is all of this going to end?" Peggy once asked me on a road trip not long before we decided to divorce. I never answered that question, and she never asked it again.

When my siblings and father found me, they were full of food and happiness. "I brought you the leftovers," Margie said. "Half of a hamburger. Slightly cold by now."

I took the food from her. "Such a nurturer," I said. "Thanks."

Steven sat beside me. He belched, slipped his feet out of his shoes, and tilted his seat back. "People are going to think you don't like them if you keep avoiding everyone," he said. Margie and our father sat in front of us; Cousin Mark entered the car a few minutes later and sat a few rows behind us. He was reading a book as he walked by, and I doubted he'd even noticed us.

"I like everyone just fine," I said. I shut the Rhodia and watched what was left of Colorado pass by. We rode on.