Traveling Outside of Time
This afternoon, a lively bunch is gathered in the Pacific Parlour Car, a room full of strangers who, at this moment, have nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but sip wine, look out the window and chat. Across from me, the insurance salesman is deep in conversation with a burly guy who sports a shaved head, trim goatee and gorgeous full-arm tattoos. At one of the six banquettes, a Danny DeVito look-alike with thick Russian accent talks with a big bruiser of an Australian who is in the U.S. for the first time, traveling the country by rail not so much to see the scenery, he says, but to meet the people.
Sitting next to me is a strapping young women who appears to be wearing pajamas. She tells me that she is a gofer for a trucking magnate, and then confides, sotto voce, that they are sharing a sleeping compartment. From her I get the gossip of the day: Drew Barrymore is traveling on this train, holed up in compartment B in the next car. I would be more impressed if Willie the cook had not already told me that the Dalai Lama recently took the Coast Starlight, bringing with him a private chef and a cadre of armed bodyguards.
Somewhere outside Salinas, the storm clouds part to reveal an almost full milk-white moon. I had been hoping that we would outrun this storm and that the skies would clear because tonight is a lunar eclipse. Now I watch out the Parlour Car window as the dark gray shadow of the earth drifts across the face of the moon. I haven’t sat like this, in deep and thoughtless meditation, since, well, since I can’t remember.