All Gone to Look for America (34 page)

There wasn’t. The only problem was another of Barry’s incurable attacks of the munchies. We were by no means certain of the situation on the pass as we drove south. Big heavy-looking clouds were indeed marching in from that direction – ‘could be full of moisture if they’ve blown in off the Gulf’ – the only snow we saw was on the tops of a stunning camel-backed double peak
mountain
group to our right. Barry didn’t know what they were called which once again had me lamenting how annoying it is that most American maps show little more than road: spidery thin lines on a blank background.

‘Yeah, well, maybe Homeland Security just doesn’t want you to know,’ says Barry with that smile of his that always leaves me uncertain whether or not he’s serious. In this case I reckon he’s not too sure himself. Google Maps’ hybrid photographs from military satellites offer spectacular resolution in this part of the world. What they lack, however, by and large, is that old-fashioned British ordnance survey-style meticulousness for naming peaks, giving elevations and pointing out the whereabouts of churches and pubs. Particularly the latter.

There is another reason why Barry might well be right. Pikes Peak isn’t the only nationally significant mountain in the Colorado Springs area: there’s also Mount Cheyenne. This is less of a lofty peak than a great bulk of a mountain looming over the US Air Force base outside the town. I say ‘looming’ because Mount Cheyenne is one of those mountains that would loom no matter what shape it was. That is because deep inside, and probably very far beneath it, Mount Cheyenne houses a hub of the American strategic nuclear missile control system. As Barry has told me on several occasions before: ‘We don’t worry about the risks of a nuclear war. If anyone ever launches a first strike against the United States, the war’ll be over for us before anyone else even knows it’s started.’

But it’s not nuclear war that’s worrying Barry as we head for the high
mountain pass. And it’s not the threat of black ice either. It’s the rumbling in his stomach. I’m looking at my watch worrying that we’re not going to make it over the mountains into Raton, New Mexico, before my train. He’s worrying about making sure we have time to stop at McDonald’s on the way.

I’m not terribly impressed by this. Not least because having dreaded being forced to live off McMeals and the like for a month or more and ballooning as a result, I’ve actually managed to totally avoid them: the microbrew pub phenomenon has largely gone along with a good food ethos. It hasn’t all been gourmet standard, but it’s really only on Amtrak that I can say in best
American
fashion that ‘the food sucks’. And now my cousin, my own cousin, is
dragging
me to a McDo. And for what: ‘This little place in Trinidad do just the greatest sausage biscuit.’

Excuse me? This little place in Trinidad? It’s a McDo for Christ’s sake, Barry, not some quaint little Caribbean restaurant. And it is, as it turns out, everything I expect. And less: a smaller than usual, but much more crowded little McDonald’s roadside stop, tucked in just next to the I25 freeway, with just one obvious blessing: it is also right next to the railway track so if the train comes through I should see it. Barry meanwhile has queued up at the counter and comes back with the object of his lust: a fairly unrecognisable bun thing with an even less recognisable might-once-have-been-related-to-an-egg thing and some meaty goo next to it. I settle for a large coffee and orange juice. The morning after the night before has different effects on different people. I need rehydration. Barry clearly needs starch. And stuff. And that’s what he gets. The sausage biscuit with egg (regular size biscuit) and hash browns on the side
provides
a not necessarily vast 660 calories, but more disconcertingly 65 per cent of your daily recommended intake of fat, 77 per cent saturated fat, 83 per cent of recommended cholesterol and 62 per cent of your salt recommendation. And that’s from McDonald’s own website.
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I’m not sure Barry could care less: ‘Man, I was dreaming about that sausage biscuit and hash browns for the last 70 miles,’ he purrs as we roll out of McDo’s and back onto the highway only to see the train pulling out ahead of us. This induces a moment of blind panic on my part – the next train is same time tomorrow – and also a sheer Homer Simpson ‘D’oh’ moment as I pull out my timetable to check how long we’ve got to get to Raton and find out the train made its previous stop just 10 minutes ago. In Trinidad. The simple fact is I hadn’t looked at a map, just thought the only option was to take the same route
as Amtrak’s ‘Thruway’ coach link. So if we miss the connection now, I can’t even blame McDo and Mister Munchie next to me, who’s still licking his lips as we coast up the winding road that for the next 20 miles over the mountains and down into Raton is part of the historic Santa Fe Trail that ran from Missouri through the ‘disorganised territory’ as they then called the Native Americans’ lands, down to the genuinely ancient city of Santa Fe which had been a
collection
of Pueblo Indian villages since at least the end of the first millennium.

There is one consolation: the train, still in view, is obviously having more difficulties than we are with the gradient, huffing and puffing its way up an admittedly steep incline before plunging down the other side: all in all,
according
to Amtrak’s timetable, another hour, while we should need, according to McDonald’s man next to me, 30 minutes at most. Even with the rain settling in, and cold grey clouds scudding overhead. My brief foray onto road transport has left me hankering for the comfort zone of the steel rails – yes, all those stories about Lake Donner and the Rockies snowdrifts notwithstanding – our little truck seems suddenly less reliable than the iron horse.

I need not have worried. Weather in the Rockies is like weather in Iceland, where the favourite local saying is: ‘You don’t like our climate? Hang around an hour or so.’ By the time we reached Raton station, it felt like a particularly pleasant British June, the temperature in the upper twenties, warm sunshine on my face and just a few small white clouds drifting by above the mountains.

Raton itself is something else: a one-horse town where the horse packed up and left some years ago in search of excitement. Atop a limestone cliff there’s a white giant-lettered sign clearly modelled on the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, except that this one says ‘
RATON
’. Because it’s in Raton. And because it’s in Raton, it dominates not Beverly Hills but Marchiondo’s ‘Golden Rule and New York Stores’, which according to the painted signs sells ‘Dry Goods’ and Levis, or must do when it’s open, whenever that is, and certainly not today. In fact there’s no sign of much at all open in Raton. Well, actually nothing. Not even the station. I mean, I suppose trains stop here, once every morning as it says on the timetable, but there’s nothing much to reassure the uncertain
traveller
that they really do. Just an old, adobe, pinky-cream painted station with no sign of human habitation, and just a few quietly rusting freight cars on the second track, while occasionally-humming telegraph poles march off like the totems of long-vanished tribes towards a desert horizon beneath a high
cirrus-flecked
azure sky.

‘Like, are you sure this train’s gonna come?’ asks Barry, gazing up at the sky, then down at his watch, and shuffling his feet, almost certainly wondering how
long it’ll be before he’s due his next McMuffin. But in Amtrak we trust.
Especially
having seen the train snaking up the mountain behind us and I persuade Barry that his ‘cuz’ can cope and wave goodbye as he heads the Econoliner back towards the state line.

Within minutes my residual fear that the Southwest Chief might have done a downhill spring and I’ve missed it subsides as, five minutes after it’s due to depart, a van pulls up with a screech of breaks and a bloke the size of a
not-very-small
grizzly bear in wraparound sunshades jumps out and rolls – he is that sort of shape – up to the track.

‘Not here then yet,’ he says. When I mutter a few words of well-meant reciprocal doubt-cum-optimism, he decides I need a few instant stranger-
in-a-station
bonding lessons. I though I was just waiting for a train, but no, I realise with a weary inward sigh: it’s time to make friends again.

‘So you’re from England, heh? What’s that country like? Compared to this country round here?’

It’s sort of hard to know where to start. That’s the trouble with the questions some Americans ask: they can be disconcertingly direct, and not as easy to answer as they expect.

‘Well, it’s smaller,’ I try. ‘And more crowded, and wetter.’

‘That so. Yeah, it’s pretty quiet round here these days. But this town used to be hoppin’,’ he says, his interest in faraway parts instantly assuaged. As if England were Wyoming. Although he might have found that easier to relate to. ‘They used to mine coal and stuff and then they stopped. Dunno why and it went real dead for 10 or 15 years, and then they found natural gas up the road and now they’re workin’ on that.’

Richard, as he tells me his name is, shaking hands with a paw that could probably tickle salmon out of mountain streams, is none too pleased with the way the economy is going. Or anything else: ‘What with the way they keep tellin’ us to save fuel and all. And then there’s the DUI
3
laws, they’re real strict on that. I could just spill beer on you and they’d pull you in.’

Before we can delve further into the rights and wrongs of the local law
officers
’ enforcement of Driving Under the Influence legislation – widely seen out here to be not only iniquitous but unfair – we’re joined by another apparent passenger. It looks like Raton rush hour is hitting its peak.

‘Train not in yet,’ the new arrival says though it’s by no means clear if it’s a question or a statement. He’s a man of that indeterminate age you seem to
come across out west, on the blurred upper edge of middle age. He says, just a mite improbably, his name’s Paulie.

‘Glad I got here on time. Boss got on that there train. But forgot his
computer
. He called me on his cellphone so I came on up here ahead. He’s goin’ back to California. He has a trailer park out here, in Trinidad. I kinda look after it for him.’

‘That so?’ says Richard, with the kind of genuine-sounding interest I couldn’t even hope to emulate. Within minutes these guys, who had never met before and might never meet again, have exchanged details of who they work for, how long they’ve been there, where they come from, what they’ve been doing today, and just about anything else they can think of.

‘My granddaddy used to bootleg hooch over them there mountains,’ says Paulie, apropos of nothing I can identify. ‘There was a fella in the store in
Trinidad
a while back buyin’ up a whole mess a’ rye and sugar at the same time. And I’m tellin’ the storeman after he’s gone, he oughta watch because there’s no way he’s buyin’ that to feed chickens. And the storeman says, “That so? You intendin’ to tell someone?” An’ I say, “Hell, no, I mean he’s makin’ moonshine an’ all, he at least oughta buy the stuff separately.” An’ the storeman says, “Yeah, well he’s my cousin.” And we had a laugh about that.

‘When it came round to Christmas he gave me a bottle, but I was careful because it’s moonshine and moonshine can hurt ya, real bad. But I know this fella he got a lab and he checked it out and said, man that’s good stuff. And it sure was.’

‘That illegal nowadays?’ says Richard.

‘What’s that?’

‘Brewin’ up hooch. Whaddaya call it, spirits?’

‘Man, it ain’t ever been legal. No, sir.’

‘That so? There’s way too many regulations in this country nowadays. This so-called land of the free.’

Paulie thought that was true too, and started telling a story about a time he was ‘torn a strip off’ for getting into an argument with one of his boss’s trailer tenants: ‘This here guy, he done pay no rent and he has the nerve to say I’m discriminatin’. Hell, I ain’t never discriminated. Most o’ the folk I know round here have some Spanish blood.’

‘Me too,’ says Richard. ‘I don’t discriminate ’gainst no one less they
discriminate
’gainst me. Me, I got Spanish blood.’

Paulie, not to be outdone here, says: ‘Well, my kids is half Mexican. I done speak no English till I was ’bout five, just Spanish.’

Richard clearly sees this as a challenge: ‘Lot o’ folks round here part Injun too. Me too, I’m part Injun. Don’t see no reason to deny my heritage.’

All of a sudden I have the surreal impression I’ve drifted into a politically correct American West version of the Monty Python Yorkshiremen sketch, that any minute one of them’s going to claim he was brought up ‘in teepee with nowt to eat but buffalo droppings and refried beans’, and the other’ll say, ‘Luxury!’

In fact, we’re pretty damn close when Richard – whom I’m already
reclassifying
as Ricardo – says: ‘Back in the day all we had to live on was beans and potatoes.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with beans and potatoes.’

‘Hell no, you can live on that okay.’

‘In fact I’d prefer it!’

And then, mercifully, its long low horn-blast drowning any further
conversation
, the train arrives (I travelled with my laptop and got it out as soon as I got on the train!!!).