Counting cars

Albuquerque, straddling the Rio Grande, sits in a pass on the western side of the Sandis Mountains. As we passed through there yesterday and with the city shrinking in the rear view mirror, a landscape emerged in front of us that took my breath -- the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and, way off to the south, trains. Long trains, purposeful and solitary. Trains moving in both directions -- east and west. (The intersection with the north/south rail route occurs south of Albuquerque at Belen.) Oh, wow.

Over the course of the 70 miles between Albuquerque and Grants, our stop for the night, those trains became much less distant. To my delight, I-40 crossed the tracks at some point and in Grants itself the rails ran between I-40 and the San Mateo Mountains which hover over the town. Also to my delight, our room was on the backside of the building which afforded us (namely me) a view both of the mesa during the late afternoon and early evening and of the trains -- which were far enough away that they couldn't be heard, actually, but their rumble could be felt distinctly.

I don't know when trains got to be such a big deal. It's been a long time, though. Most recently one of the perks of sitting with the gallery in Ridge Spring during the time I was a member of the art association was the frequency of the freight trains as they passed through town just across Highway 23. If there were no visitors when I heard horn in the distance, I'd step out on the porch of the old school building and wait ... and, yes, count the cars. It didn't dawn on me then, but it did last night -- when the train I counted (it was tough, but I limited myself to counting only that one) had six engines, three on either end, and 138 cars, that it's a pretty quirky, even obsessive -- thing to do.

Although very difficult to see, there are two trains meeting in this photograph, taken through the window of our hotel room. Both sets of engines are to the right of the utility pole.

In fact, Adrian Monk's face flashed through my mind like a pang, when, mindlessly, I started counting a second train travelling in the opposite direction, as though knowing the number of cars were a necessity. "My stars, am I starting to degenerate into a parking meter/light pole touching, sidewalk crack avoiding, closet rearranging, towel stack straightening, obsessing nut?" I wondered.

Starting?

*Don't know about Adrian Monk? Click here for a pretty impressive list of habits, obsessions and phobias.

Long shadows

We left Weatherford OK this morning before the sun had risen over the eastern horizon. Within 20 minutes or so our car was casting a very long shadow on the pavement precisely in the direction we were travelling. While that felt a little strange -- to be following that shadow so exactly, I was surprised by how sad I felt when I-40 changed direction and our shadow moved to run along beside the road, casting a moving shadow over the fields on our right, our two-wheeled silhouette flashing along, popping up occasionally at fences and narrow strips of trees growing in low spots, then going back flat. It seemed to me as though we were touching those fields in some way, leaving a mark -- which, of course, we were not.

Again today the terrain changed with great speed -- Oklahoma, across the plains of the Texas panhandle, well into New Mexico -- Grants, to be precise. There were times that I would have sworn we could see the curvature of the earth when we looked from horizon to horizon. Then, could come stretches with trees lining the road, other stretches with ridges on either side, those ridges being probably a hundred miles away. At one point we travelled in a straight line for 60 miles, each time we crested a rise seeing the road on the rises before and behind us.

Normally, when I'm not driving I tend to fall sleep. (But, then most of the long distances we drive are on I-95, and it's best to sleep through as much of that as possible.) Again today, though, I didn't sleep at all, watching instead, hoping that I'll remember, knowing, though, that everything my eyes were taking in would likely become a long blur before nightfall, if not before. Truth is, the land -- its mysteries and it surprises -- is stunning, beautiful, forbidding, welcoming, vast. Every passing mile opens up something new, reveals wonders.

I realize it has secrets to share, the land. There are stories that could be told -- human and geographical and geological. As we travel along, I cannot help but wish I understood more about how the terrain has evolved over the eons, and wonder how people have survived in the barren, beautiful, lonely landscape. What were their struggles? Did the joys come anywhere near offsetting those struggles? Perhaps my noticing the 75-mile an hour shadow our car casts constitutes something of a nod of acknowledgement to the land and to those people, most of them nameless and forgotten.

Now, as I write about the day and about shadows, perhaps I am writing not so much about shadows, literal and figurative, as I am about how fleeting life is, how limited the actual marks are that we do leave.

Day Three
Three States: Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico
548 miles