The train into New Orleans slows way down a few miles out of the city. It clanks along languidly, always many hours late. The “arrival time” on the schedule is merely a quaint formality. The greenery is lush and dense as you roll through the Cypress swamps. The train stops mysteriously now and again, sits for a long, long time, hissing and sighing, then starts up again just as mysteriously. The best place to be on the New Orleans approach is downstairs, where the car steward has opened the top half of the door. He’ll usually bend the rules, especially if you’ve already made friends with him, which you’ve had plenty of time to do, and let you lean out a little.
We stop for a while next to a drainage ditch near the tracks. A dead tire and a grocery cart repose in black water, the oily surface shimmering with peacock-feather iridescence. And on long slender stalks, growing right up out of this poisonous-looking pool, the most beautiful delicate waxy white science-fiction flowers you ever saw.
This is Friday. We left Los Angeles on Wednesday morning. The thing about the train is that it takes you through the ass-end of every city. You see the unlovely backs of factories and chemical plants, you see feedlots, refineries, vast elephant graveyards of dead cars, trucks and buses, mountains of scrap metal, interesting slums. There’s a fine tradition, as old as the railroads themselves, probably, of dumping the worst, ugliest trash down the embankment near the tracks. You see plenty of garbage bags of regular household trash, but what’s impressive is the big stuff that’s harder to get rid of, civilizational detritus like mattresses, tires, televisions, sofas, carpets, water heaters, washing machines, refrigerators, and cars. Sometimes these dumpsites are in what would otherwise be pleasant leafy glades, and seem to be making a definite statement. I knew a man, an environmentalist, who had a theory about why humans trash nature. He said his idea was regarded as heresy among fellow environmentalists and usually caused them to recoil in shock when they heard it: humans trash nature, he said, because they know that nature is ultimately going to trash them. I think he was on to something.
On the way out of L.A., the train passed behind some office buildings. We on the train could see what someone working in one of the buildings couldn’t—that in a series of open garage-sized spaces under the building, people have set up housekeeping. Some of the spaces are shipshape, homey and cozy-looking. One guy reclined on a Barcalounger and watched television. He’d carpeted the dirt floor with salvaged hunks of rug, and he even had some pictures on the walls. You could see the ingenious system he’d set up to pirate some electricity. He’d hung shower curtains across the front of his little home, but they were pulled aside. He was not at all concerned about the faces at the train windows peering in at him as we rolled on by. Further along, where the urban sprawl petered out and gave way to eucalyptus groves, scrubby palms and cacti, we saw dozens of encampments, men sleeping on mattresses on the dry reddish ground. The ones whose faces we could see had the fried, depleted, windburned look of Everest summiters. Even asleep, they looked tired, so tired. It wasn’t at all hard for me to imagine the utter opulence of an old mattress of one’s own, a prize, found and dragged out here to the edge of the city among the trees, where you could be left alone and just sleep.
It’s eight hundred miles from L.A. across Arizona and New Mexico to El Paso near the Texas-New Mexico border. Then there’s eight hundred miles of Texas before you get to Louisiana. El Paso and Juarez are the flip side of each other. From a distance, approaching from the west, you see gleaming glass towers like a giant Wurlitzer on your left, and disappearing to infinity on your right, parched dirt and low ramshackle pink, blue, green and yellow buildings and houses. There’s nothing gradual about the transition. The Rio Grande is the line of demarcation cutting right through the center. And there’s nothing grand about the Rio Grande here. The train comes in on high ground, so you look down at the river. It’s shallow, with concrete banks, in some places just pools of standing water, some stretches of it deserted, looking as if you could walk across it in about thirty seconds. Plastic bags are everywhere, snagged in the barbed wire, in the brush, high up in the trees, in the water, blowing around like tumbleweeds.
