Wayfarer She Goes
Nathan posted this in In Travel
The night prior, dear friends, was as hard as any for coach passengers aboard train number 4, also known as the Southwest Chief. In the first coach car trailing the observation lounge, two large and loud Latino women were boisterous and unruly, the threat of random hilarious annoying children speak loomed long between but full on throughout the night, backed by the twisting turmoil of trying to fit 5’8″ of human being into two foot and a half wide, broken seats. Not a single stop from Los Angeles through Flagstaff yielded enough time for the conductor ladies — one thin and sprite, the other thick as molasses — to allow us to leave the train even long enough for just that first drag of midnight nicotine.
Olivia gave at it with her greatest of valour, carving a niche for herself by somehow straddling two swiveling lounge chairs and an end table, doused in light some slow motion strobe effect there, laying under the massive glass windows of the observation lounge, streetlights beaconing in to her every eye twitch or so.
Slowly and ever so subtly it came over the train, then, a glow so beautiful to the restless, trained and weary that you might not even see it if you weren’t so desperately begging for it all through the hours so indeterminably late and early, as we were. Purple, simple sunrise. I pulled back the window blinds as Olivia appeared, head brought to a sleepy rest on my rightmost shoulder. We watched the sun go from just hinting at itself over the Earth’s long curve to it cresting omelet egg-like to its current position of high in the 7:40 am sky, where — after a heartily well earned and yearned for breakfast — Olivia has fallen to sleep atop my hoodie, arms crossed to hold the rising morning heat in her belly, hat pulled down to nighten the early day.
It’ll be four good, good days in Flagstaff, well deserved after four long, solid days of trainery.
