Until today, I’ve mostly just been winging it on this trip… I hadn’t made plans to occupy my time (or I had and the plan fell through as at Paso Robles) or spent much time beforehand locating points of interest. On the other hand, the national park here, or rather off the coast of here, is the only reason I’m here in Ventura to begin with besides the opportunity to ride as many different named lines as possible, and this leg allowed me the opportunity to travel on the Coast Starlight.

I took a taxi this morning from my hotel to the Ventura harbor offices of Island Packers, with whom I’d arranged passage to Santa Cruz Island. Santa Cruz is only one — albeit the largest — of five islands that make up the whole park, but more than one in a day would be impossible, and this was the charter that made most sense for my schedule.

Arriving an hour before our scheduled departure, I figured only I and a few other travel lunatics would be present, but in fact there were some dozens of Boy Scouts in uniform — two troops — milling about the dockside, kicking, pushing, teasing and all the other sorts of things boys of that age do when given a moment or two of idleness. I can’t deny I felt pang of nostalgia for my bygone days of Scouting and all the places we spent a night or two (or so) in tents, and sometimes not in tents at all. As far as that goes, days like this — weather free, if you catch my meaning and of moderate temperature — are not very prominent in my memory. Mostly I recall digging out or tamping down a place for a tent in the snow, building fires as large and wastefully as we could get away with, and having snowball fights we’d later regret as the night threatened to freeze our wet clothes solid.

I would have loved to have spent some time on the island camping myself, but for reasons of time and the expense of outfitting myself with much of the equipment I’d need (a larger pack, a new tent, camp stove…), not to mention the need to carry around all that gear for my entire 30 days for only a couple days worth of camping, I just couldn’t justify it.

The boat, a large craft with two decks and two hulls (or one hull with two immersed segments separated by 10 feet or so… I haven’t the ship-lore to identify the design more accurately) made it’s way through a maze of private and commercial craft in the harbor, cleared the piled breakwater, and then really started cruising, fast enough that I heeded the warning about lost hats, and stuffed mine into my pack. Fast enough too that quite a few passengers could be seen adding additional layers in the chilly, humid morning air.

We began passing a series of oil platforms that are every bit the eyesore you expect them to be, but perhaps a necessary evil, and as the ships captain pointed out (over the loudspeakers, he added a good deal of fun commentary), the pipelines and submerged support structure end up making a pretty good artificial reef for the local sea life, so they’re not all bad. It was while passing these that we began seeing the ocean change character. On the surface, one could swear it was raining, but for the cloudless sky and the fact that no rain was falling on the boat. This turned out to be small fish, millions of them, breaking the surface just long enough to create a ripple, but not be seen (or not by me anyhow). Apparently the meeting of cold currents from the north and warm currents from the south in this place causes an upwelling of nutrients from the sea floor, causing particular richness in the sea life.

The evidence of this was presented gloriously a few minutes later when we happened across one of the most fabulous sights I’ve ever witnessed. Dolphins — thousands of them — filled the ocean around us, cresting, leaping, twirling underwater and surfing both the bow and stern wakes of the ship. Seeing a show at an aquarium or park is something everyone should experience, certainly, but it’s just nothing in comparison to a whole ocean full of wild dolphins at work and play.

We took a serpentine route amongst the pod, looping around in order to maximize our ability to experience the sight, and from the way the animals would swim close and play in the wakes, I guess it was to their benefit too.

After that, I felt like I’d already more than gotten my money’s worth without having even set foot on the island, but I passed a lovely day there nonetheless, hiking overland through dry grasses and occasional little groves of cedar, enjoyed lunch on a promontory three or four hundred feet above a pretty little little cove, the sheer walls of which proclaimed their geology in a riot of whites and reds and echoed back the sound of the crashing waves far below.

In the afternoon, back at the anchorage and well enough exhausted from 7 miles of hiking, I laid down on a little patch of sandy grass, rolled up a spare sweatshirt for a pillow, and dozed to the sound of the incoming tide, rushing through the rocks that dominated the “beach” there.

We set off on return to the mainland around four with a much reduced manifest, having left behind the 70 or so campers, around four, which is very nearly evening these days. In a stroke of nearly unprecedented luck (we’re told by the crew), we find the dolphins almost exactly where we left them this morning, but beginning to make their way west, leaping across the setting sun, occasionally flopping onto their backs, every bit as energetic as they’d been in the morning.

It’s become quite cool in the night, and for the first time on this trip I need to put on my jacket and gloves as we cruise back to the distant lights over a sea of cotton candy pinks and purples.

I wandered a bit more after writing this afternoon’s rambling missive and wound up (by design, certainly, though on a sort of random path) at Corrales restaurant. Last night, on a search for cheap eats in the vicinity of my hotel, and not wanting to venture too far in the unfamiliar territory at night, I walked past it and was struck by a craving for Mexican food, but alas they were (just) closed. I managed to acquire a very serviceable hamburger at a nearby diner, but that did nothing to allay my desire for Mexican.

Corrales operates an outdoor window which was, even at 2:30 in the afternoon, quite well attended. My perusal of the menu led me to believe that burritos were their specialty, so I ordered a pork burrito in a “colorado” sauce and a Dr. Pepper (which Californians seem to approve of as much as I do, thankfully). I waited about 20 minutes, but was well rewarded with some of the best authentic style mexican food I’ve had. This isn’t Chipotle, and in all honesty doesn’t even really compete with it… they engender completely different cravings and fill distinct gastronomical niches to me. At any rate, recommended without reservation.

In the evening I strolled back out to the beach and wrote in my journal. The evening tide looked to be a good deal stronger than the morning, and the crests two or three times higher, no doubt to the delight of the evening surf crew, one of whom would occasionally be caught in silhouette against the peaks of the Channel Islands off in the distance. All told, a very satisfying, if largely uneventful day… there’s something about sitting on the the beach, listening to the waves in the last hours of daylight that is quite eminently pleasant… something I could easily make a habit of were I to reside in such a place.

It’s to be expected, I suppose, but it sure doesn’t feel like November 21st here in Southern California. The sun is bright in a partially hazy sky… it seems like there are always some light, white clouds over the nearby ocean. It’s 73 degrees and when I walked on the beach this morning the surfers were doing their best to ride waves that appeared to me only barely sufficient to keep them standing. It occurs to me that if I’d been on my game, I might have been able to take a surfing lesson today, on this tractable ocean.

After sitting on the beach and enjoying the sound and the breeze for a while, I walked through the town, stopping here and there in shops that seemed interesting, but couldn’t really focus on buying anything. There’s nothing I want for myself regardless, but with Christmas approaching, I’ve been at least partially concentrating on finding gifts that might appeal to friends and family.

What’s becoming more and more clear, I’m afraid, is that I don’t have a damn clue what my friends and family might want or like. Gift giving has always been kind of a challenge for me, but it’s only gotten more so recently. Why should that be?

I mean, in part, it’s just lack of proximity… less time to absorb what’s been catching their attention, less conversations that might imply a desire.

The other problem is that, honestly, most of the people I know don’t have to really restrain themselves, so when there’s something they want, they buy it. The number of things in that elusive category of “would like, but wouldn’t buy for themselves” is dwindling rapidly. Books are nice, but you can’t give only books — and even then, finding books that are really well suited to someone isn’t a trivial enterprise to begin with.

The last really good gift I gave (at least by my measure), I mostly made by hand, and it took me 100 or so hours. I genuinely don’t begrudge the expense of gift giving, at least when I feel like the gift is good. I just don’t like to think that I’ve bought something that will only add to the growing pile of stuff that we all keep building, and which isn’t really all that useful or interesting to the recipient.

I really can’t think of a single thing I want right now, or really even anything that I need, now that I’ve upgraded my computer (and that essentially for practical reasons). I sold, gave, or threw away a ton of stuff when I left atlanta, and honestly there’s more stuff that I kept but could do without. I moved about 3500 pounds worth of stuff from Atlanta to DC. Almost two tons of things. I don’t have kids, or family living with me, and that doesn’t include a washer, dryer, bed or dresser. There’s a part of me that finds that just totally insane.

I guess I’ll just have to keep my eyes and mind open and when something seems right for someone, go ahead and pick it up, and hopefully at the end of it, I’ll have something for everyone I care about.

Portland has turned out to be a town I would like to have spent more time in. I walked the length and breadth of the downtown area a few times over in the day and a half I had available, and found quite a lot to like.

For one, there’s a very respectable amount of park land, including one long strip down the middle in a sort of echo of Central Park. In fact, Portland feels in many ways bigger than it is… not just in quantifiable metrics like the number and types of businesses, or the gridded street layout, but also in the character and feeling of the place. It’s a very pedestrian oriented town, with lots of people walking about, even until 10:30 pm (which, much as I regret to admit it, was as late as I could keep my eyes open last night). There is also a series of electric street cars that will shuttle you around the main thoroughfares. All in all I felt really comfortable and while covered, superficially, at least 90% of the downtown streets, I feel confident that there’s a lot of cool stuff going on that I didn’t (couldn’t) catch. Whether or not that stuff is all safely accessible via public transportation is another story, of course, but one I hope I’ll get to answer someday.

I had breakfast (bagel and cream cheese, of course) at a little café while listening to an old gentleman giving a physics lecture to another old gentleman in the back corner. Even in proximity to a college, it was a pretty unusual scene, as it didn’t seem formalized or “official” in any way, except that the lecturer had a large book open and a notebook and a pen in hand with which he would gesticulate as he explained the nature of light and gravity.

From there I poked around some of the little shops nearby, visited the art museum which held a decent collection of mostly American Indian inspired work that’s quite nice if that’s your scene, and then located a Safeway to replenish my stock of traveling food. Having deposited that back at the hotel, I enjoyed an afternoon coffee, walked through a more businessy / financial district and down to the waterfront. I was off in search of a stationers to replace my dwindling supply of postcards and note cards, which a map had indicated nearby, but walked past and around the spot many times without luck. I rested briefly on a bench overlooking the river and the three or four visible bridges, all of which were of the raising and lowering sort, and each with a distinct mechanism for doing so.

Today I was to have tea overlooking the beautiful Portland Chinese garden but ran out of time in the morning, and was somewhat too footsore to try and make it up there and back to the hotel in time to check out, and definitely didn’t want to haul my luggage around the garden. Instead I found a nice little internet café and coffee house called Backspace and passed a couple of hours there, reading and catching up on some administriva.

Now, of course, my train is about an hour and a half late, so in truth, I had a lot more time this morning than I thought, but, c’est la vie. I’ve been in worse places than this train station, which doesn’t have much going on, but is pretty enough, with the high ceilings and chandeliers and big brass lettering on the walls and entryways that mark it as an old building, unlike anything people are building from scratch these days.

Next stop, Paso Robles, CA, after another couple days on the train, where I shall hope to find a hot spring to rejuvenate my increasingly travel weary body.

The best thing about my first day in Portland was the shower.

That’s not a backhanded way of saying Portland was underwhelming… I just really needed to take a shower. I kept myself pretty clean on the train… brought soap and a washcloth and plenty of clothes so I could change daily, but sleeping at all kinds of angles, on not always forgiving surfaces, takes a toll. I needed to soak as much to loosen up my joints and muscles as anything else, and I took full advantage of the fairly luxurious Hotel Lucia.

Note for future train trips (and all you fellow travelers) : have a place to sleep comfortably and shower at least every couple of days.

Suitably revived, I put on the one nice outfit I brought and went out to explore. Again, after four days of being relatively austere, eating things I packed, not splurging too much, I decided it was time to burn one of the semi-bling meals I budgeted.

I settled on an italian place called Pazzo and had a really surprising and delicious meal. The main course was hand made linguini in a beef short rib & sage ragu, which was very distinctive with very noticeable sage flavor from (my server told me) locally grown organic sage. The beef, well seared and braised in red wine before shredding, was tender and excellently flavorful throughout. My only complaint was (surprisingly for me) maybe too much butter had been used. The sauce was extremely rich, and though that didn’t stop me from sopping up every last bit of it, it would’ve been improved by lightening up a little.

Oh, and there was a freebie taster item I really want to try for myself… it was kind of a little ball of deep fried risotto with porcini mushrooms. It was tasty, but I couldn’t identify the porcini, likely because the frying was a little heavy handed… I felt like the the flavor of the rice was somewhat obscured as well. Conceptually, however, it’s intriguing and definitely want to see what I can do along the same lines.

After dinner, I enjoyed a cappuccino at Portland Coffee and got to work. a and I had a good, productive conversation and got some planning done. Once I get to Dallas, I think we’ll have a really solid foundation to get started implementing a bit.

I saw my first wild Bald Eagle this morning, landing gracefully on a sort of mudflat crowding in on the fringes of a broad series of lakes and marshy areas through which we’ve been traveling. Small mountains hem it all in, blankets of mist clinging to the low slopes and spreading over the inlets and sheltered bays.

On the train, it seems never to be too early for beer, as a couple of guys walk by at 8:30 in the morning with Sam Adams’ in their hands. Anything to pass the time, I guess.

I saw my first wild Bald Eagle this morning, landing gracefully on a sort of mudflat crowding in on the fringes of a broad series of lakes and marshy areas through which we’ve been traveling. Small mountains hem it all in, blankets of mist clinging to the low slopes and spreading over the inlets and sheltered bays.

On the train, it seems never to be too early for beer, as a couple of guys walk by at 8:30 in the morning with Sam Adams’ in their hands. Anything to pass the time, I guess.

The impetus behind taking this trip has, from the start, been a bit unclear even to me. I could think up some reasons, but ultimately it all comes down to the fact that I was thinking about trains, saw a period of time when I wouldn’t be attached to a day job or a physical place and could at least kind of justify it to myself.

It occurred to me that I might have inadvertently dressed this up in the guise of a sort of voyage of self-discovery or some such. I think really that the relevant self discovery happened before I ever left. So really, maybe it’s a matter of drawing a line of demarcation between how I have been and how I wish to be in the future. I don’t know, maybe I figure that doing one thing I’ve never done before will give me the confidence, or at least the psychological support, to do all the other things I’ve never done before, but hope to build a lifestyle around.

Anyway, as I muse here, the landscape has changed yet again. The open spaces are sort of dry looking and covered with scrubby bushes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Nevada yesterday except for the fact that occasionally a large and irregular stand of moderately tall evergreens will appear. The mountains here are green too, if misty, and occasionally one peak will be visible above the rest, rising high enough to take on a mantle of snow and dominate the surroundings.

We coasted down out of the forested mountains and into the northern bay area just as the sun was setting. In Sacramento, most of the people who’d been sharing the train with me since Chicago departed, and I didn’t even get a chance to say farewell, as I’d chosen that moment to shave and wash downstairs. After Sacramento we passed through the largely industrial regions along the water, and into the station, around which were a whole series of new and modern looking condos, apartments and shopping.

Walking from the train, I struck up on conversation with a guy, I guess about my age, named Aaron, from the Bronx. He’s the sort of earnest and passionate person I was expecting to meet out here, and we talked for about an hour while he waited for his ride to show up. A while back he’d had a similar, if more philanthropic, impulse as launched me on this trip, and had quit his job at Pfizer and searched for something more meaningful and genuine. He’d spent the past 6 months on a ranch in Colorado, working on an irrigation project of some sort, and was returning to the world, so to speak. We exchanged addresses and I hope to keep up some correspondence… certainly he’s the coolest person I’ve met so far.

This is a neat looking little town, though all neat looking little towns make me think they’re carefully constructed but inauthentic neat looking little towns. Still, we passed a good looking ski area a few minutes ago, so perhaps this is a place I might try to come back to someday…

Lake Tahoe is away somewhere to the south of us and I’ve always wanted to make a skiers tour of northern California, so I guess I may make it back to this neat little town someday, be it authentic or otherwise.

The countryside here is if anything even more beautiful than that which preceded the Rockies, with more trees, higher apparent elevations and longer vistas. We have been passing through a series of snow sheds — artificial tunnels made out of concrete in places where the snowfall would otherwise threaten the track — around the peaks that look down on Donner Lake, named for the now infamous Donner Party, some of which chose this area to try and live out the winter before continuing on to lowland California.

I’m having a late breakfast in the lounge car after spending an hour or so chatting with my seat neighbor Marco. He told me he’s been working for the past 7 months at a gold mine in Elko, NV and heading back to see his wife and (by my count) 6 kids, as he does every two weeks. He’s a treasure trove of knowledge about mining, paving, welding, landscaping, concrete and surely a lot more, but that’s already a lot for a single hour. He’s a driver of those gigantic loaders, the ones that look like dump trucks scaled up to preposterous size… whose independently driven wheels are each taller than a normal dump truck, and can shuffle around 100 tons of ore (or other, smaller trucks, as Marco learned to his surprise, and related in turn to me). He tells me he loves life too much to venture into the underground shafts, but will happily work any job that lets him see the sun and make enough money to support his family.

Meeting people is half the joy of the train I think (well, maybe a third of it… the creature comforts of legroom and the scenic lounge are worth an awful lot). I had dinner (a decent though overpriced affair, save for the company) with a couple from outside of Little Rock — whose daughter had gone to Vanderbilt as an undergrad in 1999, while I was still there, and who stayed for medical school — and a young woman originally from Alaska, who was on her way out to visit family in Omaha. A few seats behind mine I talked with a woman from Sacramento who recently lost her job and moved to Vermont on a promise of work, and while between jobs is taking her opportunity — much as myself — to sightsee and visit her family back in California.

I met a pastor’s wife from Golden, CO who was bringing a sizable group of teens and tweens to a youth conference on the other side of the mountains, and an elderly couple who told me they ride the train up from Denver and then back the next day, just for the view, every so often.

Most people on the trains have been nothing but friendly and the sort of casualness and openness of the environment make conversation happen organically. To purposefully and deliberately beat a dead horse, in every single way besides efficiency, the train is superior to air travel.

I hope I got a few good photos this morning of sunrise over the low hills in northern Nevada. Before long, the light revealed a pretty bleak desert landscape, miles of not much besides scrub brush and dirt between hills that not so very long ago drew so many people west during the gold rush. Some, Marco proves, continue to produce wealth for some and jobs for others, and some that had ceased being profitable long aog have apparently been reopened to take advantage of the surge in gold prices over the past couple of years. Still, it’s not a place I think I’d like to live.

There are little towns, or settlements anyway — some consisting of less than 5 structures and a single incongruous tree — along Interstate 80 (which we parallel most of the time), incontrovertible evidence of the variety of human experience and interest, that people would choose to live in such a place. Marco, who has spent most of his life in Nevada, found the depictions he saw of New York City on television shocking, the density and rapidity of life there, the avenues of midtown Manhattan filled with men and women in suits (the latter of which he laughingly told me was the sexiest thing on the nightly news), and the complete absence of children. I hadn’t thought of that before… a New York built from the images you can see on the news is an even stranger place than New York already is.

I’ve been typing now for long enough that we’ve passed out of Nevada and into California, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and soon to head over and through them. Suddenly there are trees again, mostly evergreens, and it makes me realize that rich or poor, I could never live in a place without trees. When I’m without them, I feel an anxiousness, a fear that should my world go completely bad, I might end up poor and in a place like that, with nothing to do, and little to hope for. In other words, I get depressed. Here, I just feel different, and wonder if it’s because it feels like home in at least some small way. I think, despite the fact that most modern families live in their own sort of diaspora, everyone takes the place they grew up along with them, and is comforted when they find themselves in similar surroundings.

Coming down out of the highlands of Colorado offered even more spectacular scenery than going up into the mountains earlier this morning. Where that was the green and white of ski country — a color scheme and starkness with which I’ve always been in love — we left the state still hugging close to the river that shares it’s name, through canyons and valleys of vibrant red rock in dozens of strata that even an armchair geologist can appreciate. In places the rocks look as if they’ve been excavated by industrious animals or insects, hundreds of little holes pocking the sheer surfaces, but on closer inspection they’re soft-edged and have the smooth curves that only flowing water can produce. Presumably whatever rain falls up above seeps through the differential densities of the sandstone and wears down the face as it escapes. Still it’s a surface that surprises, and would look perfectly at home on the set of a movie depicting some alien landscape.

As the sun falls lower behind the enclosing hills, it alternately casts long shadows and brightly illuminates the already ruddy cliffs, occasionally becoming visible as a burst of light over a low saddle or through a wind-etched hollow. When we finally leave the valley and depart the river, the sun is well below the horizon, and casts its goodbyes into a sunset that stretches in a grand arch from one side of the world to the other, which would be a god to rainbows, if rainbows had gods. The reds and flame oranges limn white and gray stratus clouds before fading into the blues and blacks of night behind us.

Soon enough it’s fully dark, and we’re in Utah. By the time the light returns, we’ll likely be all the way through the other side, having made the most of the flat and empty land by night.

Sensibly, the train follows the course of the Colorado River starting a few miles past Fraser. It’s become a pretty clear and sunny day, with views all the way to the next ridge on all sides. This is apparently horse country and each meander of the the river and tracks reveals another ranch nestled into the land inside the bend, with the river as a border around it, a few trees, and a group of horses trotting around their enclosure.

Here the rocks are clay red or gray, the trees little more than bushes, and the valleys a bit more expansive than they have been. It’s a softer, less extreme feeling area, though I expect that in the dead of winter the dirt roads are impassable and the power and phone lines unreliable. So, maybe not so very soft after all.

The Icebox of America, they call this place, which has the lowest average temperature of anywhere in the United States. It’s a short bus or taxi trip from here to Winter Park, where I’d be heading if I’d decided to try and do some skiing on this trip. It’s good that I didn’t… too much trouble for too little payoff, and soon enough I’ll be able to drive up to Bellayre or Windham or maybe even some of my old favorites in Vermont. This fact is one I happily haven’t adjusted to yet, meaning I get to experience a pleasant surprise every time I re-realize it. Skiing is one of those great pleasures I missed most living in the south, to such a degree that I largely tried to avoid thinking about it in order to minimize how often I had to feel disappointed. Crazy I guess, but one more psychosis that’s soon to be remedied.

Fraser looks like most ski towns I’ve seen, albeit a pretty big one.. Once a mining village where they pulled gold and other valuables out of the rocks, it still looks like a place with plenty of money, only now it’s made on the tops of the mountains rather than inside of them. I look forward to skiing here someday… there are ever so many places I’ve yet to try. My next major train trip will be a ski train, perhaps, and I’ll spend a few weeks poking along from slope to slope through these passes.