The train to Denver follows the course of the Colorado River, down through canyons too narrow for roads or even hiking trails. Snow was falling lightly as we left Glenwood Springs. The sky cleared as we rode east. Travelers filled the lounge car chairs, carrying on conversation, playing cards, watching the landscape for wildlife (eagles, deer, a few isolated moose). Broken crosses of abandoned telegraph poles lined the sides of the tracks.
I followed the route closely on my Colorado map, noting where another set of tracks split north to the coal mines of Steamboat, where we would enter the long, dark Moffat Tunnel under the Continental Divide, where we roll eastward down the Divide toward the night lights of the Front Range.
Charlotte sewed blocks for a new quilt as we rolled along. Mrs. Child wrote in The American Frugal Housewife (1832): "Little girls often have a great many bits of small cloth, and large remnants of time which they do not know what to do with. I think it better for them to make cradle-quilts for...their baby brothers than to be standing around, wishing for something to do." No idleness even on Amtrak when one can watch the mountains and work at the same time.
It is a long way from the sea. Last month, I went out to the Jersey shore for the funeral of my Aunt Edna, the last survivor of my father's four siblings. I had flown into Philadelphia airport and then headed east, as far as the road would take me, to the beach at Point Pleasant.
A cold, rain soaked wind was blowing across the hard, crusty sand. Waves crashed. And then I saw some surfers, black in their wet suits, moving out into the sea. They moved gracefully into their watery mountains, riding more deftly than our Colorado snow boarders, but with the same verve, the same joy in being challenged by gravity, physics, the forces of the earth. I watched from the beach for a good while, making touch with the edge of the continent. Then I got back into the car to go and join my cousins (and their children and their children's children)at the wake.
