Portland - Albuquerque

(this will be the first of a few entries catching us up to the present)

After a week of sweet send-off from Portland´s dear friends and coworkers-- para bailar la bamba!-- the trip started on Saturday, January 9, 2010. Marking my momentous departure across continents and time zones, I caught the Amtrak from Portland to Eugene. There, I did some justifiable REI shopping and got in a few square meals. My folks kindly fixed me up with some friends who manage a refugee camp in Rwanda. Along with a Lonely Planet guidebook, this is one of very few strings pulling me towards my final destination.

On Monday, January 11, I boarded the train from Eugene to Albuquerque, which is no Orient Express. It is, however, the Coast Starlight, the San Joaquin Express and the Southwest Chief. I spent the first night on the train listening to metal and trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. I thought, Ha! I have no job, no house, no car. It is also true that I had only one of those things to begin with. Any three things, any three things. This jumbled logic rolled along the tracks south to California.

The next day I woke up in Steinbeck country, read the paper and had coffee. An Amtrak ticket agent acted like he did me a huge favor and adjusted my itinerary to get me to LA with some spare hours. I used these to eat some good tacos and take a long urban hike around Dodger stadium in Elysian Park. LA is, um, strange. And it´s always unnerving to spend leisure hours in a park named for the place where poets and philosophers went to die.

Boarding the train to leave for New Mexico, I was seated next to an Albuquerquean, which was exciting. Except that this particular Albuquerquian, Angel, was 7 shades of high. He slurred his way through an explanation of his plans for a geographic cure, and then directed a series of auditory hallucinations toward a muse named Mike. "See, Mike, I said I´d leave this city before you." This might have been poetic from a distance, but No no no no no! I just quit that job and I don´t have to deal with this shit anymore. As authentic an experience as Angel offered, a million times No! I switched seats, made a reservation in the dining car, read Zanzibar Chest and went to dinner.

Eating on the Orient Express, from the descriptions I´ve read in Graham Greene and Paul Theroux, is somewhere on the spectrum between elegant and exotic, charming either way. Nothing I had read prepared me for how dull this meal was. I still can´t tell you if it was served on plastic or glass, or perhaps Amtrak, with its government subsidy, has commissioned its own material for dinnerware, Glasstic. Who knows.

I sat with a couple from Riverside. The couple, claiming to be a victim of the economy, celebrated its anniversary by taking a sleeper car from LA to Albuquerque, spending the day in Burque and catching the return train the same night. I admire this kind of vacation, obviously- much more about journey than destination. I shared some details about my own trip, which I find myself reluctant to do because people either look at me like I´m crazy or it takes too long to answer the follow up questions provoked by the suggestion that Bakersfield is somehow en route to Paris. I think I said I was going as far as Texas. The gentleman, encouraged by my personal revelation that I, too, enjoy trains, and was indeed, going somewhere, decided to disclose that he is a very dedicated fan of renaissance fairs. At these fairs, he explained, there is often an attraction at which any attendee may go up on a stage and be publicly flogged. Receiving a public flogging is his favorite thing to do at the fair. As I understood him, "flogging" must be renaissance-speak for "spanking." Within ten minutes of meeting this stranger from Riverside, over dinner, he shared not only that he likes to be spanked, but that he likes it especially when strangers watch.

Being a stranger myself, I finished dinner and retired to my coach seat. The next morning I awoke to sunrise over the desert, a beautiful, sparse landscape that led us into Albuquerque. The purpose of my visit to that city, besides, um, making progress towards Africa, was to check out the University of New Mexico´s law school. It is one of a small number of schools that I applied to, mostly on the strength of its particular curriculum and its legal clinic. I didn´t have time to set up a formal visit, so basically I spent two days lurking around the school and walking a figure 8 through Albuquerque. It´s fun to be a tourist in a US city- visiting places that I would have ignored in Portland. I took a run that led me to San Mateo Street, Albuquerque´s equivalent of 82nd Ave. There, I spent 20 minutes having espresso and biscotti with a plump Italian woman who runs a bakery. She very likely thought I was from another country and that in my geographical confusion, I happened to stagger, sweaty, into her bakery. This is essentially what happened.

The other highlight from the two days spent in that city was my visit to a used book store. Because we have one in the family, used bookstores for me are familiar sources of orientation, knowledge and culture. Maze-like and stacked with books from floor to ceiling, this store´s shelving did not permit that any two people in the bookstore would be able to see each other at a single point in time. This explains how the owner of the bookstore closed shop, locked the door and left while I browsed fiction. Tee hee, I thought, Albuquerquians are spacy. Thus a broad generalization was formed. The bookman returned within 15 minutes and we laughed over the incident. I bought a copy of Kerouac´s Lonesome Traveller for $2 and he gave me directions to Old Town. Which were totally wrong. Generalization confirmed. This is how I know so much about Albuquerque from only two days.

That city has its charm. The campus is beautiful. The climate, sunny and dry, seems ideal after Portland. The Salvation Army has a good selection of cassette tapes and people put hot peppers on their sandwiches. I could get into that. I spotted many small, private law practices around town, mostly dealing with DUIs as far as I could tell. There´s also a handsome federal courthouse. The city is not friendly to cyclists- marked bike routes do not have bike lanes, so its hard to tell how they are different than any other streets. Nor was it easy to navigate as a pedestrian, chopped up by freeways. Being able to ride or walk is important to me, as evidenced by the fact that I used a spare hour to walk to Albuquerque´s airport rather than take a bus or taxi. I´m probably the first person in the history of that city to attempt this, and it required some exciting sprints through traffic. I thought, man Albuquerque is so lame, you can´t walk right up to its airport. You know, because I always loved to stroll around PDX.

So that brings me to the Airport, a flight to Austin, and the end of this entry. I can almost guarantee that I will not write with this much detail about anywhere else. Until soon =)