This image made chugging through the mountains heading North for Chicago. Bet it is snow covered now. Just so you know I shoot subjects other than people. There is a poem “From the Window of a Train” as yet unfinished I will post it later, perhaps around the new year as it is somewhat retrospective. ho ho ho pjc
Back on Amtrak Heading South in California
A moment in the shade for the workers as ghosts from the past race round my mind.
In Albuquerque a cause to fight for bike paths less polution.
Well I’m back on the train and back to the 19th of August despite starting the last post with it being the 20th. The nineteenth was perhaps the longest day of the trip. Five fifty five am didn’t happen often on this trip. In Sacramento I met Webster a PHD student on his way to Univ. of New Mexico we sleep walked to are next leg and met again in LA. Over the course of the day I watched and time traveled through the Ca. farms. My mind drifted back to the 60s/70s and Ceasar Chavez organizing United Farm Workers Union, yes “the times they are a changing.” But rambling through those fields my mind drifted to those troubled decades, and how wonderful it was to have a cause, hell many causes. From Prague to The Sorbonne, to Columbia and Berkeley to the fields where the migrant farm workers toiled in the sun for sub [prime] standard wages and living conditions a solidarity sprouted and grew wild like a weed. One voice singing as a chorus, in Bethel NY Richie Havens wailed “Freedom Freedom” and 500,000 people sang along. [including me] In my long life so much has changed so fast, but in the life of the planet it has all been a blink of the eye. Let the planet survive “To every thing, turn, turn, turn,There is a season, turn, turn, turn, And a time to every purpose under heaven” [Book of Ecclesiastes/Pete Seeger] as sung by The Byrds and everyone listening, sing along the words are easy “Freedom Freedom” Then it was the Dawn of Aquarius. What is dawning today?
Make it Peace and Equality. enjoy pjc
Amtrak back to Sacramento and on to LA
Returning to 1998 in Sacramento it was the first long stop on the return trip and I had hoped for a sunny morning two hour stroll. But it was pouring rain, I still found the highlight beaming in Benjamin’s gentle eyes. We spoke for a couple hours of life, his living on the streets. He was a true ambassador for the city telling me about the arts and progress Sacramento was making, and he was pleased with how much he had improved his own life in the previous couple years. Not a bitter word was spoken much can be learned from his positive attitude. I did and often revisit this print when I need a lift. He asked for nothing, but insisted on holding the energy bars in the photo as a way of thanking me.
Just before dawn, just before coffee bleary travelers at Sacramento Station
A Tall Ship Petty Officer
and a young women with an old Canon film camera and a pen.
August 19th 5:55am we are awakened by the conductor as we arrive in Sacramento. Just an early am blur dragging baggage real and inner we wander into the station lost in the world of anachronisms of tickets and signs. “Where’s coffee?” There isn’t a warm and welcoming presence that Benjamin provided a decade ago but after a cup of Joe or two people begin to chat and wait for connections mine is a bus here for a short ride to another train. As I write a women asks about my journal, the community [that is a little less formed on the southern route due to many different routes and changes from train to bus] begins to emerge again. She had taken this train fifty years earlier. She says this will be her last trip. I say me too, a decade later the body isn’t as comfortable bouncing along the rails. Daylight is still magic but the nights are too long. Twenty one hours to Rees in Flagstaff, dawn arrives and the magic returns. I am the rectangle! A mirror wandering around reflecting the soul of a nation. The meeting of Rees in Flagstaff will be creative moment one that has been planned, postponed and rescheduled at a few different locations for 5 years will happen in less than a day. Flagstaff will be that moment.
The journey blossoms anew fresh air and warm sun, the magic returns in a wave of exposures. A Tall Ship Petty Officer in a Mod hat at first taken back by my interest in shooting her wakes to the magic and offers a smile. What a grand life it must be on the sea, living in a different century. On the platform a young women from a family of artists strikes up a conversation about my old Nikon. She still uses film and a pen to write her poetry. We ride the bus together and I talk her ear off sharing some of my writing reading some of hers, listening to her stories of moving to California from Canada. On to another bus and four hours in LA. enjoy pjc
Photographic Art. Dylan’s Chicago and From the Window of a Train New Mexico