California Zephyr Keeps On Rollin'; A Journey To The Past, A Train To The Future

By John W. Fountain

WE SET OUT FOR California with a cargo crate atop our brand new ’88 Buick Skylark that summer, only miles and mountains between us and Illinois and a journalism internship waiting. The year was 1988.

Our children at the time were 9, 7 and 5. We had already come so far from the Chicago West Side neighborhood known as K-Town, where I grew up and where I returned with my wife Robin – my high school sweetheart – and our kids not long after we married, though poverty and welfare permeated our daily existence like smoke from a blazing wildfire.

I wanted to escape, like I had always dreamed before life happened: A father by age 17; married at 19; a father of three by age 22, a welfare case, and a college dropout. I had sunk so low that I had forgotten that I ever had a dream. That I had once dreamed of becoming a rich lawyer someday.

Making ends meet consumed my life and daily thoughts as well as the depression and sense of hopelessness that engulfed me. Then one day, my grandmother – amidst my tears – said something to me I have never forgotten: “You can’t stop dreaming, or you start to die. Oh, no, baby darling… You can’t stop dreaming.”

Our road to Modesto, California, for a journalism internship at the Modesto Bee newspaper, had been paved by my decision years earlier after that fateful conversation with Grandmother to go back to school. First to Wilbur Wright, one of Chicago’s City Colleges then the leap of faith to pack up the family and leave the West Side to return to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I had completed my freshman year before dropping out.

I was 27, as we rolled west and filled more with determination than fear about traveling halfway across the country with a family in tow – a family that I had not told my editors about during the interview process, fearing they wouldn’t have offered me the job out of concerns that I was not your typical intern and was saddled with too much responsibility to do a good job.

I was fueled by the sense that I had somehow been granted another chance to extricate myself from a life that had consumed so many like me in my forgotten Chicago neighborhood. Pushed toward the light of possibility by the darkness from which I was running, even if it felt as we drove that I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

That I couldn’t fail because I had too much, too many to lose – even if I had been catapulted by my own ill decisions from my teen years to full-blown adulthood. I sometimes felt I would collapse under the pressure, wondered whether I would survive and yet understood that if I did I would certainly leave my children nothing behind because I could not even afford life insurance.

‘And after all these years, 38 to be exact, I still found something pulling me back. For years, I put off the trip, at least never made time for it.’

As the wheels rolled, I was covering ground that no one in my family before me had covered, seeking to build a professional career from the ground up, even with mentors few and far between, without a roadmap and most often filled with doubt about my future and, more importantly, the future of my children.

That summer proved to be fruitful for me as a young reporter. I ultimately told my editors that I had brought my family with me. We even attended a company outing or two. And beyond the swimming pool at the apartment complex where we lived that summer, we spent weekends visiting various sites in California: San Francisco, Monterey, Carmel By The Sea, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yosemite National Park, where I posed for a picture with my children as we sat on a big rock at a crystal-clear creek.

That is the photograph etched into my memory even after all these years. After divorce and life and the inevitable hurst, losses, struggles and regrets that impact every human soul. I had always said that someday I would return to California, maybe on a train and without any arguing or strain. Take the journey back to a special place, even if in a different time.

And after all these years, 38 to be exact, I still found something pulling me back. For years, I put off the trip, at least never made time for it.

THEN A FEW MONTHS ago, I was on the lakefront chilling when my sister called me with bad news: My friend Spencer Leak Jr., with whom I had spoken 10 days earlier, had died suddenly. News of his death shook me, deeply saddened me. But it also provoked me.

A few minutes later, I signed onto the Amtrak website and booked my trip. Honestly, I thought to myself, “Do you really want to spend two days on a train to California? Why not cancel and book a trip to Cancun instead?”

I reasoned, however, that sometimes taking the journey can be so much more rewarding than simply arriving at a destination. I took the journey on the California Zephyr, a restful winding journey, in Amtrak’s own words, through “one of the most beautiful train trips in all of North America. …through the heart of the Rockies, and further west through the snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains, coursing through the plains of Nebraska to Denver, across the Rockies to Salt Lake City, and then through Reno and Sacramento into Emeryville/San Francisco.”

Along the way, I penned a song – moved by the scene, by the restful rumble and clickety-clack of the train’s steel wheels over track. By the ambiance and nostalgia of peering at nature’s wonders in this country through the portal of a train window…

ONCE IN CALIFORNIA, I eventually found myself back at Yosemite at a restful clear creek with smooth and jagged rocks, the sound of white waters rushing as tears filled my eyes for memories of my children now grown and gone. Thirty-eight years and a lifetime later, peace washed over me as I stood barefoot in the waters, giving me a measure of healing I never even understood I needed. Reminding me to continue to take the journey whether by plane, train or automobile. But there ain’t nothing like the California Zephyr:

(Verse 1) Seems so long ago
That I set out on the road to California
Had three little kids and a wife
I was still young and yearnin’ for
A brand-new life
And a little bit more
Back when livin’ was hard
And we was dirt poor
In a white ‘88 Buick
Nothin’ but miles ahead
Got me California dreamin ‘
And I’m feeling kinda led
To take it all in
Cause time flies by
And it’ll all be gone In the blink of an eye
(Chorus) White water rivers Red canyons blue-sky-high
Life’s made for the livin’
Don’t let it pass you by
Snow-capped mountains
God’s green earth and majestic
Redwood Trees Lord,
grant me a few more sweet memories
And a few more miles to go before I sleep
Let this California train keep on rollin’
Gotta keep goin’,
Gotta keep on rollin’
I come this far;
Ain’t no time for foldin’
Let this California Zephyr just keep on rollin’
-JWes the Writer

Email: author@johnwfountain.com