Train Journey

Well, here I am 12 hours into my train trip, and I have few complaints so far. The morning wasn’t too bad. My wonderful husband dropped me off at 6:20 or so. The sun wasn’t up yet, which made for a great view of the sunrise as I traveled between Sacramento and Davis. The first thing I noticed with the rising sun, was that the Yolo Bypass had water in it; a sign of better times water-wise. When the river reaches a 27.5 feet deep and rising, weirs are opened up north of West Sacramento, or farther upstream near the confluence of the Feather River and Sacramento River. The water is allowed to flow into the bypass, which moves excess water away from the delta towns and dumps it back in the river downstream from the cities. The Yolo bypass is rather long and wide and can carry water from the Sacramento River, Feather River the Yuba river and couple more. In a really wet year, it looks like a giant waterway, but this year the tops of grasses and shrubs were sticking out of the water, giving evidence to only a moderate amount of water. In fact, I believe we are at normal this year, which isn’t enough to make up for the past two years, in which the bypass was left empty. Still, normal is better than below normal. Bypasses were one of many ways to keep places like Downtown Sacramento from flooding in the winter. Levees and raising the whole downtown area (which wasn’t as big back then) about 12 to 14 feet were other ways of dealing with the flooding.

By the time the train pulled into the Davis station the sun was up and lights were on in some of the houses. I have never seen the side of Davis I saw today. Usually when passing through Davis I am on the freeway and the university is the visible identifier for the town. While the actual train station looks pretty decent I was looking out the south-east side of the train and had the view of a rural fringe with a mobile home park. The buildings in the park closest to the train looked more like migrant worker quarters than mobile homes. Since Davis is a college town and got its start as an agricultural center, I wonder if the quarters were left and the rest of the plot of land turned into a mobile home. Who knew that such a town as Davis would have a park like that? We must have been moving generally south-west because we did eventually pass the university and followed highway 50 for a while.
The thing about riding the train is that you don’t get really good views of most towns. I did see a few old main streets briefly, but lets face it, railroads foster industrial land uses, and that is what you see the most of. I say that and look up from my laptop to note that we are stopping in Oxnard and at least at this point, it is not industrial, but then its pretty dark too, there may be industrial uses near by. All I can see for now is a used car dealership and a tall building that says “A IO ZER.” (I think some of its letters are out.) As we pull out though, sure enough here come the industrial uses. Steam billowing out from stacks, billboards, trucks, loading docs, etc. I have seen some interesting industrial areas though, my favorite being a bunch of old metal buildings almost completely covered with colorful graffiti. At least it wasn’t a boring new building. Oakland was interesting because there were a lot of industrial looking new buildings that were actually lofts, right up against the tracks. I could see into people’s loft homes, what a treat. I guess it’s a cool thing to own a loft apartment that looks like it used to be a factory, even if it never was. That said, I do think its kind of cool to turn old factories into loft apartments, its just silly to build apartments that look like old lofts. It’s like taking the coolness and uniqueness and making it every day, cheap and mundane.
There were plenty of other interesting sights on the trip. The train goes through the Salinas Valley. This valley, fed by one water source, the Salinas River, is sometimes referred to as the Salad Bowl of California, and no wonder. As we traveled through I saw artichoke plants, lettuce, carrots, and plenty of other wonderful vegetables. The soils look dark and rich from the train, but that could be loads of fertilizer mixed into them. At any rate, this is an ideal spot to grow all of the really healthy vegetables that require more care than say, tomatoes or sunflowers. The valley’s south end is open to the sea where the Salinas River dumps whatever is left of itself into that great Pacific Ocean, where most rivers originating in California aspire to flow. This ocean access and the coastal ranges on either side of it produce a climate that is much more suitable for these types of vegetables than the great Sacramento Valley.
Once the train began to move out of the valley and back up into the southern end of the mountains, land use changed to ranching and oil drilling. Here is a mixed use plan outside of any urban boundaries. The cows wander among oil derricks and power plants happily eating their grass (at least for this time of year), and all the while the oil derricks are bobbing up and down like monstrous creatures drinking up fuel from the depths beneath the hills and valleys.
It’s been a nice train trip so far, I listened to conversations around me, about being in the Marines, why people go to church and why the sweet older Asian woman should give up her seat for twenty dollars so the restless youth can plug his cell phone in (a conversation that the conductor quickly put an end to thank goodness.)
I sat in the observation car, as I am now and met a wonderful woman named Rita who got on at Davis and is going as far as I am. We had wonderful conversations off and on for the whole trip. At dinner I sat with Rita and Bonnie and Tim, a couple of school nurses going to a school nurse convention. One of the best things about train trip is that you get to meet new people, and they are generally all very nice. In fact we all agreed over our luxurious diner dinner that trains are pretty much the safest and most enjoyable way to travel.
Between visits to the lounge car and dining car I’ve read so much Jane Jacob’s that I could tell you all about how to combat the decline of healthy diverse city communities, and what to do about those darn boundaries that kill the life of the surrounding city. But Maybe I’ll talk about that all later when I find some boundaries or declining diversity in Sacramento.
For now, the train trip was wonderful, the people were wonderful and the views were mostly wonderful.