All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  I’m used to the version of ‘Living next door to Alice,’ that adds: ‘Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?’ But I start feeling old and prim when the piano player rattling out a version of ‘You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille’, adds: ‘You bitch, you slut, you whore, you suck, you swallow, you cunt.’ And this in what my rather overly proper friend Philip from north Oxfordshire would call ‘mixed company’. The girls don’t seem to mind, though, hollering right along with him.

  As I wander out into a starry crystalline mountain-air night, I recall there are more than enough volunteers to save their souls out here. Even if it has to be posthumously.

  1 A Study in Scarlet.

  SALT LAKE CITY TO DENVER

  TRAIN: California Zephyr

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH: 4:35 a.m.

  via

  Provo, UT

  Helper, UT

  Green River, UT

  Grand Junction, UT

  Glenwood Springs, Colorado

  Granby, CO

  Fraser-Winter Park, CO

  ARRIVE DENVER COLORADO: 7:43 p.m.

  DURATION: 15 hours, 08 minutes

  DISTANCE: 570 miles

  16

  Downhill to Denver

  ‘HEY, SUSAN,’ the woman in the tight jeans and blue sweater calls, gazing out of the window as we head towards the highest railroad pass in America. ‘There are some bars.’

  I shoot her a questioning glance and scan the vast panorama in front of us – it’s not as if we’re going to stop even if there is a bar – but all I can see across the great brown plateau to the distant snow-capped mountains is a couple of hundred contemplative-looking cows. Nothing that I would call a decent watering hole vaguely in sight. And then I turn to look at Susan, her teenage daughter, beaming away in delight, mobile phone clamped to her ear.

  Bars. ‘Cellphone speak’. Reception. In fact the first trace of it for several hours, several hundred miles and several thousand feet difference in vertical altitude. ‘I’m on the train,’ mobile-phone syndrome is still a relatively new phenomenon for most Americans, if only because so few of them have ever used a train, and it is a small mercy that for most of the transcontinental routes reception is patchy at best. When it isn’t they have an overwhelming desire to phone their friends and tell them about it. And like everyone else in the world, they talk louder on mobile phones than they do at any other time. And in the case of some of them, that’s saying something.

  But here we are at 6:30 on a Saturday night, in my case having been on the train since the extremely ungodly hour of 3:00 a.m. – and that only because the Zephyr’s arrival into Salt Lake City had once again been mysteriously ahead of time – at long last anticipating the run downhill to Denver.

  ‘Downhill to Denver’ is not a phrase people use a lot, not least because Colorado’s biggest urban agglomeration is famously known as the ‘mile-high city’, with a celebrated mean altitude of 5,280 feet, one of the few measurements on which Britons and Americans agree.

  Unfortunately Amtrak’s timekeeping had lost its edge somewhat. There were urgent works going on in the Moffat Tunnel and that meant we had to wait. The Moffat is not only one of Amtrak’s longer tunnels – at six miles – it is also the highest point the railroads reach in America, coming in at a quite remarkable 9,239 feet (2,820 metres). There are not many ski resorts in Austria that will take you up to that level even on their highest lifts.

  But you can hardly tell how high you are, trundling across a high-altitude cattle-grazing plain through rocky crags and sparse scrubland. The Moffat was built in 1928 and was a hugely important development in cross-country rail transport. Cutting through the mountain saved 65 miles on the journey between Salt Lake City and Denver. Far more importantly, those miles were along twisting steep gradients around the continental divide, the 13,260 feet (4,040 metres) James Peak. That journey alone used to take five hours. Now, in theory at least, it takes 10 minutes. Not, however, when they’re working on it.

  So here we are stopped outside Granby, a little town in the middle of a nowhere that just happens to be the Rocky Mountains’ – and the world’s – highest altitude road, the Middle Park Trail Ridge.

  Disconcertingly, for someone fresh out of Salt Lake City and carrying more Mormon baggage than I’d anticipated, according to our train conductor, it is also near a site1 where evidence has been found of habitation by people older than any of the known North American tribes. If the archaeologists ever dig up some inscribed gold plates there’s going to be an awful lot of smug ‘I told you so’ stuff coming out of Utah.

  The result of the delay, however, is that by the time we are finally getting towards Denver we are more than three hours late and it’s pouring with torrential rain. The one bright side in all this is that for once, I don’t have to face tramping the streets. I’m being picked up in Denver by my cousin Barry. This, dear reader, is where, I have to admit, I’m going to cheat. Despite my best intentions to complete my entire US pilgrimage by train, there is simply no easy way to join the next leg on my itinerary southwest towards the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles without going all the way back to Chicago or making an overland connection. Amtrak recognise this by offering a bus connection south from Denver to Raton in New Mexico. I had been intending to take this when I realised that it in fact passed through Colorado Springs, which is where Barry lives and he has kindly insisted on making the connection for me and is right now waiting in Denver.

  Thanks, however, to the very technology I’ve been moaning about – mobile telephones – he is not sitting staring at his watch in the train station, but ensconced across the road in the warm and welcoming surroundings of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, Denver’s oldest brewpub (est. 1988). He is my cousin, after all.

  Dashing out of the dark damp into a steaming fug of beery conviviality it’s reassuring to hear a voice drawl, ‘Hey, cuz, how ya doin?’ and spot a familiar face at the bar, eyes twinkling behind glasses on the other side of a large steak sandwich. I should point out straight away that Barry is not one of those Americans with a weight problem. Given that he is of modest height (we are not a family of giants) and hardly a sportsman even in his less than athletic prime, he remains remarkably trim and active. He has also just passed the milestone age of 60 but you wouldn’t know it, primarily because he has the mischievous zest for life of a testosterone-fuelled 14-year-old, just occasionally tempered with a world-weary lassitude. We get on well together.

  Not least because Barry is already ordering up for me a pint of Wynkoop’s highly recommended Railyard Ale, which he thinks I absolutely have to try. Never one to fight an argument like that, the long day’s train journey is soon soothed away in a tide of richly hopped, mildly fruity amber ale. Railyard – so named obviously because they are right across the road from it – is Wynkoop’s flagship beer, which they describe as a German Oktoberfest lager made from their house yeast and finished with Tettnang hops. All I can tell you is it went down full steam ahead. Barry watched just a little enviously; he was on Coke, having experienced difficulty with law enforcement driving home from a bar before.

  And then it’s out into the cold rainy night – Colorado can get very hot but also very cold and when it rains, it rains – into Barry’s ‘bus’, a 20-year-old Ford Econoliner that has seen the 100,000 mile mark roll round more than twice, and head for the hills. Colorado Springs is another thousand feet higher than Denver on the eastern edge of the Rockies and at the base of one of America’s most famous mountains, Pikes Peak. It was also rated Best Big City in Money magazine’s 2006 list of Best Places to Live. Barry would agree, although Money magazine is definitely not on his regular reading list.

  Barry was born, like myself, in Northern Ireland, just a decade earlier, shortly after his father had returned from serving in the British Army. He was four when his parents emigrated to America, and even though he has an American passport still considers himself an Irishman at heart, although as he actually is on
e, he doesn’t make much of it. What brought him to Colorado is a complicated story: for much of his late teens and early twenties, he was unenthusiastic about being drafted into the army and getting sent to Vietnam. In the course of that he got a lot of education, including a year at Queen’s University in Belfast where he wore Aran sweaters, drank Guinness and sang Dylan songs in smoky bars to great effect with the local young ladies. A varied collection of careers, divorce and remarriage later, he did what he had least expected to: joined the army. As a drugs counsellor. ‘It was something I felt I knew about.’ Fort Carson in Colorado Springs was where they were posted to. He left after his wife died and devoted himself to bringing up a talented son who became a surfer, deep-sea diver and fighter pilot, joined the military and is now based in Hawaii, and serving in Iraq.

  Barry, meanwhile, still enjoys female company, smokes his daily weed and soaks up conspiracy theories – including intergalactic ones – like the old hippy he is, while working on a semi-autobiographical novel that one of these days will win a Pulitzer. He is, however, clearly not yet fully attuned to North American ley lines because despite Denver being laid out on a grid pattern it takes us 45 minutes to find our way out of it, and then it’s only after asking a second set of strangers for directions. The first attempt had failed when Barry got out of the van next to a little bar lit by red neon to the side of the inevitable freeway overpass to ask if anyone knew where we might get on to it. He came back a few minutes later none the wiser: ‘I couldn’t even find out where we are never mind where to get on the freeway. Nobody in there speaks English.’ There are clearly parts of the state named for the reddish-brown coloured Rio Colorado that are going back to their roots.

  Outside Barry’s house on the edge of Colorado Springs the next morning I realise just how close he is to Pikes Peak: the great conical mountain that is a focal point in the landscape for leagues around almost sits on his doorstep. Pikes Peak is named after the magnificently monikered Zebulon Pike, an explorer who was the first white American to see it, though because the US Board on Geographic Names back in 1891 ruled against the possessive apostrophe in place names it is officially called Pikes Peak.

  Pike tried and failed to climb it, predicting it would never be possible, which was a bit out as the first man made it up there just 14 years later in 1820. By 1893 even a woman had made it. Katherine Lee Bates was the daughter of a congregational pastor from Massachusetts who came out here to teach a summer school and was moved by both the journey and the view from the top of Pikes Peak to write what many Americans, on the left of the political spectrum at least, would prefer as their national anthem: ‘America the Beautiful’, with its references to ‘amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’. An altogether less martial image than that conveyed by the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. But we shall get to that in just a minute. Today there’s a gift shop on top and you can get there by a partly paved road – the mountain is chiefly famed for the annual Pikes Peak race, and the annual marathon run to the top and back. There is also the Manitou and Pikes Peak cog railway which it had been my intention to take, but as we sat there trying to locate the timetables, thick fog rolled in and over the peak, and announced its intention to settle. A trip to the top in those conditions would be as scenic as a day out in an old-style London pea-souper.

  Instead we take what Barry calls a ‘hike’ – a leisurely stroll – around the romantically named Garden of the Gods which is virtually Barry’s back garden; he chooses his property well. The ‘garden’ is actually a park created around some of the most spectacular sandstone formations on earth: great pinnacles, towers and strange eroded primeval animal shapes of pink and red rock shaped by millennia of Colorado’s occasionally awesome climate that varies from beautiful mild Mediterranean-style days to extremes of wind, snow, rain and searing sunshine. It’s a favourite spot for climbers and walkers and a cool spot to take a short after-dinner stroll round if you live next door.

  It got its name back in 1859 when two of the surveyors laying out the Colorado Springs city plan came across it and one, being a practical man, suggested it would be a super spot for a beer garden. His chum, obviously of a much more prosaic and dull disposition, added: ‘Why, it is a fit place for the gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.’ I think they should have gone ahead with the beer garden.

  Barry, however, has that aspect of the day sorted out, having booked dinner for us, his long-term girlfriend and a couple of other pals at the Phantom Canyon Brewpub. In the meantime, it’s a chance for me to wind down into domesticity for 36 hours. I had half hoped we might take in a rodeo. Colorado, being classic cowboy country, is famous for them. Rodeos are an odd obsession. A neighbour of mine in England is a fervent fan, donning his Stetson and dragging his wife and daughter out to the Wild West every couple of years to watch him yippee and yeehaa his way around the rodeo circuit. Strictly from the stands, I stress. But then he is a Chelsea fan, so what do you expect?

  Barry took us to my only rodeo the last time I visited him. It was an odd affair. Out on the opposite edge of town. Pickups parked for miles in every direction. Concrete tiered seats around the stadium – for want of a better word: corral? – and every other man in a cowboy hat with a shoelace tie held together by some little Navajo jewellery woggle.

  These, I suspect, are not people you’d want to discuss gun control with, or invite to a gay wedding, come to that. These are the sort of down-to-earth Americans who’d tell you their heart is in the right place. And put their hand on it just to check. And stand up and sing the national anthem at the same time. Which is, in fact, as I sat there cringing, exactly what they then did.

  Now I don’t have a problem with national anthems. In fact, I sort of collect them. Some of them have remarkably good tunes – the British one being a bit of an exception here – and quite a lot of them have entertainingly quaint lyrics. The Marseillaise is a good example: cracking tune and those endearing words about ‘letting impure blood slake the thirst of our trenches’. I once embarrassed myself in Germany by singing the now unused first verse of theirs: the one that goes ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,’ while these days they only pick up at the ‘Unity and law and justice’ line. When the Soviet Union collapsed we held a party at home where we played their anthem with its cynically hilarious opening line about ‘Indestructible union of republics so free’. Corker of a tune too, to the extent that Vladimir Putin restored it. And the way things are going he may be thinking about bringing back the old words.

  The American anthem has a fine tune too, one of the best in fact. It also has pretty par for the course embarrassing words: that bit about ‘the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there’ really does lack a little subtlety when you’re the only country to have dropped an atomic bomb or two, and has a worrying tendency to go in for the air strike as a weapon of first resort.

  Not my problem, of course, I didn’t have to sing it. Or did I? Surrounded by the Stetsons, staying sitting was not an option – not that I’d intended to – but even that not to join in full-throatedly might be taken as an act of irreverence, disrespect or even treason, for which the excuse of being a foreigner might not be acceptable. I’m wary about these things since my childhood in Northern Ireland where they used to play the British national anthem when cinemas closed at 10:30 p.m. You had two choices: either make a run for it while the titles were rolling, or stand rigid and sing along in case someone thought your allegiances were to the Irish tricolour rather than Her Majesty. In Colorado therefore I decided to do what any brave Brit would do under the circumstances: I stood up and mimed.

  And then they brought on the Rodeo Queen. This is an institution which is to the bucking bronco business what cheerleaders are to American football or page three to readers of the Sun: a bit of mostly harmless soft porn for the lads. The girl in question was your typical western American dream with long blonde hair and long tanned legs beneath a white le
ather cowboy suit with micro-mini skirt. A fetishist’s fantasy.

  And then we got down to the serious – or depending on your point of view rather silly – business of blokes on broncos: men with leather leggings on their trousers flapping their hat and trying for dear life to cling onto a horse that thinks it’s in the Olympic equestrian trampolining final. Impressive, at least for the few seconds most of them manage to hang on, and undoubtedly very skilled, particularly for those who manage it for a bit longer. But – and I would never say this to my neighbour – it’s just ever so slightly… samey! Once you’ve seen one bronco buck…

  Anyhow at this stage I decided the evening could only be improved by a couple of beers – which despite a general prudishness about alcohol are gratifyingly on sale at absolutely every American sports event – so I headed off to the beer tent. Lots of beer, none of it very interesting but all of it chilled. The only trouble was that when I tried to pick up a couple of cans the sweet young cowgirl responsible for taking the money asked if she could see my ID. It took a minute for me to realise what she was on about and then of course I launched into my – soon, no doubt, to be outdated – proud spiel about Britain being a free land which does not require its citizens to carry identity cards, much less have the state register how many beers we consume (although the way Britain has changed I fear it soon will). And then it dawned on me: she was checking to see if I was old enough to buy beer. This was really rather flattering. In fact absurdly so. It may seem insane to us – and it certainly does to me – to ban your citizens from buying a beer for three years after they have attained full legal adulthood, but the idea that a man approaching 50 might be mistaken for being under 21 was unlikely to say the least, even with my baby-faced complexion. She was obviously just complimenting me. I beamed and said something like, ‘Thanks luv, but I’ll just have the beers.’ Which is when she went and ruined it all: ‘No sir, it’s perfectly obvious you’re over age, but I need to see your ID. It’s state law.’ So off I trekked back to find my coat with my passport in the pocket. All for the sake of a few swigs of tasteless Coors Light.