Denver 1984

At 18 years old I left behind my family and past in search of a better future in a distant city. This is an account of my train trip with its the scenes and my emotions.

Denver 1984

     My bean pole body was adrift in French Market. The pungent aroma of oranges and tomatoes scented my trance passage through Quarter.

     Awash in twilight street shadows, a wrinkled woman with foreign accent held an offering in her gnarled fist. “It’s a fava bean. You look like you could use it” she said. I held her sacramental legume of luck. The clouds of my mind parted. A ray of light beamed through my murk. I glimpsed rainbow hope in eyes of a stranger. On the eve of my exodus to a land where I knew no one I had faith.

     It was the summer of 1984. New Orleans was bustling with the World’s Fair. My heart burned for the west. The Rockies beckoned me like snowy altars where holy madness awaited. I carried an army backpack filled with whole grain bread and soy nuts. Dad accompanied me on the train to see me off. He said even if I didn’t stay in Denver it would be a great vacation. Visions of the Great Plains filled my imagination. Dad disembarked the train and my long crazy journey began.

     We crossed Lake Pontchartrain as dusk cast the marshes in deep brown sorrow. I said farewell to the grassy reeds planted in mud. The night fell like the cape of a Count. We chugged through the Mississippi Delta where grandma first opened her eyes while held in the arms of a mother soon to die after giving birth.

     I imagined grandma and grandpa heading to bed while grass harpists chirped a lonely refrain from the thick tussocks of their cricket’s hassock in the sunken forest of my boyhood haunts in Natchez.All the while I hurtled through my native

land in my goodbye to her bluesy soul.

     By midnight we were in Memphis. I gazed at the city lights in a daze of insomnia. I was flying by the Dixieland of my youth like an angel in the night. A homeless orphan of dirt roads and tupelo swamps, I heard the rhythm of the rails sing me to dawn.

     By morning we passed through Illinois. I sat up in the viewer car watching thunderstorms. Lightning bolts flashed in a mad opera. By Kankakee the thunder had ceased its fury. We arrived at Chicago. I strayed from the station and ascended the Sears Tower in an elevator. I could almost feel the building sway in the wind. Then I returned and boarded the train to Denver.

     We crossed the Mississippi River at Burlington,

Iowa. Our train took us over the backwaters of the river with trees rising from the tea colored water. The Father of Waters was much narrower this far north than in the southern reaches of my home country.

     We stopped on the western bank of the river. A young man with a soft smile disembarked carrying his backpack. He smiled back at the passengers like a lost son who’d found his way home. The brown buildings of the town looked antique and quaint. I felt homesick for my hometown of Natchez, Ms.

     Iowa was sad cows in the darkening prairie whose knolls passed in the ghostly night. Late at night the lights of Omaha greeted me with the promise of Denver drawing closer.

     Dawn arrived across the high plains. Men in thick jackets huddled outside my window breathing clouds of mist. We rolled across the dark land till snowy peaks loomed ahead like clouds. Finally we crossed into Denver whose century old train station felt like home.

     I toted my backpack and set off into the strange city. I breathed the crisp cool mountain air whose purity purged me of melancholy and home sickness. I didn’t know where I’d lay my head that night. But I knew I’d find my way to those peaks where peace waited like a virgin cloaked in white.