Iron Rails and Desert Blooms

A Texan Midnight Sunset

Texas is soft – a velveteen world at the climax of agrarian fantasy. One sees the clearest picture of this fantasy from the windows of Amtrak’s Sunset Limited line, a classic old rail route that swings through the heart of the state. At night, the earth rolls by, luscious, contented, smiling like old men with icecream before the television set of their deepest memories. Beside me, a man saunters up with coffee in hand, alone – his face is a dry wash, a seasonal river, he is a beef-eating man of the prairie. Stern in his contentment, releasing his posture into a genteel sort of repose – he is wiry, his beef-jerky torso only slightly leaned back below the ninetieth degree in angle from his seat  – his ride on the Sunset Limited is not a lark but a retrospective.

“Yep,” he mumbles to himself as the train rocks village to village – “yep.” He is speaking only to himself, seated at an empty table built for four, remembering his exploits in this sumptuous, humid kingdom – the land not only of his own youth but of perpetual youth.

“When the river went dry I said – fill it with water,” men like him might say – they suspend the laws of physics and hydrology for their endeavors, they roll through the countryside with presidential apblomb – such men are the masters of dykes and dams and the cartwheeling irrigation machinery of the rich fields.

“But I’m nothin’ special,” such a man might continue,