When I last saw my son’s family, there were four children. Now, there are six. The oldest, Donacienne, is a budding writer, while the next, Elodie, although still in middle school, does math on the college level.
The youngest, Sebastien and Genevieve, were reticent. Who is this woman called Gramma? Noemie, another mathematician and logician, hugged me, then brought out a math-based game, which I didn’t understand as she does. Magalie, the family humorist, and I became reacquainted.
There was blissful domesticity, including watching the younger children while Mom and Dad took the oldest shopping for school shoes. The girls and I walked to create one-on-one time. They shared their art and their writing. We bought food and cooked together. We worked a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
When Saturday was too hot for the beach, we saw a movie, then dined at a barbecue restaurant. Days began and ended with hugs.
On the last day of this perfect grandmother holiday, we shared final hugs as I boarded the train from Tacoma, Washington, to Portland, Oregon, at the invitation of a Facebook friend.
She suggested visiting Powell’s, the world’s largest independent bookstore. Funky and dusty, it reminded me of beloved stores in Detroit and Cambridge. where browsing was the point. Over lattes in the store’s cafe, we shared life stories and continued when her boyfriend joined us for meal in a French-style, farm-to-table restaurant.
We window-shopped the next day, stopping at her favorite chocolate shop. Like Seattle, Portland is modern, prosperous, but more livable. Where else can urban dwellers walk to real supermarkets? We ate lunch in a restaurant atop an office building, while viewing the river whose bridges earn Portland its nickname, Bridge City.
We both regretted the shortness of my visit when she dropped me at the station to board the Coast Starlight. On board, I learned that the line faces rerouting as the rising Pacific is eroding the shore.
After a night on the train, I wanted a shampoo, but Sacramento, less well turned out than Seattle, Tacoma or Portland, had no hair salons near the station. Breakfast was hard to find but the walk in the cool morning was welcome after so much sitting.
The scale of the Northeast changes how even a Midwesterner like myself perceives the country. Denver is more than 1,000 miles from Sacramento, a 17-hour trip. There is no escaping a night journey, which is regrettable as the California Zephyr follows the route of the original Zephyr created in 1949. The gold fields, Reno and Salt Lake City, are hidden by the night.
But Colorado is the most exciting part of the mid-continent trip. The Colorado River is well-used by people fishing or riding white water or enjoying the looping journey through the state. Rock formations climb endlessly. Wild horses are visible is small flocks. Best of all, the train cuts through areas without roads, clinging to mountain sides and reaching Denver in the dark.
I spent my first day at the Denver Art Museum, which offers a history through artifacts of the indigenous peoples of the continent, as well the Western art of Remington, Proctor, and Henri. I took a break from the museum to lunch with another Facebook friend at the gorgeous Brown Hotel. That evening, I sat at the bar of a new-American restaurant, Potager, and enjoyed dinner and the company of an age peer, who had moved from Chicago to Denver to provide day care for her grandchildren.
The next day began with breakfast at the Jelly Cafe, a millenial hangout staffed by people sporting beautiful tattoos. The man seated next to me asked, “O. J. Simpson. Murderer or Avis spokesman?” I knew his record at “rushing,” whatever that is, against overmatched teams, but I had no idea how to describe him. I said, “Greatest running back ever,” and the man and his wife high-fived me.
However, what made the day special was a transplanted Detroit friend, who I hadn’t seen in 40 years, was taking me to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I packed my bags and waited outside the Airbnb. A grayer version of my friend opened our conversation with the kind of corny, fifth-grade joke I had always loved. That is what friendship is: never forgetting.
When he dropped me at the train station that evening, he told me that it had become a social mecca. The station was alive with people enjoying ice cream, coffee and conversation. As the train pulled away and dropped from the plateau, and headed toward Nebraska, it would pass through endless fields of corn, the dominant crop of the Midwestern plains. However, the route also crosses the Mississippi where it is wider and more like the river of legend than the river I crossed in Minnesota three weeks earlier. If any feature symbolizes the continent it is the “Father of Waters,” the mighty Mississippi.
The finale of the trip was the return to Chicago where I had just one precious hour at the Art Institute of Chicago. I last visited in the ’70s, when the paintings were hung more like stamps in a scrapbook. A new wing, less than a decade old, modernized the museum. But with so little time, I followed the advice of my friend, unavailable as she was performing, and viewed, “America after the Fall: Paintings of the 1930s.” After traveling coast to coast, it was an appropriate close to my journey.
Along the way, I learned from conversations what it is to survive cancer and heart attack. I discovered how many my age care for grandchildren while both parents work.
I saw mountains and rivers, a bit of the Pacific, raptors and browsing deer and antelope. Again and again, I thought of road stories and road songs and was glad that I went off to look for America.
Susan Wozniak, of Easthampton, is a retired journalist and writing professor who writes a monthly column.