Riding the Steel Bronco

Aside from a few commuter train rides from Los Altos to San Francisco, the first real train trip that I ever took was from Thompson, Utah to Oakland, California.  It was early January of 1975.  Three months earlier I had accepted a park ranger job in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and I was determined to take my live-in partner Susan with me.  This time we would pretend to be man and wife to avoid the quickie Reno marriage that I had endured as a very naïve seasonal ranger several years before.  In October, 1974, we left our home in the Salinas Valley with Susan driving her old VW bus, while I wrangled the small U-Haul truck with my Datsun pickup hooked to a tow bar in the rear.

We had determined to head to southern California first to retrieve some of Sue’s belongings before sequestering ourselves in the canyon country.  All went relatively well until we got to Santa Barbara.  I noticed that the U-Haul was driving erratically and when I pulled over to check it out, I was appalled to find out that somehow the Datsun had jack-knifed into the tow bar which had impaled itself to the Datsun’s front  bumper.  As fate would have it, we were rescued by a young mechanic in a nearby garage who separated said vehicles, but that left us with three vehicles to deal with and only two drivers. Realizing our dilemma, the mechanic told us we could leave the Datsun with him and pick it up at our convenience.  So, taking a huge leap of faith, we left my little pickup with a complete stranger in Santa Barbara, and continued on to Canyonlands.

By early January we had made arrangements to take the train back to California to retrieve my truck.  By that time, my friend Tom Ferrell had gone down to Santa Barbara on his own, rescued the Datsun, and had driven it back to Pinnacles where he was stationed.  These were the days before AMTRAK.  Our only option was to pick up the Steel Bronco, the northbound Denver & Rio Grande passenger train in Thompson, Utah, and make a couple of transfers to get us to our destination.  My district ranger Dave Minor dropped us off at the snowy platform in Thompson.  We were the only two people there when the train pulled in late in the afternoon.

It was the dead of winter and the cold night was only minutes away.  Sue and I were riding coach, of course, so we sat side by side sharing a blanket over our legs, watching as the hulking Bookcliffs turned into a long, jagged silhouette outside of Green River, then disappeared entirely. But we looked upon it all as just another romantic adventure.  We had only been living in Canyonlands for a few months, and already the sublime isolation and magic landscape had won us over.  We were feeling a little naughty as she gave me a hand job under the blanket as we rolled along.  We got to Ogden, Utah just before midnight and had to get off the train and board a bus to Salt Lake City where we picked up another west bound train around 1am.  I slept fitfully feeling cold drafts whenever anyone entered our car.  I remember waking up in Elko, Nevada and seeing snow falling.  But eventually we made it all the way to the bay area, got a ride down to Pinnacles, and retrieved my much-missed Datsun pickup, which was not too much the worse for wear.

After a day or two of visiting friends, we began the drive back to the Needles. I’m not sure where we slept that first night but I remember going through Cove Fort, Utah very late the following night with snow falling. Only a few pieces of Interstate 70 were complete so we were on and off of frontage roads most of the way, but happily reached our destination with two vehicles now at our disposal and a weird little adventure behind us. After all these years, I still love the sound and the feel of a train rumbling through the dark desert night as the steel rails rock me to sleep, and the mysterious darkness beckons.