Back at Emmeryville I was trying not to admire a very shapely, tall brunette exuding lone femininity. Next to me was a lady athlete of the bicycling kind, with her roll-on gear, in the moisture wicking stretchy clothes. The athlete and the seraglio prize sat across from each other on the painted steel benches between the station and the platform.

The lady athlete said some nice things to the beauty, who was obviously nervous, and helped get her calmed down for the trip.

Lady athlete: “May I ask your destination?”

Seraglio girl: “Denver,” as her shoulders shook, “I heard it’s a beautiful trip.”

Lady athlete: “Oh yes it is. Nevada we take by night and I get off at Salt Lake City. But I hear that the most beautiful portion of the trip is Colorado.”

Seraglio girl: “I can’t help but wonder at the people [as if persons other than men had done this] who did the work, how terrible that must have been.”

The train roared up, surprising us, the station chief apologizing over the loud speaker, and we were off, the backpack hoodrat the very first to board. The Seraglio girl dragged her wheely gig to the sleepers at the head of the train. I would see her later in the observation car in a snug brown sweat suit, her lustrous hair bouncing from her clothed shoulders, still obviously terrified of the world that saw her as food, pleasure or adornment and nothing else while it’s priests lied to her that she is its queen. As the car filled in early mourning, she fled back to her rolling cloister.

Within an hour or two, the woman qualified to be her protector and confidant, traveling also alone, but with a reasoned confidence, understanding her peril but not wilting before it, sat down next to me. We both looked outward and she and I at times nodded off to sleep, me from the heroic level of drinking with Tony from Texas the night before and her obviously from some long grind.

I will never start a conversation with a lone woman. The black-clothed emo girl seated next to me in the coach, was in distress over the kicking of her seat by the Yutish wench and the mammy feed whale behind us and for a while I thought she was sick. I did not inquire of her health like some gentleman of old, because we are either monsters or slaves these days and gentleness is denied us by the priestly creed of modernity.

The lady athlete said, “Well, hello sir. How are you and may I ask where you are bound?”

I looked up at her eyes and saw that she was beautiful in her own right, a tall, blonde, fit girl with huge alien blue eyes—an obvious Daughter of Mormon. She had only looked plain in contrast to Seraglio Girl. A Comanche war party would have taken both of them, but this one might have bore a chief.

“You seem like a good train buddy, and I can see that you like to laugh,” she said halfway through our two hour conversation. I recall her name, but will not use it, since she is a lady that travels alone at times.

She is 40 and has a boyfriend who is 50 and runs a business. He does not get off for spring break like she does, for she works as a teaching assistant in a school for disabled children. She also works at a small grocery store in a small town near Salt Lake City. She shows me the picture of her and her man and they seem very happy, very good for each other.

There is a sadness in her that previous boyfriends who were all long term had wasted her childbearing years with false commitment, using her as an enjoyable companion who liked to travel and would fly out of state to see a ball game, etc. And now, at the end of her fertile season, she finally finds the man of her dreams.

I informed her that my youngest son was born to his mother when she was almost her age and that my oldest son’s wife is pregnant with another grandson at 44 and doing well. This cheered her some and I reminded her, ‘And you’re fit, an athlete of some kind, clearly.”

She smiled, “I was the pace setter on the bike tour with my friends in California because I’m the weakest rider...but we did bike 400 miles and some of it on bad coastal roads…”

She was familiar with the town where I stay in Utah, in the mountains above her. So I told her Bob and Deb’s address, on the main road almost near tiny town center, that if they have the fresh eggs sign out that she could visit with Bob and buy some eggs and inquire as to his elderberry syrup and wild berry jelly prices, and that I’ll be there in September and October and would like to meet her man, who works in an ancient trade that once supported an earlier civilized age as a key artifact producer.

Her big beautiful sky-reflecting eyes seemed sad at maybe not bringing children to this man she admires so much and she says so, to which I replied, “Good God, girl, you come from Mormon stock—you should be good for four sons at least!”

She smiled and whispered distantly, “Maybe so—you have to have children before you have grandchildren and grandchildren... they seem the best reason to live.”

“Thanks for being a good train buddy. Sorry that you’re living out of a backpack. But I think that whatever city spat you out did so because you were too good for it. I’ll tell Dave about meeting you and maybe we’ll all meet again.”

“You look tired still, and Salt Lake City comes early.”

“Yes,” she admitted as she rose, “I need some rest—and thank you and have a nice journey, sir.”

The sun just then began to set behind us as its last shadows creased the snow-stained Nevada mountains before us.