JULY 19, TUESDAY

LOS ANGELES TO NEW ORLEANS

This was my longest leg of my Amtrak circling of the United States, 48 hours plus the four hours we were late, 52 hours, with two nights sleeping in a reclining seat. And I have the least to report of any two days on the trip. I went to sleep at 10 p.m. on Sunday and woke up in the Arizona desert and stayed in the Arizona desert all the way through New Mexico to El Paso, Texas. There was always the same brown desert with scrub trees and brown grass and purple hills in the distance. At one point our route took us near jagged hills that had a stark empty beauty.

Once in a while, where there was irrigation from some source, there were briefly green fields or orchards, but the the desert would resume. We passed a few dusty crossroad towns and even a few real towns like Tucson, Arizona, which appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared just as quickly. I’ve read somewhere about the great American desert and didn’t quite believe it, but now I’ve seen it and it is immense. Only irrigation from some distant source or aquafur gives the illusion of normality. This year the drought is worse than usual.

But the impression I got was of huge empty spaces with nothing there. Of course I missed Southern California and Western Arizona during the night, and again missed most of Texas between El Paso and San Antonio, but in each case what I woke up to was the same as the evening before. By the time I was going along the Gulf to New Orleans it was dark agains. There was some green in Texas but it was only when the Crescent approached Houston, Texas on the Gulf that thick forests with pine trees and miles of green fields appeared again. So I saw the same thing over and over again and all the photographs look alike as if I had stayed in one place. But what I did get from these 52 hours was a sense of how huge and empty the Southwest quarter of the United States is and a sense that the few people living there must have a very different conception of what is is to be American than I do. Maybe I didn’t look carefully enough or slept too much or was too much of an outsider to be able to see or maybe the variety of the West passed me in the night. But in any case I have nothing to report except that I didn’t see anything but desert for hours and hours and hours. Here are a few photographs that could have been taken anywhere along the way.