August 25, 2008
The train leaves Sacramento right on time. I find myself in a virtually full car, but manage to snag a 4-seat table spot with a big picture window with a southward view. I am amazed at how quickly the visions change from industrial urban to pastoral and agricultural. The train passes over the Sacramento River far from any highways. There's not a car to be seen in any direction, only pleasure craft and sunbathers on the wooded waterfront of the river, giant elms, oaks and sycamores and the distant silhouette of the Coastal Mountain range approaching head on.
I had not given over the reins to someone else for a long time, so I relished the pleasure of just sitting back and enjoying the scenery. I am a recent transplant to Sacramento from Southern California where, for fifteen years, I logged countless hours and thousands of miles behind the wheel of my car in the notorious parking lot freeways of Los Angeles. I yearned for the ability to hoof it from home to work and back as well as to visit far-flung destinations without having to brace myself for stressful hours spent in traffic. I'd lived in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles, so I knew my vision of a walkable world in California was not science fiction.
From Sacramento on the Capitol Corridor
It was an unexpected delight to discover a light rail stop just two blocks from my new home in the Midtown area. The light rail runs every ten minutes to the Sacramento Valley Amtrak Station, the depot for the Capitol Corridor train. The Capitol Corridor is the commuter train that runs from Sacramento to a number of Bay Area cities creating a fast and easy link between the historic and scenic State Capitol and the attractions of the greater San Francisco metropolitan area.
From downtown Sacramento the journey begins at the historic Amtrak station. The grand 1924 waiting room, with its towering windows and marble walls, sends me into reminiscences of train travel I'd done earlier in life on the east coast. It evokes a familiar feeling of excitement, a brimming hopefulness about the possibilities that lie ahead. It is exhilarating knowing that I'm about to place myself in the hands of Amtrak for a journey through unknown landscapes with the promise of chance meetings with strangers, for better or worse, in the comfort of a lounge car. People seem so much more willing to engage with strangers when they are on a train together. There's a sense that we all have to be on our best behavior in tight quarters to make the time pass without unnecessary tension.
Capitol Corridor From Davis to Martinez
The train rolls into the center of Davis within ten minutes, just long enough for another large group of passengers to board -- college vintage to my eye -- a reasonable inference in as much as the University of California campus is located here. Happily, the new group settles into their seats and I don't have to give up any of the chairs in my cozy quartet.
Outside of Davis, the train passes through some stunning agricultural areas with fruit trees and crops with beautiful yellow flowers bursting from their tops in endless, perfect rows that reach toward the mountains in the distance. The landscape changes shortly thereafter from agricultural to wetlands – oceans of reeds and grass – cattails and sawgrass with canals and estuaries snaking through their dense growth. A giant Blue Heron launches in slow motion, spreading its enormous wings as it soars from a patch of water in deep grass across the marshes. Houses on stilts rise from the water – shacks like old fishing camps with porches – seemingly inaccessible except by boat. It feels as though we are being jettisoned through a wormhole – breaching the time/space curtain and viewing a world that disappeared a century ago. Animal tracks appear in the mud along the rails. Coyotes? Deer? Foxes?
And then, almost as suddenly as we had been immersed in this land of lost time in the reeds and marshes, we glide into the coastal mountain range and our next diorama – the San Francisco Bay. Over the marsh grasses I see the National Defense Reserve Fleet, otherwise known as the "Mothball Fleet" -- clusters of abandoned Navy ships of every size and variety -- bound and anchored like islands of stark gray with rusty pinnacles hovering in the soft blue of the far reaches of the bay, out of the main shipping lanes . . . hulking steel masses left to decay in the shadow of Mt. Diablo to the south and the coastal mountains to the north.
Our next stop is the port town of Martinez where the principle structures beyond the rotting navy craft in the bay are the oil refineries and train and auto bridges that span the narrows of the bay. It's at this point that we can see the water of the bay below us and the magnificent tidal forces that draw the churning brown waters into and out of the bay, day by day, over the gigantic concrete pylons that support the bridges surrounding us. It's also at this point that the ineluctable reminders of a more urban age start to mark our passage into the great metropolis of the Bay Area – graffiti and suburban sprawl.
Next Page: Destination Berkeley
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Fares, schedules and other information about the Capitol Corridor train, as well as an online reservation link can be found at the Capitol Corridor Home Page: www.capitolcorridor.org.