Durango Colorado, October 2024

 By Josie Millikan

In the summer of 2024, I watched a video of an old steam train out west and was immediately haunted by it. This train was climbing a steep grade on a narrow cliff as a river roared in the vast forested valley below. As the train gradually lurched further into view, a whistle blew long and echoing into the canyon walls, then ricocheting around in my mind for the next few days. I walked around dazed with stars in my eyes thinking about this train, and trains are not particularly something that I'd known much about before. It was the sound of that lonely, crying whistle echoing around in the wilderness that made me feel like I had reconnected with something old and forgotten.

A few weeks later, my husband Nate and I were talking about places we'd like to go for our second anniversary. We had a little extra spending money that year as I had been taking on a lot of freelance projects on top of my full-time job. We had also recently moved, so I wanted to escape somewhere after so many long work-hours. We wrote some state names on slips of paper and threw them in a jar. The last slip in the jar was the one we were going to go for, and the slip read "Colorado." Nate had written that state down, but my mind immediately jumped to the train. "Wait. I think I already know of something we could do in Colorado," I said, and searched for the video to confirm. The video was indeed from Colorado, posted by the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad of their engine number 480. Our anniversary is at the end of October, and with some providence, the last train-ride before the railroad closed for the winter was on the weekend of our anniversary. We bought train tickets within the hour and got to planning how we were going to get to Durango.

If you know Colorado, you'd know that Durango is rather in the middle of nowhere (which is great.) Our choices of flights from Tennessee were limited to Alberquerque or Denver, and neither of those places were anywhere near our destination. Denver flights were cheaper and the route had a National Park on the way, so before we knew it we were heading to Colorado's southwesternmost corner all the way from their capitol.

I took notes in a journal while on the trip so that I wouldn't forget anything. Some of the notes from the drive into Durango are recorded as follows:

- saw a man walking all alone in the middle of the desert, hunched over and stomping furiously. is he in his own movie?

- nighttime, almost to durango. in the middle of the mountains, a huge herd of elk came leaping across the road and down the cliffside below. thank God that nate was able to stop the car in time; he had to slam the brakes and our car definitely swerved. that coulda been the last of us! (their eyes were glowing so bright, there were at least a dozen of them and they were huge!!)

I'm glad we survived for many reasons, but the most immediate one was that our train left the next morning. The moment we walked over the tracks onto the platform where steam billowed out all over, I realized that the engine was number 480. If you've seen any old movie with a steam train waiting to depart while all the little people on the platform next to it clutch their handbags and get swallowed up in the stram clouds, then you can imagine what it felt like to walk into that moment. It was perfectly and exactly cinematic.

"IS IT STEAMY OUT HERE OR IS IT JUST THAT TRAIN" 

Engine 480 took us from Durango through bucolic valleys into the San Juan National Forest, trailing the deadly Animas River up into the peaks of Silverton, an old mining town that remains virtually unchanged today. The streets were wide and only dirt, the buildings were erected in the late 19th century and you could hear ragtime piano drifting out of saloon doors. I'm not joking. We walked into a saloon for lunch and I saw the most beautiful woman, a visage of what I wish I could be: she had brown, curly hair falling wild from underneath a black cowboy hat, wore a vest over a ballooning bishop-sleeved blouse and accented it with a bolo tie, jeans and black cowboy boots. The piano she played with a bounce at her elbows featured hand-painted folk art flowers on the caramel-colored wood. She looked up at me and smiled in a way that told me I must have been staring at her with mouth agape. I may have been too obviously struck by the realization that she wore all of our commonly-shared features so much more elegantly. We shared the same hair, hat, bolo and boots but she was living it for real. I am still looking for an old piano to put in my house so that I can evolve into this woman and become who I really am at the core-level.

The train-ride back to Durango from Silverton brought me to the very reality of the video that had, months before, haunted me so. We climbed a steep incline and the Animas River rushed far below us to the left. We turned a corner along the cliff and our track was so narrow that you could look directly below you into the depths of the valley. The train whistled loud, lonely, exhausted and strong into the canyon walls, and the sound filled every inch of the space in that valley and rattled around in my bones. I was ravenous during every second of that moment, alive with admiration and awe and letting absolutely no detail go unnoticed.

Further notes from this trip detail a day spent mostly at our Airbnb, which was a beautiful two-room loft on the second story of a barn. The owners of the property had a homestead with fluffy red Highland cows, cats and dogs, chickens and goats. The loft was like a log cabin on the inside and smelled beautifully of pinewood and the fresh hay from the barn floor below. It had a back deck where you could see the Milky Way at night - we were out in desert plains and the night was black, crisp and quiet. The only sounds were of coyotes howling in the distance. During the day, we spent time on the property and found a bench out underneath a spectacular tree which arched over it protectively. The bench was seated to have the perfect view: out on the prairie, on the state-land behind this property, was a one-room log cabin and a lean-to barn built in the early 19th century. They stood alone and empty, abandoned long ago. I wished that I could run across the grasses and explore that place, but the fence was high and I knew I couldn't get there. I had to clutch the fence instead, leaning as far as I could to imagine what things that house must have seen.

On our drive back to Denver a few days later, we experienced three seasons in a span of four hours. Durango was painted in beautiful autumn, mountains dappled with rust, pumpkin and gold. As we passed through the mountains again going east, we were met with a winter blizzard reminiscent of the Coen brothers film Fargo. Once again, we feared for our lives as the rental car navigated thin, winding mountain roads on ever-building snow. We made it down the mountain okay and quickly enough, then we were met with the summer heat of the desert. I've never experienced such whiplash.

I drew as Nate drove and we passed beautiful scenery. It was a lot of fun to see so much of the state in our travel to the airport. These drawings were done while looking out the car window as I passed the time:

The first is a very quick color-grab of the autumn landscape at the bottom of the mountains. The roads were winding and scenes passed quick, so I didn't have much time to get anything but splotches of color down. Still, I am glad to have it, as the trees really were that red.

The second is of a very marshmallow-looking dog who stuck his head out of the window of a truck for a very long stretch of highway. He was a happy boy!

I've been lucky to have experienced many memorable and amazing trips throughout my life, but I think of this Colorado trip often. Nate and I watched westerns, drank sarsaparilla and rye, ate at multiple saloons, visited two National Parks: Mesa Verde and Great Sand Dunes, and rode on a real working steam locomotive that was built during the Wild West. The feeling when hearing that train whistle, that I had reconnected with something old, made sense afterwards. I love the west. I've made my home in Tennessee, which I also love for many other reasons, but there is nothing to me quite like breathing wild desert air. I feel rejuvenated anytime I visit the west, and I know now that I can't go very long without seeing it again. When I planned the Colorado trip, I thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I don't think I can promise that to myself realistically. The idea of never seeing those mountains again is impossible to me. If I am old someday and I've never made it back onto that train, I will be holding an unresolved longing. However, this trip may just be something that I think on and long for often as my life goes on, because realistically there's no number of times that I could take that trip and be satiated. There are people who live in Durango and in Silverton, whose regular job it is to show up at a locomotive, or at a saloon, and show people a good time out west. Isn't that insane? In a world full of phones and driver-less cars and AI (sorry for a bummer line,) there's someone out there who shows up to a saloon in an almost-ghost town and gets paid to play ragtime piano. There's someone who gets to blow the whistle on a steam engine as it climbs through the mountains. Isn't the thought beautiful? I think about it so often. I'm so glad I got to experience this trip with my husband while we we're young, and I hope to go back before we're old. And when we're old. And again when we're older-than-old. Old people love trains, you know? I totally get it. I've never been accused of having anything less than a grandma's spirit, anyway.