Glenwood Springs comes up in the world

Glenwood Hot Springs last night, when the air temperature was 25 degrees F and the rising mist thinner than usual.

When I began research for Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America in 1990, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, was trying to shake off its reputation as the town of residence for "the help" that worked at the ski resorts of Vail and Aspen. One old friend, who had risen teeteringly high on the status ladder from our boyhood and owned a condo in Vail, sneered at my idea of stopping in Glenwood Springs and making it part of my book.

But in my three years of research for the book on the train that calls at Glenwood Springs, I encountered more young ski bums than elderly cleaning ladies. It seemed as if almost every waiter or waitress in the town's restaurants was just making a living to be able to ski, the way servers in Manhattan restaurants tend to be up-and-coming actors.

I liked the town because it was so unpretentious, yet free of those awful downmarket Jellystone Park attractions that mar so many Western tourist towns. The only concession to Declasse Road Culture I could see was the huge water slide at one end of the Hot Springs thermal pool. (There are two slides now.) That was smart of the pool operators -- the slides keep rumbustious youngsters well away from the adults devoted to Taking the Waters.

In the early '90s Lady Friend heard so many languages in the pool -- German, French, Spanish and dozens she couldn't identify -- that we deduced Glenwood Springs is a favorite stop for foreign tourists. It still seems to be, she said yesterday, as we parboiled ourselves in the 103-degree therapy pool.

Glenwood Springs has expanded a great deal since the 1990s. New motels have gone up all over, as have chichi (and excellent) new restaurants, some of them with Manhattan prices. The town's grand old hotels have been refurbished and even rebuilt, and are also commanding decidedly non-downmarket rates. A soaring tourist tramway has gone up the mountainside north of the town. New homes, both small and palatial, have been built everywhere. A huge new mall is in the planning stages.

What's more, townspeople tell me with a touch of schadenfreude, the moneyed residents of Vail and Aspen now are self-consciously mingling with "the help," buying necessities at Glenwood Springs' Walmart and Target stores. Sic transit gloria . . .

What I'm doing on my vacation

Combat report from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, by a happy tourist who is probably on his last vacation for the duration of Great Depression II:

Friday the Lady Friend and I departed via our favorite train, the California Zephyr, for Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It was my 22nd or 23rd trip -- I've lost count -- on that train.

The journey began in Chicago Union Station, where Amtrak's Metropolitan Lounge for sleeper passengers had been refurbished with new carpeting and furniture since I had last been there a year ago -- and Amtrak has at last laid on Internet wireless. A year ago the shabbiness was almost embarrassing.

The customer service reps at the desk (who got a national public drubbing a couple of weeks ago when another train was delayed almost 24 hours without respite for the passengers) were pleasant and polite, but I have never known them to be otherwise.

The Zephyr departed bang on time at 2 p.m. Our sleeper, one of the original double-decker Superliners of the late 1970s, had been completely rebuilt, and by the look of the appointments quite recently. I didn't need to use the roll of duct tape every smart Amtrak traveler brings along to snub down wayward and misfitting curtains and rattling panels. I'd give the car 4 stars, and I'd also give Donald, its attendant, 4 stars. He was quiet, polite and attentive, though hardly colorful.

The diner and lounge car also rated 4 stars, looking as if they'd been through recent refurbishment at Beech Grove, Amtrak's Indiana maintenance facility. Not the coaches -- they were as shabby-rattly as any I've seen in a decade. One star for those.

At dinner, the Lady Friend and I both gave the flatiron steak 3 stars (it was tasty, albeit slightly tough and rubbery); the boiled veggies 4 stars (to my surprise, they were moist and tender); the baked potato 4 stars, and the creme-de-brulee cheesecake 4 stars and the Haagen-Dazs ice cream 5 stars.

Our waiter, E.B., was an interesting case. Clearly a veteran, he was both jovial and efficient, but he was also officious, sternly rebuking the Lady Friend and several other diners for handing him their empty plates instead of allowing him to pick them up from the table. Three stars for him, but four for the over-all dining experience.

The sleeping experience: Three stars. Donald arrived not five minutes after we put in the call to make up our room for the night, and I got in a solid six hours of slumber, but sharp jolts somewhere in Nebraska awakened me at 3 a.m. and I couldn't get back to sleep. The beds are comfortable enough, but I'd swear Amtrak's minuscule pillows grow smaller with each passing year. And those heavy coal trains seem to be beating Burlington Northern Santa Fe's Chicago-Denver main line into rough-riding spaghetti. Not Amtrak's fault.

Breakfast: Four stars. E. B. helpfully suggested that we not sample the scrambled eggs but was upbeat about the rest of the menu. My three-egg cheese omelette deserved 4 stars, as did the hash browns, biscuit and coffee -- but the bacon was a tad dry, rating just 3. My wife gave the hot oatmeal 5 stars and called it the best she'd ever had -- I'll have to try that on the return trip.

Jolly-officious waiter would have rated 4 stars this time, but we heard him put down another diner for handing him her plate. If he'd explained why, perhaps in a pleasant fashion, that would have saved her a little embarrassment. There's probably a good reason to allow the waiters to do the picking-up -- I suspect it's to avoid spills -- but this fellow could use a bit of a personality adjustment. He might even earn a fifth star.

He was much improved at lunch, 4 stars' worth. The steakburger with cheese and bacon rated a full 5 stars, even though it wasn't good for my arteries. Amtrak's burgers have always been top-drawer, and I just cannot resist them.

Likewise, the Colorado Rockies scenery, the Front Range and the canyons -- Byers, Gore, Little Gore and Glenwood -- has always been a 5-star show.

And we arrived in Glenwood Springs right on the advertised, at 1:53 p.m. An hour later we were in the Hot Springs pools, soaking up the dissolved chemical bennies.

So far, a 4-star trip, maybe 4 1/2.

More in the next couple of days.

LATER: We had dinner at Juicy Lucy's Steak House across from the Amtrak station. Superb pork chop, superb salmon fillet, both 5 stars. Slightly pricey, but we still escaped with a bill-plus-tip well south of a C-note, and that included a half bottle of an excellent Napa Valley merlot and a shared slab of creme de brulee cheesecake. This bistro was recommended by someone on Railforum.com and I enthusiastically pass it along.

Off ve go to Take der Vaters

The Romans had the right idea about hot springs: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadena's "A Favourite Custom," 1909, oil on panel, at the Tate Gallery, London.

Tomorrow the Lady Friend and I don our engineer's caps and metamorphose into the unreconstructed rail buffs we are at heart. As promised last December 2, we are heading for Glenwood Springs, Colorado, aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr.

Among other things, at the Glenwood Hot Springs we will Take the Waters, as members of the upper crust used to say a century ago when they were going to such nobby spas as Saratoga Springs, Salsomaggiore in Italy or Baden-Baden in Germany. Here's part of the reason why, in a passage cribbed from my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America:

"Much of the attraction of thermal pools lies in simply letting one's imagination float upon the passing scene. Sitting on a ledge in the shallows of the larger tank during our visit was a quartet of stout matrons in their seventies, chattering animatedly in age-old fashion. Throughout history women have gathered to exchange gossip at watering places, and these ladies, despite their floppy straw hats and voluminous skirted bathing costumes -- "swimsuits" is inadequate -- wouldn't have looked out of place in linen robes, amphorae on their shoulders.

"Next to them four men of similar vintage -- their husbands? -- sat in silent line abreast like basilisks brooding on a cornice. Four leathery bald heads remained rigid as four pairs of reptilian eyes slowly trailed into the pool a thong-clad beauty who brought to life Raymond Chandler's line about 'a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.'"

We'll be back in a week, but until then I'll try to post combat reports from the front.

More words

At last, a honest columnist: Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points out the truth behind Lake Superior State's annual list of banished words: Far from dropping out of memory, those words (and phrases) tend to stay with us. Why? They're useful.

What's more, the nation's newspapers wouldn't take much notice of the list if it weren't cannily issued around New Year's, when news is slow and we need something light to assuage the pain of our hangovers.

Assuage! Now there's a good old underused word to revive. Maybe the guys at Wayne State University will put it on their list.

LATER: A noted environmentalist takes a swipe at the Lake Superior State list.

Words

Lake Superior State University gets a lot of ink around New Year's every year when it releases its annual List of Banished Words, those it unilaterally deems to have been overused during the previous year.

This normally would be all to the good, but the banishers never seem to offer decent replacements for the banished. So "green" is overused? Very well, what shall we employ in its stead? "Carbon footprint," too? Let's face it, those are useful terms with particular meanings, and it is not their fault people write and say them a lot. After all, those words stand for important -- even vital -- concepts.

You could say the same for "a," "and" and "the." Shall we banish them, too?

Bunch of nattering negativists, those guys at Lake Superior State, but at least their campaign gets that obscure third-level school in remote and frozen Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, into the public eye for a while.

Let us now praise Wayne State University farther south in Detroit, which takes a positive attitude toward words. It wants to bring good words back from oblivion.

Its "glorious variety" of words gives English "an unparalleled capacity for nuance and precise expression," say the Wayne Staters. Reviving certain words that have fallen into obscurity "would make the speaking and writing of English a livelier, snappier pastime and more satisfying for us all." Bravo!

And here are the first three words on the Wayne State list:

"Cahoots . . . Questionable collaboration, secret partnerships. I think my senator is in cahoots with fundamentalists.

"Charlatan . . . Quack, Imposter. This guy claims his anti-aging cream really works, but I think he's just a charlatan.

"Defenestrate . . . To throw out of a window. Bob threatened to defenestrate his laptop if it didn't stop eating his data."

Followed by farrago, galoshes, higgledy-piggledy, mendacious, mercurial, nonplussed, obsequious, quixotic, resplendent, sagacity, skullduggery, sublime, supercilious and sycophant.

All excellent words, words with precise meanings, words with lilt and zest. But I would argue that they are not obscure, that they are all in common use in publications aimed at readers with more than two brain cells to rub together.

Come on, Wayne Staters, you can do better. How about reviving "impecunious," meaning "having little or no money," as in a titled but impecunious family?

These days we all could overuse that word.

Back at work on the novel

Posting yesterday's entry on New Year's resolutions seems to have pushed me off the dime, at least a little, on Resolution No. 1 -- to resume work on that fourth Steve Martinez novel.

One of the problems I was having was shaping a convincing character to be my killer. None of those I'd created really seemed to possess a plausible motive to deprive another human being of his life and to be the kind who would develop sufficient skill with a weapon highly unusual in the commission of serial murder.

So yesterday morning, a few minutes after putting up that blogpost, right out of the blue I hit upon a new character to insert into Chapter One of Hang Fire, and now maybe at last I've come unstuck.

My task is not just to give a person enough physical description to allow the reader to see that person, but also to build a history that lets the reader know him or her. (I am deliberately being vague about the gender. Think I'm going to telegraph everything?)

Right this moment a telling detail to dab into my developing portrait has just occurred to me. It's a detail that carries an important clue to the plot but also one that won't immediately cause the reader to say "Aha! Here's the killer!" At least I hope so.

Now to go insert that detail . . .

Resolutions revisited

Last November 7 I decided to post my New Year's resolutions early, partly to be contrary (who wants to read all those New Year's resolutions blogs on January 1, when one is recovering from the night before?) and partly because I needed something to blog about.

Seven weeks have passed since then. How have I made out with the resolutions?

"1. Work harder on the new novel instead of dipping into it desultorily."

Not terribly well. The news that publishers have cut back on their acceptances of new manuscripts -- and some are not accepting any at all -- means that it may be another year or two before my publisher even deigns to take a look at the fourth Steve Martinez novel. So this has become an occasional project, but the Lady Friend and I are taking a writing trip to Colorado next week, and that ought to be good for another 50 to 75 pages.

"2. See the grandchildren frequently and regularly."

Since 2 3/4-year-old Emmet and four-month-old Alice live in the vicinity, that's an easy one so far as they are concerned, but I needs must get to Washington more often to visit 6-year-old Will and 2 1/2-year-old Ellie. Piled-up airline miles will help with that.

"3. Boost my Macbook's RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB. That way I won't have to buy a new computer in order to go faster, even if I could afford a new one, which I can't, not in this economic climate. Two GB of RAM costs less than $50, shipped."

Did. That was the easiest resolution to keep. And everything does run a bit faster on the Macbook.

"4. Get off my ass and go out and take more photographs to feed the other blog. The exercise will be good for me."

Needs work, as you can see from the photo blog -- the last photo I posted was on Dec. 18. The weather around here has been intense, but that's really no excuse.

"5. Walk the dog longer each day. It'll be good for him and it'll be good for me."

Needs work, too. I can legitimately blame the weather, which has made the sidewalks slippery, not good for a senior citizen with a dicey sense of balance.

"6. Resume my daily hour-long workouts at the Geezer Club, starting today. (Catching a cold two weeks ago made me backslide.)"

Did, and I've lost a few pounds, too.

"7. Fly my airplane at least an hour a week as long as I can afford it, which might not be much longer."

Almost impossible, because southern Wisconsin had a lot of snow and the hangar aprons couldn't be plowed owing to soft ground around them. But there's been a thaw, and there's a good chance I can get old N5859E back into the air tomorrow.

"8. Smile and say hello to the sour neighbor up the street every time I pass by. Maybe she'll smile back sometime."

Haven't seen her at all, but my pearly whites remain ready to flash when the occasion arises.

"9. Read two books a week instead of just one, exercising that dusty library card."

Needs work, too. I've become a slow and careful reader in my advanced age, going through P.D. James' newest novel one chapter a day. One retains more that way, doesn't one? (Meantime, in two weeks the Lady Friend has nearly plowed through the entirety of Doris Kearns Goodwin's 916-page Team of Rivals for her monthly book group. She shames me.)

"10. Finish that Windsor armchair kit I bought last summer. It's not that difficult -- it's the careful sanding that's so time-consuming."

It's finished! But I screwed up the staining -- one should apply wood filler after staining, not before -- so I'll probably paint it later in the year.

"11. Take a course in advanced photography or American Sign Language somewhere, just to mix with other people and forestall reclusiveness."

Manana.

"12. Stop blogging about politics, and encourage other bloggers to follow suit."

It's hard, it's hard. Losing weight is easier, and better for you anyway.