Westward from Chicago (2019)

The California Zephyr, one of the last great passenger train routes, starts in downtown Chicago and ends across the bay from San Francisco, a fifty-four-hour ride that often takes much more due to the chronic lateness in the American system of passenger rail.

I’ve taken this route and its reverse route perhaps a dozen times, each time fascinating.

It’s not only the people that you meet on the train—a demographic slice that cuts through the usual socio-economic bubble that we all live within—but it’s the land itself that holds one’s attention. The back-sides of town, the spaces between farms, and especially the desert and the mountains and the canyons and the sky.

It all scrolls by the windows of the train, unedited, uncurated, unorganized for your appreciation. It exists without you and there is so much of it.

Here I share a short excerpt from the film I made by pressing my phone against the glass.