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country’s landscapes from a clean mobile home and place of work, a place they know and command, as if The Man Without a Country had been given command of a ship to cruise America’s coasts and rivers.
    At breakfast we enter Colorado, the country mostly flat and grassy, with scattered trees and low green scrub brush. The sky is cloudless, an expanse of unbroken blue from horizon to horizon. Cows watch us, and a jackrabbit bolts. After breakfast, the club car is filled, so we go down to our room, which occupies the width of the car, with wide windows on both sides. To the north there are ridges as we move toward Denver. West of Fort Morgan we are in rolling terrain, some large farms, penned cattle, then grass and white and yellow flowers growing wild. By eleven o’clock we can see the Rockies. Leaving Denver, we skip lunch, sit in the club car, and look out at the snow-capped mountain range to the west, as the train goes north to Cheyenne, where we turn west toward Laramie and see antelopes standing in the open. Because they are so close to the train, they seem tame; but then I realize that there are no people out there, and the train is going through their country, whose flat scrub-grown surface is split by long draws, and rises steeply into buttes and, in the distance, mesas. We stop at Rawlins and I go downstairs, to the bar, to buy cigarettes. A black woman named Sharon Avington is tending bar, selling snacks, and working a microwave oven. She doesn’t have Marlboros.
    â€œI’ve got ex ot ic brands: Merit, Kent III, Salem Lights — but you see those machines in the station?” She points through the open door at a window in the small station. “You go in there. But don’t dawdle.”
    I go, stopping long enough to read the sign on the station door:
    Rule of the day : DON’T get off the train if you
    can’t hurry back.
    Missed this month — 3
    Near misses — 0
    In the club car we watch grazing antelope, russet buttes, and the citizenry. While driving the highways and walking the streets and roads of America, I blame the garbage I see on an abstraction: they dropped their emptied cigarette packs and cans and bottles and wrappers and boxes. Here on the train we watch them do it. There are no waiters in the club car, but there is a large garbage can; the arms of the chairs and the tables have ashtrays. By mid-afternoon smokers and drinkers have come and gone, leaving behind their coat-of-arms: ashes and cans and plastic glasses. I watch one couple, a man with greying short hair and his wife; their dress and faces appear conservative, and I imagine their kitchen at home: clean, orderly, the emptied can or bottle immediately removed from the table and dropped in the garbage hidden behind a cupboard door. Yet on the table they share between their seats at the window, and in the shallow trough for drinks beneath the window, cans and glasses accumulate, ashes and matchsticks scatter. Then they leave.
    First call for dinner is supposed to be at five, but today it is late, and the citizenry are lining up in the club car aisles, muttering behind our chairs as we watch the country. Downstairs Sharon is chilling the champagne we brought. A large woman keeps saying she will write to Amtrak. Others call for the steward. A wiry greying man in his fifties goes into the dining room and comes back with word: We were late getting to Rawlins and they had to turn off the power when we stopped there and the chefs did not want to start cooking before that, and then lose power.
    â€œBut he’s only a Negro,” the wiry man says.
    My wife goes downstairs to the bar, comes back with the champagne, and I hold plastic glasses over her lap while she works on the cork. It pops loudly and the large woman softly screams.
    â€œI thought it was a gun,” she says.
    People laugh nervously, and for a while their anger dissipates. We drink the bottle of champagne while behind us in the aisle the