Telluride 2014.

I wrote this journal on the Eastbound California Zephyr, returning to Chicago after the festival; I retain the comments about the ride, because it is a journal, not, film reviewing. Explaining why its not film reviewing could plunge me into a long unnecessary discourse on reviewing. I have reviewed art and some film, for various popular and scholarly journals for over 20 years, the short answer is that it is not timely, because I’m not writing on a deadline, working with an editor and I am not being paid! Another reason has to do with the nature of festivals: one makes a pilgrimage to festivals, so the journey, as we have learned from so many writers is always important. Another is that going back and forth in time and space has its own rewards.

The sun is illuminating the red, or is it sienna-colored, escarpment that runs north of the Colorado River; there is a bit of a haze, but not a cloud in the sky.  When we stepped out of the condos that had been our home for the past two weeks, to leave Telluride at 5 at AM, we could hear the river and I saw a shooting star beyond the deep layers of black against black that were the mountains. Daniel, the Polish driver who took me and a film programmer from Lincoln Center, back to Grand Junction was another world traveler, adept at conversations while moving through space. We had a conversation about Polish resorts in Egypt and New Guinea: his latest trip. I made him promise to watch Pawlikowski’s Ida, one of the best films from last year’s festival. It was still dark when we came out of the high peaks of the San Juan Mountains at Ridgeway. There is actually a fair amount of farming in a green belt between the desert and the mountains. When we stopped and got out of the car in Grand Junction the air smelled like sage in the dawn, something very liberating about the dawn. I could have easily driven to California.

The Grand Junction Amtrak station is a box-like building with air-conditioning next to the collapsing original yellow brick Mission-style building with a red tile roof. There is a bit of a courtyard in front but no place to sit. Having spent the summer in France, I couldn’t help thinking that there would be places to sit, even though, it does get quite hot here, right now, for instance, it is lovely, but you have to sit in the dark station. In France you could go out on the Quays. They would not let us out there for some reason, even though there was at least one bench out there along the track. The surrounding neighborhood consists of pawn shops, buildings for rent, parking lots, and some roads which seem to be part of the main thoroughfares of the city. I tried walking into town, but the space was not pedestrian, so I felt odd, disobeying the social rules of this world, by walking, and went back to the station. In Nimes, there was a great promenade leading from the station—one of the most beautiful, built into an old viaduct—filled with people and graceful spaces.

The escarpment is remote, but beaconing, in its haze under a cloudless sky. There are peach orchards and vineyards in Grand Junction, which may let humidity into the air. I hate to leave the west. It seems like I have to leave the mountains as soon as I begin to trust in their magnificence. I can see a cleft in the striated red rock that looks like a beautiful canyon. How I would love to go up there, and enter into the world of the rock—the heart of the land. I walk up and down the platform looking across the wide space, at the trains in the yards. It seemed to be at least a 1/4 mile long and was beautiful in the morning air. In France there would be people everywhere, and yet, the great emptiness of the spaces comes into your soul, and you begin to like it, not the parking lots of course, but the red rock canyons, and wide plateaus, and the silent vastness of the mountains.