Finally, and then home.

We went rumbling through Chico in the hour of the morning when the birds are out and yelling but before the sun shoots up above the mountains. The mountains looked like a long fog bank way out there to the east -- cold, purple, very wet. Out the sliding doors it went beans, berries, tomatoes, beans, nectarines, dirt, berries, tomatoes, like that for miles. That's what I made of the fields anyway, in the half-light, but who knows what was really growing out there. Then an orchard of tall trees that I couldn't place. I thought apples. Maybe cherries or apricots or some such but Jim said pretty emphatically that he knew them to be olive trees, mostly because of the fingerling leaves. For the oil. Big business, he said. Farmers markets or whatever. All organic and shit.

We would've seen the sun right before we hit Sacramento but we were back asleep by then. Instead Jim shook me awake as we wended through the marshland on the north side of the Benicia bridge. I poked my head out the doors and saw a giant plume of smoke mushrooming over the Exxon refinery in Martinez. The brown smoke extended for miles. It looked like China, with the smokestacks and the brown smoke and the flat bay and the old bridge. Really though, it was just a cloud. Like any other. June Gloom, we called it in San Diego. I've heard the term May Gray before, too. I don't know if this was the same thing or not.

Thirty minutes later we got off somewhere near Martinez where the train had stopped for some reason or another. Jim took his bag without saying anything and hopped off and jogged briskly over the ballast and into a thicket of weeds beyond which the chainlink fence enclosing the yard was twisted and torn. I jumped down after him, trying to keep my knees from buckling under my weight. I hadn't really used my legs in days and they ached. I followed Jim through the weeds, then stepped over the fence where he had. I looked down the adjacent road in both directions but I didn't see Jim anywhere. I called his name. I stood there for a minute, waiting, I guess, for Jim to appear so I could follow him. But it dawned on me that Jim was gone. We were home. I was on my own.