The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [77]
There was no time for elaboration before, with melodramatic suddenness, a roar presently engulfed the hotel, negating all possibility of speech for the next four minutes. The sound reverberated around the valley, echoing off the cliff faces of the Tehachapi Mountains and making manifest the vastness of the sandy bowl in which the town lay. Mojave was positioned across one of the country’s most congested rail junctions. Freight trains, many of them a hundred cars long, came through day and night bearing chemicals and aggregates, canned fruits and television sets, cattle carcasses and corn flour. The trains were on their way north and east, from the port at Long Beach to depots in Denver and Chicago, and were so heavily loaded that despite being pushed along by as many as eight separate locomotives apiece, rarely achieved speeds of more than fifty kilometres an hour. On cloudy nights, in the canyons between Mojave and Bakersfield, gangs of Mexican thieves often succeeded in jumping onto these ponderous trains and cutting open containers of valuable cargo. Every month, one or two of their number would be found dead on the desert floor, surrounded by bin bags full of running shoes from Vietnam, having lost their way among the rocks and crevasses. Kimberly showed me an account of just such a misadventure which had been published in the local paper. Decidedly unmoved and vengeful in tone, it appeared to be squarely on the side of the shoes.
The experience of the train made it hard to leave. Learning of it was akin to having seduced someone in a bar only to discover, when she stood up to dance or go to the bathroom, that she had only one leg. I secured a key from Kimberly and headed to my room, from which I almost immediately realised I would have to escape until the instant when I felt ready to go to sleep. I headed back downstairs to take advantage of the swimming pool. A teenaged girl was sitting next to it on a sun lounger and cutting her toenails, which ricocheted remarkable distances across a turquoise-coloured concrete floor. Unfortunately, most of the budget for the pool had apparently been squandered on proclaiming – in an enormous illuminated display by the roadside – that it existed, leaving few resources for it actually to do so. It was the minimum size to qualify as a pool before it would have to be recategorised as a bath.
I went back to the car for a drive around Mojave. However, like many small towns in the American west, it seemed not to have a centre where citizens could gather for fellowship, javelin contests and philosophical debate, as they had done, according to most historical accounts, in Athens in the age of Pericles. There was not even a Wal-Mart. Judging by the number of signs devoted to it, the main attraction was the airport, which ran diagonally across the town and comprised a few huts, a hangar, two Cessnas and a landing strip. In the pale late-afternoon sky, an ultralight aircraft was advancing slowly over the valley, making no discernible progress. But as I continued around the airfield, a more arresting spectacle came into view: on the horizon at the far end of the runway, the entire aeronautical population of a sizeable international airport appeared to have touched down and been parked in close formation, wing tip to wing tip, as if a calamity I had not yet heard about had prompted a mass migration by aircraft from every continent to this particular corner of southern California. There were representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Switzerland; there were short-haul Airbuses and giant 747s. Adding to the eeriness of the scene, the planes had none of their usual supporting equipment – no jetties, buses, baggage carts or refuelling trucks. They sat unattended in the desert shrub,