A Book of Railway Journeys Page 14

  The train to Washington was pretty crowded. I went along to the club car and found myself next to a delightfully tight man of about fifty with sandy hair and a Hitler mustache. “My name’s Pitman,” he said, “and I’m in adult education. I arrange workshops and seminars and things all over the country. Christ, how I hate it. This is Mother.” Mrs. Pitman was a large spreading blonde. She was holding a newspaper and pencil, and she said, “Barnyard fowl. Eight letters.” Mr. Pitman said, “Mother’s produced three daughters. They’re all married and have children. Christ, are they prolific!” He sipped at his drink. “Mother and I are on our way home. We went to New York last night to see Hello Dolly. Isn’t that a great show? Isn’t that something?” I said I had found it so boring I had come out halfway through. “Oh, we didn’t find it boring at all,” said Mr. Pitman, “did we, Mother?” Mrs. Pitman said, without looking up, “It was lovely, just perfectly lovely.” Mr. Pitman said, “Oh, we both thought it was just great.”

  Mr. Pitman looked around and noticed a man in a blue suit who had sat down beside us. “This man looks like Faulkner,” said Mr. Pitman. The man looked embarrassed. “My God,” said Mr. Pitman, “he is Faulkner.”

  Mrs. Pitman said, “Honey, Mr. Faulkner’s dead; you know that”; and to me, “What’s ‘Alcoholic refreshment’ in five letters?” I said, “Scotch?” and Mrs. Pitman said, “No, that’s six.”

  Mr. Pitman said, “Do you know where this man’s going? He’s going to Hickory, North Carolina, to get better. Do you know how many people there are in Hickory? Forty-eight. That’s right, forty-eight. Christ, there’s nothing else to do in Hickory but get better. He can’t miss.” His mind went off at a tangent, and he said, “Our eldest girl married a young Jewish boy. He hasn’t got a thing. But he’s a real doll.”

  Mrs. Pitman said, “E, F, blank. Salamander.”

  “What do you mean, E, F, blank, salamander?” said Mr. Pitman, and the man who looked like Faulkner said, “I think it’s eft, which is a kind of newt.”

  “Well, my, aren’t you clever?” said Mrs. Pitman. Mr. Pitman said. “Noot? Who said anything about a noot? You’re crazy. I’m going to wee-wee.”

  He got up and lumbered off down the corridor. Mrs. Pitman put down her pencil and said, “I love Gordon, though his mother was a nut. We have three beautiful children. My second daughter’s blind—did he tell you? She’s just the loveliest creature in the world. Both her sisters are pregnant right now, and boy, are they jealous of her figure! My youngest is a joy, too. She’s been borrowing the car Tuesday nights. She wouldn’t say where she was going for a long time, and then last week we finally got it out of her. She’s been going to give extra coaching to some of the backward colored kids. Now that the schools are integrated, the backward ones can’t keep up unless they have extra coaching. Isn’t that just wonderful?”

  Mr. Pitman came back, and Mrs. Pitman said, “Honey, that was a real good idea you had there”; and she got up and teetered down the train. Mr. Pitman yawned and said, “Oh, boy!” He looked as though he had sobered up a bit. He said to me, “You know, you were right about that Hello Dolly thing. I thought it was a load of horseshit.” I said, “Why didn’t you say so?” He said, “Well you can’t, can you? Not in public. Not about a big hit like that. Besides, it would have upset Mother.”

  LUDOVIC KENNEDY,

  Very Lovely People

  The trains in Maine

  I made my first rail journey into Maine in the summer of 1905, and have been riding to and fro on the cars ever since. On that first trip, when I was led by the hand into the green sanctuary of a Pullman drawing room and saw spread out for my pleasure its undreamed-of facilities and its opulence and the porter holding the pillow in his mouth while he drew the clean white pillowcase up around it and the ladder to the upper and the three-speed electric fan awaiting my caprice at the control switch and the little hammock slung so cunningly to receive my clothes and the adjoining splendor of the toilet room with its silvery appointments and gushing privacy, I was fairly bowled over with childish admiration and glee, and I fell in love with railroading then and there and have not been the same boy since that night.

  American express train on the banks of the Hudson River, by Currier & Ives

  We were a family of eight, and I was the youngest member. My father was a thrifty man, and come the first of August every summer, he felt that he was in a position to take his large family on a month’s vacation. His design, conceived in 1905 and carried out joyously for many summers, was a simple one: for a small sum he rented a rough camp on one of the Belgrade lakes, then turned over the rest of his savings to the railroad and the Pullman Company in return for eight first-class round-trip tickets and plenty of space on the sleeper—a magnificent sum, a magnificent gesture. When it came to travel, there was not a second-class bone in my father’s body, and although he spent thousands of hours of his life sitting bolt upright in dusty day coaches, commuting between Mount Vernon and Grand Central, once a year he put all dusty things aside and lay down, with his entire family, in Pullman perfection, his wife fully dressed against the possibility of derailment, to awake next morning in the winy air of a spruce-clad land and to debouch, surrounded by his eager children and full of the solemnity of trunk checks, onto the platform of the Belgrade depot, just across the tracks from Messalonskee’s wild, alluring swamp. As the express train pulled away from us in Belgrade on that August morning of 1905, I got my first glimpse of this benign bog, which did not seem dismal to me at all. It was an inseparable part of the first intoxication of railroading, and, of all natural habitats, a swamp has ever since been to me the most beautiful and most seductive.

  Today, as my thoughts wander affectionately back over fifty-five years of railroading, the thing that strikes me as most revealing about that first rail trip in 1905 is the running time of the train. We left New York at eight o’clock in the evening and arrived at Belgrade next morning at half past nine—a thirteen-and-a-half-hour run, a distance of four hundred and fifteen miles, a speed of thirty-one miles an hour. And what is the speed of our modern Iron Horse in this decade as he gallops through the nights? I timed him from New York to Bangor not long ago, divided the mileage by the number of hours, and came up with the answer: thirty-four miles an hour. Thus, in fifty-five years, while the motorcar was lifting its road speed to the dazzling rate of seventy miles an hour on the thruways, and the airplane was becoming a jet in the sky, the railroad steadfastly maintained its accustomed gait, between thirty and thirty-five miles an hour. This is an impressive record. It’s not every institution that can hold to an ideal through fifty-five years of our fastest-moving century. It’s not every traveller who is content to go thirty-four, either. I am not sure that even I, who love the rails, am content. A few of us visionaries would like to see the railroad step up the pace from thirty-four to forty, so we could leave New York after dinner at night and get home in time for lunch next day. (I’ve just learned that the Maine Central has a new schedule, effective early next month. Soon I can leave New York after dinner and be home the following afternoon in time for dinner. There’s to be a four-hour layover in Portland, an eighteen-hour trip all told. Thus the speed of my Horse has just dropped from thirty-four miles an hour to twenty-eight. He’s a very sick horse.)

  Railroads are immensely complex, and they seem to love complexity, just as they love ritual and love the past. Not all sick roads die, as I have pointed out, but a road can sometimes put on a pretty good show of dying, and then its ritual seems to be part of the scheme of dying. During 1959, because of some sickness of my own, and of my wife’s, and of other members of our two families, she and I patronized the railroad more often than usual, observing its agony while using what remained of its facilities. There was one memorable night last fall, when, sitting forlorn in the deserted waiting room of the Portland depot, waiting to take the sleeper for New York, we seemed actually to be the principal actors in the deathbed scene of railroading in America; no Hollywood director could ha
ve improved on the thing. For reasons too dull to go into, we were taking our departure from Portland instead of Bangor. The old station hung tomblike above and around our still forms, drear and drafty. (No social crowd was gathered here.) The only other persons in the place were the ticket agent, at ease behind his counter, and a redcap in slow conversation with two friends. Now and then the front door would open and a stray would enter, some fellow to whom all railroad stations are home. Shortly before train time, a porter appeared, dragging a large wooden table and two chairs, and set the stage for the rites of ticket-taking. The table looked to be the same age as the depot and to have been chewed incessantly by porcupines. Two conductors in faded blue now walked stiffly onto the set and seated themselves at the table. My wife and I, catching the cue, rose and approached the oracle, and I laid our tickets down in front of one of the men. He grasped them, studied them closely, as though he had never seen anything quite like them in all his life, then turned to his companion and shouted, for all to hear in the room where no one was, “B in the Twenty-three!” To which the other replied, in a tremendous voice, “B in the Twenty-three!” (and seemed to add, “for the last two passengers on earth”). Then he tore off the stub and handed it to me.

  The words of the ceremony, spoken so loudly, although familiar to us seemed unnaturally solemn and impressive, and we felt more as though we were taking marriage vows than taking a train. After the ceremony was over, we followed the red-cap with our luggage, walking slowly out, the last two passengers, into the cold train shed, and picked our way across the tracks toward our waiting sleeper. Halfway there, we passed an ancient trainman, his arms full of kerosene lanterns, on his way to harness the Horse with the honored trappings of the past. There was something ineffably sad about the departure of this train; death seemed in the air.

  When I came to live in Maine, the depot was twenty-three miles away, in Ellsworth. Then the depot got to be fifty miles away, in Bangor. After tomorrow night, it will be a hundred and forty miles away (for a sleeping car), in Portland. A year from now, there may be no depot in the whole state-none with a light burning, that is. I cannot conceive of my world without a rail connection, and perhaps I shall have to pull up stakes and move to some busier part of the swamp, where the rails have not been abandoned. Whether I move away or stay put, if the trains of Maine come to a standstill I will miss them greatly. I will miss cracking the shade at dawn—and the first shafts of light in the tinted woods, and the old excitement. I’ll miss the Canada geese in the Kennebec in the seasons of migration, and the breakfast in bed, drinking from the punctured can of grapefruit juice as we proceed gravely up the river, and the solid old houses of Gardiner, and Augusta’s little trackside glade with the wooden staircase and the vines of the embankment and the cedar waxwing tippling on berries as I tipple on juice. I’ll miss the peaceful stretches of the river above Augusta, with the stranded sticks of pulpwood along the banks; the fall overcast, the winter brightness; the tiny blockhouse of Fort Halifax, at Winslow, mighty bastion of defense; and at Waterville the shiny black flanks of Old No. 470, the Iron Horse that has been enshrined right next to what used to be the Colby campus—the steam locomotive that pulled the cars on the last prediesel run from Portland to Bangor.

  Carrying the United States Mail across the Sierra Nevada, 1870

  Early last spring, as my train waited on a siding for another train to go through, I looked out of the window and saw our conductor walking in the ditch, a pocketknife in his hand. He passed out of sight and was gone ten minutes, then reappeared. In his arms was a fine bunch of pussy willows, a gift for his wife, I don’t doubt. It was a pleasing sight, a common episode, but I recall feeling at the time that the scene was being overplayed, and that it belonged to another century. The railroads will have to get on with the action if they are to boost that running speed from twenty-eight to forty and lure customers.

  Perhaps the trains will disappear from Maine forever, and the conductor will then have the rest of his life to cut pussies along the right of way, with the sand a-blowing and the black berries a-growing. I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, for I think one well-conducted institution may still regulate a whole country.

  E. B. WHITE,

  The Points of My Compass

  I LIKE TO SEE IT LAP THE MILES

  I like to see it lap the miles,

  And lick the valleys up,

  And stop to feed itself at tanks;

  And then, prodigious, step

  Around a pile of mountains,

  And, supercilious, peer

  In shanties by the sides of roads;

  And then a quarry pare

  To fit its sides, and crawl between, Complaining all the while

  In horrid, hooting stanza;

  Then chase itself down hill

  And neigh like Boanerges;

  Then, punctual as a star,

  Stop—docile and omnipotent—

  At its own stable door.

  EMILY DICKINSON

  Wendy in Zen

  There would be no food until Albany, when the New York section, with its diner, was hooked to this train. So I went into the lounge car and had a beer. I packed my pipe and set it on fire and savored the trancelike state of lazy reflection that pipe smoke induces in me. I blew myself a cocoon of it, and it hung in clouds around me, so comforting and thick that the girl who entered the car and sat down opposite seemed wraithlike, a child lost in fog. She put three bulging plastic bags on her table, then tucked her legs under her. She folded her hands in her lap and stared stonily down the car. Her intensity made me alert. At the next table a man was engrossed in a Matt Helm story, and near him, two linesmen—they wore their tools—were playing poker. There was a boy with a short-wave radio, but his racket was drowned by the greater racket of the train. A man in a uniform—a train man—was stirring coffee; there was an old greasy lantern at his feet. At the train man’s table, but not speaking, a fat woman sneaked bites at a candy bar. She did it guiltily, as if she feared that at any moment someone would shout, Put that thing away!

  ‘‘You mind not smoking?’’

  It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze.

  I looked for a NO SMOKING sign. There was none. I said, “Is it bothering you?”

  She said, “It kills my eyes.”

  I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.

  She said, “That stuff is poison.”

  Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, “They say peanuts cause cancer.”

  She grinned vengefully at me and said, “Pumpkin seeds.”

  I turned away.

  “And these are almonds.”

  I considered relighting my pipe.

  “And this is cashews.”

  Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at twenty. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round shouldered.

  “What do you study, Wendy?”

  “Eastern philosophy? I’m into Zen.”

  Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about the Hole, or perhaps the Whole—it still made no sense to me. She hadn’t read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did—it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world—that was Buddhism, too.

  “Not politics,” I said. “That’s not Buddhism. It’s just crooked.”

  “That’s what everyone says, but they’re wrong. I’ve been reading Marx. Marx is a kind of Buddhist.”

  Was she pulling my leg? I said
, “Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It’s the opposite of thought—it’s selfish, it’s narrow, it’s dishonest. It’s all half truths and short cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things, but in Burma, where...”

  “Take this,” she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. “I’m a raw-foodist-nondairy vegetarian. You’re probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong—I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!” The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. “They’re just destroying themselves and they don’t even know it. They’re smoking themselves to death. Look at the smoke in this car.”

  I said, “Some of that is my smoke.”

  “It kills my eyes.”

  “‘Nondairy,’” I said. “That means you don’t drink milk.”

  “Right.”

  “What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you’ve got to have calcium.”

  “I get my calcium in cashews,” she said. Was this true? “Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.”

  “A box. That’s quite a lot.”

  “It was the milk. It made mucus,” she said. “My nose used to run like you wouldn’t believe.”