A Train Runs Through It

Edna St. Vincent Millay apparently enjoyed train travel. She wrote these famous line that roll the reader along with her wanderlust:

                                          My heart is warm with friends I make,
                                           And better friends I'll not be knowing;
                                           Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
                                                     No matter where it's going.

I've found that I perhaps enjoy the idea of train travel more than the trips themselves. I once took Amtrak's Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco and back, booking a roomette. Going through the vast emptiness of Nevada at night, looking out my window at the miles and miles of nothing except glimpses of the Milky Way, became almost a mystical experience. I became one with the lullaby rocking of the train… the rocking, the clicking. The greatest onomatopoeia in any language is the Spanish word for "railroad," if you rightly roll your "r's" - ferrocarril…ferrocarril…ferrocaril…

The stops we made also gave me a sense of going back in time. There were the wood-beamed train stations out west. I felt I was stepping off into the year 1880 in Elko, Nevada. A clutch of taciturn, raw-looking cowboys was huddled on the platform, their breath made visible by the cold morning air. Some flakes of snow started to drift down. And it was the Fourth of July! At those altitudes, anything is possible. Then there was the harrowing one-inch-from-the-edge ascent through the Rockies, overlooking the Donner Pass. Watch out! Don't lean over! That shift of weight might plummet us off into the same deadly fate as that Donner Party of old.

Yes, it was breath-taking, thrilling - at times. But there was a certain numbing boredom about it too. I was glad each way when the trip was over and I was back on solid ground, relieved of any twinge of motion sickness, able to read, eat, move around expansively again. I wasn't sure that the romantic idea of train travel would be enough to sustain me through too many more long journeys.

But a few places I visited more recently made me realize that I could have my cake and eat it too. I could have the pleasure of that rolling ferrocarril refrain, without being confined to actually going anywhere. I just had to stay in railroad towns that have a track running through them and a steady flow of freight making its way to distant points. I stayed in motels not far from the tracks in two such towns that are both lulled and enlivened by the rhythm of the trains coming and going.

One of these towns was Revelstoke, British Columbia. There's no passenger train service to this jewel of the Canadian Rockies anymore, so I got there by Greyhound. But the sound of the freight cars chugging through town provides a steady, reassuring heartbeat to life there. 

Trains still define much of the town. There's a train museum by the tracks which includes much of the often cruel history of the building of the Canadian-Pacific Railway. Wherever you go in the area, you see reminders of how Chinese laborers were worked to the bone building the railway, were confined to squalid ghetto parts of town, and then were discarded and left to die when they were too old or ill to do a long day's labor anymore. Some relatively fortunate workers were able to make it out of that most dangerous grind by advancing into laundry jobs. That work had its own hazards though. It involved handling scalding hot irons that had to be regularly re-heated over burners. A very few of these workers managed to advance further to become waiters in, and then even owners of Chinese restaurants.

All this history of prejudice and poverty was on display at the train museum. But then there was also the gleaming brass achieve of the train cars themselves. They had some old Pullman cars appointed as they would have been in the heyday of train travel, in the 1940's, with a rose on every dining car table. An "old-timer" was at the controls of a retired lead car. He showed tourists what all the levers and dials were for and told us the difference between running steam engines and the more modern locomotives.

From there, I explored the newer downtown area. Revelstoke was featured in a psychological thriller starring Malcolm McDowell called The Barber. In that film, they showed the town as retaining some of its old mining and railroading atmosphere, with wooden plank sidewalks and swinging saloon doors. I didn't see any such Wild West remnants though. The downtown stores all tended to be typical modern boutiques. Except for one. There was one really distinctive storefront along this main street. It housed a player piano/nickelodeon museum owned by a British couple who had made the maintenance and exhibition of these extraordinary music-makers their life's work.

After I had paid the modest admission charge, they offered me a cup of tea as I took the guided tour. I was both charmed and a little disappointed at the same time. I was charmed by the Agatha Christie Miss Marple aspect of these two transplants from Britain, but I was disappointed when they tussled with each other a bit over who would do the chore of guiding me around. "Well, I took the last one," the husband gently protested. So I fell the lot of the wife.

Since it was rather late in the autumn, there were hardly any other tourists in town, which meant I got a private showing of all the rare old pianos. The wife played them or set them in motion for me, one-by-one. She cited pianos or harpsichords from the 1700's that had the capacity to produce the same gamut of special effects that the most souped-up keyboard of a modern rock band can produce. With the flick of a switch, you could activate brass, percussion, or string accompaniments to your playing, all in a variety of styles and rhythms. Of course, these embellishments were accomplished with intricate mechanics rather than with electricity. The place was a little pocket of exquisite craftsmanship in a world of disposable plastic. If you ever pass through Revelstoke, I can recommend the Nickelodeon Museum on First Street to you.

Then I crossed to the other side of the tracks and meandered up through the residential hillside. There was a poster at the start of this winding road, with red "X's" showing spots where grizzly bears had been sighted. Walking along, part of me hoped I'd get to see a grizzly bear - but a larger part of me hoped I wouldn't!

There was the most eclectic assortment of houses imaginable along this way. There'd be a shanty next door to a brick mansion. Trailing from one of the more impressive homes was the compelling sound of a bagpipe. I walked a short distance up the house's flower-lined driveway to pause and listen a while. It seemed likely someone was inside practicing on the instrument, although whoever it was needed little practice. He or she was already pitch-perfect. The rallying drone made me want to stay on. "The pipes, the pipes are calling…" But after a short while, the playing came to an abrupt, self-conscious halt. I wondered if the person inside had spotted me in the driveway and didn't wish to perform for an uninvited audience. So I reluctantly walked on.

I ventured a little farther afield and took in a tour of the big hydroelectric dam outside of town. The dam generates electricity for a large part of the Okanagon Valley area and beyond, so security was tight. I took a cab onto the grounds, and both the cab driver and I had to show passports as ID. A guard then came out with a mirror on a stick and checked the whole undercarriage of the cab as well as probing through the trunk and every nook of the car's interior. Once I was inside at the Visitors' Center, I had to relinquish everything - purse and wallet and all. But past that checkpoint, I was free to wander through the generating plant at will, on a "self-guided tour."

Once again, I was alone, one of the last tourists of the season. To get to the viewing platforms above the big generators, I had to walk through a long, dank tunnel that ran under the big lake reservoir created by the dam. Water was seeping ominously through the pores of the surrounding concrete, puddling on the floor. I could sense the weight of all the water above and around me - pressing in against the walls of the tunnel as if it might bulge and buckle them at any moment. I hurried on through to the elevator at the end of this subterranean (or submarine) passageway.

Beyond the generators, visitors could walk outside to the parapet walls overlooking the massive concrete construct of the dam itself. I have never seen the Hoover Dam, but it's hard to imagine that it could be much more impressive than this Revelstoke Dam. The escarpment of concrete sloped over 500-feet to the tumble of waters below. It made a hypnotically dangerous ski slope of a curve going down, almost daring the person who had started as a casual sightseer to end by taking a fatal plunge.

So there had been plenty to see and do in Revelstoke. But somehow it was the coming and going of the trains that made the most lasting impression on me. My motel was about two blocks from the tracks, just the right distance to be lulled rather than rattled by the steady migrations. As the trains came and went, emitting their occasional muted whistles, they sent a gentle, subtle rumble of vibration through my surroundings, settling me into a peaceful sleep.

The second train town I visited recently was Springfield, the capital of the State of Illinois and the place where Abraham Lincoln practiced law the longest. I was finally seeing the City, after a delay of more than half a century. Most Chicago students are treated to weekend junkets to Springfield when they graduate from grade school or high school. However my class had its scheduled trip cancelled because we were deemed to be too savagely unruly to be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Truly though, many of my classmates depredations had not been comical. When people cite the more recent shootings and other acts of violence in schools as unique signs of the violence of our times - they forget that one of the hallmarks of the 1950's and  60's was "The Blackboard Jungle." Those were the days of switchblades and vicious gang rumbles and ransackings. The geography teacher in our grade school had been blinded in one eye by a carelessly hurled switchblade. One of my classmates had had a fingertip amputated by that weapon of the day. Then when our class had been let out for an afternoon field trip, many of them had run amok in the neighborhood, committing so much vandalism that the school board might still be paying reparations.

So "No Springfield trip for YOU!" I had to arrange my own trip there decades later. But I'm glad I finally did get to go. Springfield really puts the Lincoln in the State motto "The Land of Lincoln." While a lot of the Lincoln-related attractions in Springfield are geared to tourists, most have avoided becoming kitschy recollections. For example, the Lincoln Library does have a lot of "family-oriented" entertainments aside from the place's repository of books. But its hologram show is truly touching, invoking spirits from the past in diaphanous 3-D. The show had a twist-ending that left me pondering the nature of reality.

I was surprised to learn that Springfield itself has been losing population, fading from its days as a transportation hub and as a center of mining activity. Some of its main streets are now as boarded-up and destitute as Detroit's. Outside the peripatetic attendances of the Governor and other politicians who come to the Capitol Building when the State Congress is in session - the year-round residents have been forming a shrinking club. Many of these people cross paths daily as they work in one capacity or another in the Lincoln trade. It's hard to find a local resident who hasn't participated in a Lincoln re-enactment at one time or another. If they weren't the right types to play the leads of Abraham and Mary Todd themselves, they could still participate by playing lesser known figures in Lincoln's life, such as his stepmother Sarah Bush, or his law partner, William Herndon.

My favorite Lincoln site though was one that wasn't on our regularly scheduled tour. I made my way by myself into Lincoln's restored law office on the second floor of an old brick building on one of Springfield's main streets. It was furnished with the kinds of wick lamps, writing desks, law books, quill pens, and the other appointments, that would likely have been found there in Lincoln's day. Lincoln historians had taken care to recreate the smallest likely details of the scene, including splashes of ink on the walls and over various papers left lying around. The guide explained that Lincoln was very indulgent with his boys, letting them play as wild and free as they wished in his office. To the occasional dismay of clients and law partners, this playtime often came down to rough-housing that included hurled ink bottles. As a result, some potentially vital clauses in legal documents would get obscured on a regular basis.

The first floor of this building had also been restored to its 1850's function as the town's post office. Since my family and I had run a mailing business, I've always been especially interested in postal history. I learned a lot on this visit to Lincoln's ground floor, things I hadn't learned even in the excellent postal museum that's part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C. The Washington Museum emphasizes the hardships involved in delivering letters in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century when young pilots such as Lindbergh flew rickety biplanes through fog and dark to land their cargo of mail at airstrips barely lit, sometimes still by gaslight. Many of these flyers crashed and were killed seeing that the mail got through this way.

But this little Springfield storefront re-creation emphasized the hardships of mailing letters in Lincoln's day.  Back then, you were charged more exactingly by the weight of your missive. Few people could afford to be extravagant about adding the slightest extra fraction of an ounce to their letters. So they wrote on onionskin, and even avoided using more than one sheet of that for their chatty letters by cramping their handwriting small, first horizontally across the page, then vertically over the first lines. They might use a slightly different tint of ink or use a lighter pressure when they over-wrote. But some of the letters still became drudgingly difficult to read.

Back on the regular tour, we took in the larger highlights - of Lincoln's tomb - and then, the train station where Lincoln gave thanks and bid farewell to the people of Springfield as he set off on his mission as the country's newly elected President. He was to come back along those same train tracks barely five years later, carried from Washington to Springfield by train. I thought of a Tom Waits song lyric - "It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can't bring me home." In Lincoln's case though, the train did carry him both ways.

I was once again lucky in the location of my hotel in Springfield. My room was right across the street from the Lincoln Hotel which had an illuminated circle at its rooftop, painted with Lincoln's image. This medallion of gentle light was like a full moon watching over me. And once again, my place was just near enough to the tracks to let me be lulled by the rumblings of the freight cars through the night. That sound is as piercingly nostalgia-producing as a round of "Auld Lang Syne" - or "Waltzing Matilda" - or a distant bagpipe.

As I lay there, that long rolling through the night trailed a train of melancholy remembrances - of our 16th President - and of my own life. But at the same time, there was, as ever, something hopeful, reassuring in the sound. It promised places to go, more things to see, a pulling through to another morning. And so I fell into the same peaceful sleep I'd enjoyed in that distant realm of Revelstoke - myself made safe and fast in counterpoint to the ever onward moving ferrocarril… ferrocarril… ferrocarril…