All Gone to Look for America Page 6
If certain aspects of European history had taken an only slightly different turning in the middle of the seventeenth century, all of this area would still be speaking Dutch or German – settled as it was in the days when even we British didn’t differentiate much between the two (‘Dutch’ is an anglicisation of ‘deutsch’). My Rhine mirage of just a little back suddenly doesn’t seem so bizarre after all. The next stop here is called Rhinecliff while the laden orchards we pass are centred on Germantown.
This is the beginning of the Catskills, where the legendary Rip Van Winkle (now I understand the conductor’s beard) fell asleep for a hundred years. For much of this route, I realise, the ‘Empire Service’ is very like European trains in that it makes fairly frequent stops at places not far enough apart for a flight; here, unlike in most of the continental USA, the railway remains a relatively economic and convenient mode of transport and as a result trains are relatively frequent. There are up to eight a day on this line, which is more – far more – in some cases, as I am to find out – than there are in a week on lines further west.
The sprawling Hudson River on our left is omnipresent, placid and wide as we pull into the little town that the Dutch once called Claverack Landing for the fields of clover all around but since 1785 it too has been named after Henry Hudson. The station is a little clapboard single storey building with a corrugated iron roof, the whole thing painted deep russet red. A few locals are sitting on a bench outside to watch us pull in and out again. Obviously not a lot happens in Hudson.
Not much happens in Albany either, even though this sleepy little mix of modern high-rise and Victorian classical is the capital of New York State. Forever doomed to be eclipsed by its humongous alter ego – which without even thinking about it subsumes the rest of the state within its ‘New York, New York, so good they named it twice’ sobriquet – Albany reached its apogee in the late 1820s when the Erie Canal and the first steam train arrived within a couple of years of each other marking a brief boom in its life as a river port.
Our departure from Albany is marked only by the passage through the compartment of the ghost of Casey Jones, the legendary American engine driver who I am to encounter again – or at least a lookalike ghost: a huge portly man in his fifties with a single earring and bushy grey beard, dressed in the legend’s trademark blue and white dungarees.
But before I can work out whether he really is a Casey fan or the resemblance was just coincidental – as you on rare occasions see eccentric elderly English gentlemen who could do a good stand-in for WG Grace without being cricket fans – we are already ploughing through the General Electric-dominated outskirts of Schenectady. Known to its inhabitants as the ‘the city that hauls and lights the world’, the town’s exotic name is actually a Mohawk phrase meaning ‘through the open pines’ which came to be applied to a Dutch fur trading post set up in 1661. But it was the late nineteenth century which improbably put Schenectady on the global map.
The local locomotive works was already taking care of the haulage when a young local lad got his first job with the railway’s caterers selling sweets to passengers. With the money he made he bought a couple of chemistry sets and then, having that sort of inquiring mind, experimented building his own version of a telegraph system out of bits of scrap metal. Being a bit tight on space for all these hobbies he decided to set up one of his chemistry sets in a baggage car which had the temporarily unfortunate result of losing him his job, not wholly unreasonably as one of his experiments that went wrong ended up setting fire to the train.
Undeterred, however, this bright spark continued his scientific tinkering and in time Thomas Edison went on to invent the electric light bulb, power stations that would provide the necessary electricity and played a major role in the development of the telephone, cinema camera, phonograph, typewriter, dictation machine and even the humble cement mixer. By the end of his life this ambitious young upstate New Yorker had laid a substantial number of the building blocks of the twentieth century (and therefore foundations of the twenty-first). By the end of his life he had been granted no fewer than 1,093 patents. The company he started went on to become General Electric, a global giant that remains the major employer of the citizens of his home town, Schenectady.
A few miles further on I get the first inkling of just why our driver blows his horn quite so often as the train grinds to a complete halt in an area with nothing but woodland on one side and the flat motionless expanse of the Erie Canal on the other. For a few minutes I suspect a signalling problem but then slowly, lumberingly, a huge, rusting hulk of yellow machinery with what looks like chimney sweeps’ brushes sticking out of it at various angles pulls up on the track alongside us, coming in the opposite direction, and stops. After about 10 minutes the driver makes an announcement: it appears there is a crew working on the line next to us – the hulking piece of rusty machinery is some form of track-cleaning equipment – and they have left a substantial amount of their kit on the line in front of us. It would appear that, despite this being – in Amtrak terms – a relatively well-used route, they have somehow not been expecting us.
Happily – whether or not it was down to the horn-blowing – disaster has been averted: we were only doing about 50 mph anyhow but it still would not have been nice. Now all we have to do is wait for the crew to move their kit off the line so we can continue. In the event it takes no more than some 15 minutes before we are ready to move off again. As we do several of the crew clamber on top of their big yellow rail-cleaning machine. One of them waves cheerily; another pulls out a digital camera and takes a picture of us. I am left wondering how often these railroad workers actually come across a moving train.
On through Amsterdam – a small town famed only for being the home of the company that makes Cabbage Patch dolls – and we are rolling through some of the richest, greenest pasture land in America. This part of New York State is littered with dairy farms producing a disproportionate amount of the country’s milk and cheese. No wonder the Dutch felt so at home. Unfortunately for most of the twentieth century much of the cheese produced here was disconcertingly similar to the more bland products of the modern Dutch dairy industry: mild – and mildly rubbery – blubber of the Edam/Gouda variety. Only in recent years has there been a movement towards traditional, organic, artisan cheeses. The future is still in the balance.
Gradually now, as we have parted company with the Adirondacks route that heads up into New England, the forest has thinned out. Quaint pastel-painted clapboard houses line the track on the west as we pull out of Utica. Utica used to have the more comprehensible – if more cumbersome – name of Old Fort Schluyer until it was renamed after somewhere in North Africa. Why Utica when it could have been Cairo or Alexandria is for the moment beyond me. Somebody later tells me it was pulled out of a hat. When you remember that there is a town in New Mexico which changed its name from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences after a radio broadcaster promised to present the next episode of his show from any town that changed its name to that of the programme.
Meanwhile, our next stop is, after all, Rome. A bulky bald conductor who has replaced the one with the Rip Van Winkle beard comes through and bellows it, like a latter-day praetorian looking for gladiators to enter the arena. The little old couple opposite are the only takers.
Somewhere back along the tracks we have obviously passed an invisible marker beyond which the founding fathers in this relatively ancient part of inhabited North America had a classical education. After Rome comes Syracuse. A young mother with two small children who replaced the mobile phone-addicted hermaphrodite and has been struggling for the past several hours to both entertain them and keep as much as possible of their collection of teddy bears, colouring books, combs and flip-flops in more or less one part of the carriage, asks the praetorian if there is a ‘car’ to be had at Syracuse. Or if someone could phone ahead.
This seems like a reasonable enough question. I have no idea how big a place Syracuse might be and whether or
not they have a taxi rank or car hire office at the station. The praetorian, however, is shaking his head as if informing a pagan mob that there were no Christians and lions on the day’s agenda: ‘I’m awful sorry, ma’am, but there’s no baggage assistance at Syracuse.’
At this point the penny drops and I realise that once again the supposedly common language is proving to be a treacherous friend. What she is really asking for is a ‘cart’, by which she means a trolley for her luggage.
‘I realise that,’ she is meanwhile telling the praetorian with remarkable forbearance, ‘I just wanted to know if there are carts available on the platform.’
‘Well,’ he draws out the pause, painfully, ‘there is one. But it’s kept locked up, for the night shift to use.’
This seems to me as strange a set of priorities as it clearly does to the woman with the children, who has begun to look despairingly at the ever-widening circle of clutter her kids have spread around the carriage. I’m wondering how she’s even going to get it all packed again, never mind cope with getting it off the train and to wherever she’s going. But the praetorian has a soft heart and comes back a few minutes later to tell her he’s rung ahead and they’ll ‘see what they can do’.
We roll into Syracuse through a building thunderstorm which provides suitable rolling grey rain clouds to accompany the industrial wasteland of brand new breeze blocks, grey corrugated iron factory sheds, an electric power substation and acres of monotone abandoned and decaying structures that were once what we would call fixed caravans, and what Americans know as the lowest level of housing – trailer homes. And this is where they come to die.
In fact Syracuse is mostly known for its salt. Mines here were for years the main source of the town’s income and the seasoning Americans in their millions poured on their food until the health lobby in the late twentieth century finally realised how much harm it was doing. The Amtrak station is nearly 10 miles out of the modern city centre, where the tracks were laid to be close to the industrial zone. The otherwise grim vista is allayed for alighting passengers – if you can call it that – by a new out of town retail park, which masks much of the decay. The mother with the small children struggles off the train with most of their baggage piled onto an unfolded pushchair, which means of course that its intended occupant has to walk – or rather toddle – behind. The praetorian’s call ahead has somehow failed to persuade the guardians of Syracuse’s sole cart to yield it up for the use of a passenger.
But then sympathy for one’s fellow passengers on long-distance rail journeys can wear thin, I quickly realise. We are all familiar with the curse of the mobile phone on commuter trains – the endless ‘I’m on the train, darling’ conversations – and already on my first few hours on Amtrak I’d experienced one serial call-maker, but I had not been prepared for a whole new encounter with the digital age’s most useful and annoying invention. The phone as vanity accessory was new to me.
Already by the outskirts of Amsterdam I’d been getting mildly irritated by the series of beeps at irregular intervals coming from the seat behind me, but assumed the big white man dressed all in black with an iPod in one hand and phone in the other was playing some game on the latter and I had done my best to maintain a façade of good humour on my first US rail journey by not even suggesting he might seek out the ‘mute’ key.
It’s only after leaving Syracuse, with the now rather monotonous landscape fast fading beneath a blanket of rain that I decide to switch seats. My new position, across the compartment, doesn’t exactly remove me from the noise, but for the first time it enables me to see what he was doing to cause it: he’s been taking photographs of himself!
That was one possibility that had simply not occurred to me, but there he is, turning the phone away from himself, in order to face its camera, adjusting his profile this way and then that to present a variation of noble poses reminiscent of Roman emperors perhaps – still in classical mode here – or perhaps Mafiosi capi, just to update the Italian theme. After each little flash he turns the phone back round, takes a thorough look at his own likeness and then presses a button which makes the little bleeping noise that’s been driving me absolutely potty for hours: whether the bleep is made by him saving or deleting the image I have no idea, but I do know that over the past two to three hours, he has probably taken his own photograph more than 100 times. Whether he’s taking his own picture just for fun, to set as his background on his phone or – just conceivably – to send to a loved one, this is a guy clearly concerned about his image. Amused by his vanity, I’m sorely tempted to get a teeny touch of revenge by letting him see me chuckle next time he does it, but when instead he actually uses the phone to make a call, producing a ‘Hey, how ya’ doin’?’ in a gruff New Jersey accent distinctly reminiscent of Tony Soprano, I think better of it and let the moment pass.
In any case he, like almost everyone else on the train is getting off at Buffalo. That includes Casey Jones, rematerialised now in the line of passengers waiting to ‘detrain’ – this is another word from American locomotive language I have had to learn – with a row of pens, screwdrivers and torch in the front chest pocket of his striped dungarees. I can now see that these cover a grey T-shirt depicting a vintage steam engine that might or might not be the Cannonball Express.
He’s also carrying a CSX tool bag identifying him as an employee of the freight lines: a man not necessarily impersonating a legend so much as living his dream; for some people ‘workin’ on the railroad’ is just a job, for others it’s a way of life. Back in England he’d be frustrated by dull diesels and short-haul routes and would spend his weekends with other enthusiasts tinkering with vintage steam trains at Didcot Railway Museum. Here the distances are vast and the boundaries between the romance and reality of rail just that little bit more blurred.
Blurred, that is, unless you’re a middle-aged, well-to-do couple, originally from New York, trying the great American rail system for the first time on a trip from Baltimore to Toronto. Sandra and Ben, almost my only remaining fellow passengers for the last slow crawl of the journey along the shores of Lake Erie to Niagara Falls, are decidedly unimpressed.
‘We’ve been on these goddamn trains all day,’ he fumes in something extremely close to exasperation, barely concealing one of those ‘whose idea was this anyway’ hints of marital tension.
I can sort of see his point. It’s 7:30 in the evening, dark outside, and we’ve little more than 30 miles or so to go, but according to the conductor it’s going to take at the very least another hour to get there. The problem is that there’s only one track up here near the frontier and the great long freight trains have priority over our by now very much reduced little four-coach passenger train with fewer than a dozen paying customers. Not normally the most placid of travellers – I can get annoyed with the best of them at unexplained endless delays at airports – I find myself showing a surprising element of British stoicism here: after all the timetable says we don’t get in until 8:50 p.m. and at present it looks like we’re going to be early.
Ben, however, isn’t impressed by the inexorable logic of iron roads that don’t allow for overtaking, and his mood is not improved when, staring out into dark freight yards of heavy duty rolling stock, he gradually perceives that we’re going backwards. The concept of reversing into a siding to change locomotives is new to him. And not welcome.
‘Come on, honey,’ says Sandra gamely, smiling at me for encouragement. ‘You agreed to stop off and see Niagara Falls.’
‘I didn’t know what I was getting into,’ says Ben tetchily, obviously regretting it. ‘I’m a Noo Yoiker,’ he says, lapsing into the Big Apple’s unmistakable drawl: ‘I don’t do this stuff. It’s like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. It’s for people from other countries.’
Meanwhile our little train is creaking and rattling its way towards what – it occurs to me Ben might possibly have forgotten – actually is another country. It’s raining and it feels later than it is, and
I realise I have been here before. Not literally, but on a similar slow empty train to the edge of the world: as a student in the 1970s returning home to Northern Ireland at the end of term in Oxford, sitting in a cold railway carriage with worn shabby seats and flickering lights crawling along the bleak and all but invisible Lancashire coast towards the tiny seaport of Heysham and the docks for a soon to be scrapped overnight ferry service to Belfast.
Our all but empty Amtrak service creeping along past dark riverbanks and derelict factories towards the Canadian frontier doesn’t exactly have carriages still scuffed by boots of wartime servicemen 30 years earlier and the power at least is consistent, but there’s still a feeling of terminal melancholy about it. Something relentlessly soul-sapping about spending a long time on a dark wet night going nowhere fast.
At last we pull in, though it feels more like a siding than a station, as the conductor bellows, ‘Niagara Falls, New York, end of the line.’ Which is precisely what it feels like. As we climb down the high steps to the platform I realise my instinct was right and this is indeed a siding: a little line sprung out on its own on the edge of a vast freight yard, next to a small redbrick building where a single fluorescent strip light burns in an empty room. On a weed-fringed strip of tarmac a couple of motley taxis stand with their lights out.
I watch as the conductor helps Sandra out with her suitcases and she turns her head apprehensively towards Ben who adjusts his thick-rimmed glasses on his nose before declaring: ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ, is this it?’
I hope whatever Ben and Sandra have come to Niagara Falls for, it isn’t a second honeymoon.
4
Close to the Edge
THERE IS NOTHING quite like the anticlimax of arriving at one of the world’s greatest tourist attractions to find it shut.