One story

You need to start somewhere.  Why not with Adam?

There's only one picture of my great-great-great-grandfather Adam Huffman, a slim and handsome man with a tidy moustache.  And there's only one story about him: the story of how he died so young,

They say he died of cancer.  And back at the turn of the century, cancer was a word spoken in whispers, a disease too terrible to think about, something to be treated like leprosy, or the plague.  Who knew how you could catch it?  So when he was sick, he lived in a hut behind his family's house in what we now call Saskatchewan, Canada.  A diseased man, dying alone, his wife took him meals three times a day - and aside from that, he saw no one.  And then he was dead.  And since then, in every generation, the youngest of each family's children has been struck with cancer before their time.  Many of them, like him, died before they ever saw their grandchildren.  It's a toxic inheritance and even now -

But no.  That's not right.  It wasn't cancer that he died of.  That's something they said to keep face.  It was the alcohol.  He was uncommonly sensitive to alcohol.  Allergic to it, they think.  And he had a little too much alcohol and it poisoned him -

But no, that's not right.  He wasn't allergic.  That's something they said to keep face.  He was an alcoholic, through and through, and he drank himself to death.  And left her, just like that, with two kids to raise.  And ever since then the Huffman children have had this weakness, just like he did - they've taken a little strong to the drink.  But Minerva Huffman, who was Adam's wife, she made her son Harry promise her he wouldn't drink, because of how his father had gone.  She made him promise it before she'd let him have the land she'd homesteaded.  And he promised, and since then he never drank.  Oh, he'd  have a drink, but that was it - he never drank like his father did, who drank himself to -

But no, that's not right.  It wasn't drinking that Harry promised to swear off.  It was the gambling.  So maybe it was the cancer that killed his father after all.  See, at 17 Harry was already a gambler, and his mother sensed trouble.  So she made him promise to stop gambling, and he promised, but he didn't stop - just traveled farther away to do it.  He stopped gambling in Montana, went all the way to Minneapolis for the sake of his mother's peace of mind.  And then when he saved his sister's farm with his poker winnings, she gave up fighting, and let him gamble closer to home -

But no, that's not right.  Harry'd always gambled in town.  He dealt cards in Plentywood, he got into scrapes in Dooley. So he couldn't have promised his mother he wouldn't gamble, because he never stopped at all - and nobody's called Harry a liar.  And he rarely lost, either, so why would she complain in the first place?  So it must have been the drinking he swore off, because it's true he never was a drunk.  And so it must have been his father was a drinker.  Unless -

Oh, who's to say.  Great-great-great-great-grandpa Huffman died youn.  Maybe of cancer.  Maybe of the drink.

Nobody knows for sure.

End of story?

those were the days...

The stories I'm collecting are set in a time without cars, jet airplanes, odwalla bars or lazy quests for a wifi signal.  They feature horses and mules and trolley cars, hand-plucked chickens and penny candy, hand-written letters and congratulatory telegraphs.  All of this seems wonderfully romantic.  I have to stop and forcibly remind myself that this was not a misty-edged technicolor past of soft sighs and swelling piano music; it was all probably rather awful.

To make things harder, everyone keeps insisting that I'm wrong.  Things weren't terrible at all.  "I don't remember it being cold," says a relative who grew up in a land where winters were thirty below.  "We had to scrape together pennies to survive, but you know, we all worked together," says another, wistfully.  "It was a hard life, but it was a good life," says just about everybody - and that, in itself, sounds so romantic, with its promise of hard-earned exhaustion and quiet satisfaction, that once again I have to fight to quell a surge of absurd nostalgia.

Outhouses, I tell myself.  Droughts.  Milking cows at 5 a.m.  Laundry taking all day.  What's so great about riding behind a team of mules?

(wistful sigh...)

Snapshots

In the observation car, ringed by picture windows, an Indian couple sits leaning forward like they're ready devour the mountainsides.  The woman, in an orange sari that brings a bit of color to the train's blue and white retro aesthetic, holds a video camera at chest level.  Every now and again they look down to make sure the camera is pointed in generally the right direction, and then they stare forward again, back out of the windows, camera rolling and entirely disregarded.

I think about the sunset I saw while heading west on the Empire Builder.  Swirling clouds, the roiling pinks and yellows, the reflection in a perfectly smooth pool - you know the type.  I whipped out a camera and snapped one shot, two, three, messing with the settings to try to get one striking one - and then I turned the camera off and set my forehead against the window.  The photos never turn out well with the glass in the way.

Who knows why we take these pictures?  To prove we were here, to make our friends and family jealous, to remind ourselves later?  We record these visions like its an obligation, something to get out of the way before we get back to the real work of staring. And staring.  And staring.

We won't print these pictures out and put them on our wall.  We won't turn to them in times of trouble or nostalgia.  We'll pack them away, and barely ever look at them again.  The photos are like stones we drop to mark our way - someday in the future, if we need to retrace our steps, these small and otherwise worthless artifacts will be there to show the path we followed.  For now we take snapshots, Hansel with a digital camera - snap, snap, snap, here's where we went - but keep our eyes, restless, on the tracks before us.

Views Re-Viewed

It's true that it's almost impossible to say anything new about these landscapes.  The trees are green, the lakes are blue, the mountains are high.  You've seen the pictures, watched the movies, hiked these peaks or flown over top of them or seen them in Google Maps' satellite view.  There really aren't any surprises here.  Sunlight and blue skies are lovely, stormy cloud masses are imposing, riding by a sawmill really spoils the view.

You've seen it all before, but that doesn't mean you stop looking.  The views are unsurprising but - somehow - still astonishing. It's a reminder that novelty does not run the world.  Seeing some things once just isn't enough; you can't check a beautiful view off your bucket list.

The shaking, whirring mechanism of the train propels us forward in time, leaving monotony on the tracks behind us, and we get sucked into a pattern of endless appreciation that doesn't feel repetitive.  I think I could run this route on a loop and never get bored.  I've seen the crew gaze out at the mountain range with the same slack-faced calm as the rest of us.

Why are we fascinated by these well-known views?  Is this E.O. Wilson's biophilia?  I don't know.  All I know is that it's kind of irrelevant that there's nothing new to say about these mountains.  After all, it's not something new we're chasing with our eager gazing - it's something very, very old.  And it may not be novel, but that doesn't mean it's always the same.

The same green, the same blue, the same tall peaks, same white clouds, yes.  But the light changes as the sun sets lower.  The rolling range fades away into temporary flatlands and then an ice-topped volcanic mountain rises from the earth.  It's the same view, but everytime you look, it seems to have gained a shadow or lost a curve.  Who needs a new horizon when the old one is so teasingly out of reach, so temptingly shifting?

Cascades of Green

Climbing in the Cascades, the train plunges into disorienting darkness and emerges back into mountains again and again and again.  Between tunnels, the view shifts by the second.  The peaks are layered like theater sets, stacked on top of each other and sliding across the horizon at different speeds, like they are pulled by husky stagehands with enormous ropes.

The distance must be an illusion.  How could there be this much wilderness left?  We're connecting major cities here - how could it be possible to look in either direction and see endless, uninterrupted woodland? Our steel-and-glass presence is the only disruption to the pine forests and the curving, tree-topped mountains.  And that seems peculiar.


"The Cascades" is a good name for them. They tumble over each other, flowing like waves, layered like sheets of water, like tiers of tumbling ivy. They look softer than they are, with the fierce pointy edges of the Rockies traded for the deceptively alluring curves of a waterfall.  Then a dormant volcano soars to the sky, a rock amidst the green waters.  I have approximately a lifetime's worth of transcription to work on, but it sits in my lap almost untouched.

I read somewhere that the human eye can discern more variations in the color green than any other color, which is why night-vision goggles show the world in tints of green. Possibly a trick evolutionarily acquired  to help tell plants apart more and separate poison from food. Maybe, I think as I stare out the window, I'm practicing. I'm training my eyes to tell these leaves apart, burning the slight changes in color deep into my retinas.  The dark green of old hemlock needles, the toxic-bright green of new ones; the yellow-green of maple leaves, the silver-green of spruces, the blue-green off old pines, the brown-green of maples.  The gray-green, the black-green, the cold-green, the warm-green, the gold-sunlit-green, the burnt-shadowed-green of the distant mountains.  The orange-green of moss.  The burning green of what might be poplar leaves.

And then the sudden black of another tunnel.  A flash of bright light, new colors of green, rock walls and then, for three seconds, a waterfall.  Thin and white, it splashes so clearly that I imagine I can hear it over the quiet rumbling of the train, although I'm sure that's not really possible.  Another instant and the last glimpse of white is visible through sturdy pine trunks.  Then it's gone, and we're in another tunnel.  I gaze deep into the dark, and it seems to carry fleeting hints of green.

Freight and Passengers

A freight train stops the traffic in Jakin, GA.  "The traffic" = me.

When I was first planning this trip and decided that I wanted to travel around by train, I thought that there was a connection, if somewhat tenuous, between my subject matter and my method of transportation.  Trains, after all, used to be the primary form of long-distance transportation.  It seemed reasonable that, as I tried to think about family history and the importance of place, trains would feature prominantly as a way to get to those places that became home.

To a certain degree that's true, and more recently than I had expected - my great-grandfather rode the rails during the Great Depression, and during WWII my grandfather and great-aunt rode trains back to Montana, for instance.

But that's mostly irrelevant.  I had it all wrong.  Trains weren't important because they were methods of transportation.  People got around however they could - mule, horse and wagon, car, truck, bus, hitch-hiking, trains, boats, walking... Trains made certain parts of the country easier to get to, but so did roads and canals.  New forms of transportation didn't really revolutionize the art of getting around.   There was always first class and coach, always some ways that were quicker and some that were slower, some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, some people who could afford to travel and lots who couldn't.

Trains are important to my family history because trains brought money.  I was thinking about passenger trains; I should have thought freight.

When the railroad came to southwest Georgia, my great-great-grandfather, Bill Regan (the stingy one) convinced the company to build an extension of the tracks that reached onto his property.  He could shear his sheep and load the wool directly onto freight cars.  Having his own railroad tracks brought him lots of money and proved that he was a big-time businessman.  Meanwhile the presence of the main railroad allowed the creation of the sawmills, which turned acres of virgin timber into cash and provided jobs to the local young men.  What had been subsistence farming communities were suddenly swimming in cash.

I don't have any evidence that my great-great-grandmother Ida Huffman (a Montana farmer) ever rode a train.  But she would drive a team of mules, carrying a wagon full of wheat, to the Dooley grain elevators and turn that wheat into money.  As time went on the farm bought tractors and trucks, and four wheels and gasoline became their primary form of transportation.  Trains stopped passing through Dooley and the grain elevators moved to other tracks.  But the grain still went onto trains - and today, the massive farms of that region still make money by transmuting streams of golden wheat into dollar bills by way of a freight car.

I'm headed for California now, the end of the push for western expansion, and the end of the line for that first transcontinental railroad.  And I bet there, too, what mattered about trains wasn't that people had the freedom to carry themselves to California in a matter of days - it was that freight could make it back to the East Coast quick enough for the fruit to stay fresh and cheaply enough for everybody to turn a profit.  It wasn't that it made it easier to get to California, it's that it gave people a reason to go.  Profit whispers more loudly than the call of adventure.

Money, money, money.  Follow the money. Follow the train tracks.

Ruminations on Ruins

Looking at the ruins of a Chinese city, Paul Thereux wrote: "Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city... It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies - only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world.  Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities." (239)

I have to agree with him, partly.  Stepping through the dusty remains of Dooley is not like looking at the ruins of a dead city, or fallen statues of a once-great civilization.  It doesn't inspire any mournful thoughts about the futility of human effort - quite the opposite.  It puts human effort into an entirely different perspective. 

The last human inhabitant of Dooley left twenty years ago, and for thirty years before that the town was essentially abandoned.  Fifty short years were all it took for the prairie to reclaim what once was a town.  And in that time a thousand towns continued on, hunkered down in this windswept land, waiting out each freezing winter and holding their houses up against the snow, thunderstorms and floods.  Dooley is what happens when everybody moves out.  Dooley is what would happen if the people who lived in this prairie gave up and stopped trying.  Dooley is proof that human willpower and constant work holds towns together - not masonry and certainly not inertia.  Human hands are the only reason every town in Montana doesn't look like Dooley.

The Crow Indians lived off this land for five thousand years.  Without stone foundations, their abandoned settlements must have vanished even more quickly and more surely than Dooley.  Their homes would have blown away in a year if not for human hands constantly fixing rips, rebuilding fires, gathering more wood, killing more buffalo, curing more skins, making more shelters  - the constant labor to hang on to the ground more fiercely than the wind could blow.  Build a home, keep it warm, keep it stocked with food, survive.  And then the Europeans came, bringing with them broken promises and slaughter.  The Crow were torn away from their land by guns stronger than the winds had been, and the U.S. government opened up these lands for homesteaders.  Once again, small settlements were waiting out storms and fighting to hold on to their lives.  Families built small houses and kept them together, kept them warm, kept them stocked with food.  A hundred years later people are still doing the same.

The earth can reclaim its territory quickly, at least in this part of the world, where the freezing winters crack wood and stone and the winds rip trees and houses straight off from the ground.  Everything we've built would crumble into dust if not for our constant effort.    Does that make human lives seem small and meaningless, or admirably powerful?

(Or pernicious, like a parasite?  Where are the woolly mammoths, the herds of wild buffalo, the endless prairie like an ocean? Our houses might vanish but some damage can't be wiped away by time.  There are many ways to put human effort into perspective - as easily indelibly catastrophic as doomed in its glory or noble in its determination.)