Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (85 page)

This is the last letter-article Thompson wrote for the
National Observer.
It was not published
.

February 4, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Bill:

Here's the train job. See what you think and let me know. I'm not sure I understand why the other was “thin,” or what could have been done to make it fat, but at any rate thanks for the quick reply.

Oh yeah, I have a nice scenic-type photo of the
City of San Francisco
. Let me know if you want it. Since my last letter I've found that it's possible for me to take incoming calls; the problem is that I can't make any. It's an interesting set-up, but I'd be happier if it were the other way around.

HST

“D
R
. S
LOW
;
OR
, H
OW
I L
EARNED TO
S
AVE
M
ONEY
, L
OSE
W
EIGHT, AND
L
OVE THE
A
IRPLANE
 …”

     Chicago, Ill.

This is as good a place as any to start the story, because this is where it started in my mind. Or maybe it was Scott Fitzgerald's mind. Or maybe Thomas Wolfe's. At any rate I arrived in Chicago on the verge of collapse, a victim of the railroad myth. I had seen America the hard way: 51 sleepless hours on the San Francisco Chief, pride of the Santa Fe Railroad. Two days and two nights in a speeding iron box, all for $67.39, plus another $30 or so for meals, drinks, magazines, tips, and pillow rental. By air, the price would have been $110.72, including a free meal. And a saving of 47 hours.

The longest flight I've ever endured was 12 hours, from Lima, Peru to New York City. But 12 hours on a train is nothing at all. I boarded in San Francisco at noon, and at midnight we were just getting out of California—with Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois still to cross.

Only then did it dawn on me: Two days … and two nights … on this train. I adjusted the reclining seat, then realized I was nearly in the lap of the woman behind me. She whispered something to her husband and I quickly straightened up.

By midnight I had read an entire novel and two magazines, spent half the afternoon in the club car, sat in the crowded vistas dome and tried to write, lingered over a $3.50 fish dinner that would have cost $1.10 in any roadside hash house, and now, as the barren desert flashed past outside my dark window, there was nothing to do but stare and pray for sleep.

We left California at a little town called Needles, an arid outpost in the Mojave Desert that enjoys a certain fame each summer for consistently being the hottest place in the continental United States. But Needles is reasonably cool in the winter, and from a train window it looks half pleasant. Behind the white adobe railroad station is a garish city hall that looks like leftover scenery from a Tennessee Williams play. I would not have been surprised to hear the few people on the platform speaking Spanish, instead of English.

Beyond Needles the night was more empty and the train seemed to pick up speed. The lights were turned off in the coach cars and some people slept. In the seat to my left a very old man kept sliding over until his head touched my shoulder, then he would come awake with a jerk and slide the other way. Perhaps a midget could sleep comfortably in a railroad seat, but for anyone over six feet it is sheer misery. By two in the morning most people had dropped off from exhaustion, but all round me in the heated darkness of the car I could hear the shifting and grumbling of the reluctant nightwatch.

Now and then would come the rasp of a match, a sudden glow on the metal roof, then darkness again and the long hiss of smoke being exhaled by some cramped traveler who'd simply given up and decided to get through the night on cigarettes. The club car had
long since closed, and anyone who might have dozed off with the help of a nightcap was out of luck.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. a torrent of coughing cries erupted from a baby near the front of the car, shattering the silence like breaking glass. First came the crying, then the mother's angry hissing. You could almost hear the tension as more and more people came awake.

It was dawn when the train rolled into Flagstaff and I must have slept, because the next sound I heard was the howl of the “news agent,” an all-purpose merchant who hawks his wares in every corner of the train, 18 hours a day. He is a human vending machine: selling coffee and donuts for breakfast, canned “Cokes” and candy bars for lunch, and dry ham or bologna sandwiches for dinner. When I woke up he was pushing “special, high-quality Santa Fe playing cards,” which he held aloft as he moved down the aisle.

“Souvenirs for you and your family too,” he shouted. I fled to the dining car for breakfast, wondering if my nerves would hold up until we got to Chicago—33 more hours.

Before leaving San Francisco I had re-read
The Great Gatsby
, so I knew what to expect at the other end of the line. Fitzgerald had his narrator, Nick Carraway, describe it like this:

“One of my most vivid memories is coming back from the West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went further than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock on a cold December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up in their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matching of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways? or Schultzes?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. At last, the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad, looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.”

Well, gentlemen, it's not like that anymore. Fitzgerald's people are all at the airport these days, and the bulk of the crowd at any railroad station will be made up of senior citizens, children, negroes, and servicemen. Not many jet set types; not much expensive luggage, either.

Yet the difference is not all monetary. A one-way coach ticket between San Francisco and Chicago is relatively cheap, but a bedroom in a Pullman car for the same trip costs $131.46 on the Santa Fe, and roughly the same on any line. Meals and other extras will bring that up to $150, minimum, which is quite a bit more than air fare. And, not surprisingly, most of the people who can afford the time and money it takes to travel by Pullman are well along in years. Train travel, in the main, is the province of the aged and the indigent, but there are a handful of exceptions. One of these is the City of San Francisco, which runs between Chicago and the Coast across the Continental Divide by way of Denver. The City, as it's called in the Rockies, is one of the few trains that occasionally lives up to Wolfe's and Fitzgerald's romantic but long out-dated railroad myth. This is especially true in the winter, when the train is full of young skiers, bound for resorts like Vail and Aspen in Colorado, Alta in Utah, and Sun Valley in Idaho, which are hard to reach by air. The City is my favorite train, and some of the evenings I've spent on it would have pleased Jay Gatsby himself.

But the City is a rare exception in the run-down, worn-out world of space age railroading, and despite its various advantages it's still a train. No doubt there are several good reasons for crossing the country by rail, instead of by plane, but once you've done it a few times, that's it, you've done it, and the next step is to admit that airplanes have as many basic advantages over trains as television has over radio. For good or ill, the space age is very much with us, and if Wolfe and Fitzgerald were alive today they'd surely be traveling by jet.

The America you see from a train window is an older, greyer, junkier land than the one you see from
planes or superhighways. There was a time when land beside the railroad tracks was very valuable; railroad depots were centers of travel and many a town grew up around them. But the automobile changed that pattern; since World War II most towns have done their growing around major highways and intersections, while areas around railroad depots filled up with slums, warehouses, heavy industry, honky-tonk bars, and sleazy hotels. The cumulative effect of all this, after 51 hours at a train window, is a feeling of age and depression.

The man who flies sees new airports, sleek jets, fashionably dressed passengers and late-model “renta-cars” or taxi cabs. The man who drives turnpikes and freeways sees a bright, colorful and prosperous-looking America; a land of glass, leather, Formica, and pre-stressed concrete, where even hamburger stands are chic and modern.

The man who rides trains sees a part of America that has out-lived its usefulness; abandoned homes, automobile junkyards, and quonset huts housing marginal “industries” like Frank's Welding Shop, somewhere beside the tracks near Fresno in California's green Central Valley. America seen from a train window might be fascinating to a sociologist, but to the normal run of passengers it is not real inspiring.

To Wolfe a train meant excitement, distance and escape. To Fitzgerald it was more a melancholy thing, a glamour tinged with sadness—like Jay Gatsby, standing on the platform of a train leaving Louisville and the shattered hopes of his love for Daisy: “He stretched out his hand desperately, as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.”

You could do that sort of thing in 1925, but if Gatsby left Louisville by train today, and went out to “snatch a wisp of air,” he'd be jolted out of his reverie by the snarl of a porter or a prowling conductor: “Hey you! Get back inside! That's against the rules.”

Once you get on a train today you are not only on it but
in
it. The windows don't open, there are no outside platforms to stand on, and anybody brazen enough to open the top half of the Dutch doors between cars is likely to be put off at the next stop.

Train crews are not to be trifled with, especially conductors. I recall an evening in Texas on this last trip when a gentleman of quick temper took exception—and rightfully so, I thought—to the way he'd been snapped at by a crotchety conductor. It was somewhere around midnight when he moved to demand an apology, and not long afterward I looked out the window and saw him standing on the platform as the train pulled out of a dark little hamlet called White Deer. I still have his sunglasses, which he left on the club car table.

Despite the hazards of time, tedium and the benevolent tyranny of railroad crews, train travel still has a devoted following. When I finally got to Louisville an old and well-traveled cousin congratulated me on having the wisdom to travel by rail, instead of air.

“I took a plane once,” she told me. “It was from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco. I wanted to see Sydney Harbor from the air because I heard it was one of the three most beautiful harbors in the world. But when we got up in the air the plane banked the wrong way and I couldn't see anything but sky,” she chuckled sadly. “I never did see Sydney Harbor, and after that I never took another plane. I like to
see
when I travel; I want to know where I've been.”

Well, maybe so. But once you've ridden trains for five years over the same routes you begin to lose that sensitivity. A small-town railroad crossing in Mansfield, Pennsylvania looks very much like one in Shattuck, Oklahoma—especially when the train windows are covered with a thin layer of dust and soot. You can appreciate just so many late-night depot platforms, with steam in the air and baggage carts rolling back and forth while men in grey jackets move silently along the tracks with their cigarettes
glowing in the darkness. The depots are ancient and the schedules are chalked on old blackboards lit by yellow bulbs.

Perhaps there's a touch of glamour in it all, but there's also a sense of something dead or dying. One of the most obvious realities of train travel is the advanced age of conductors, porters and even ticket agents. Some of the long-haul Western lines have new cars and equipment, but compared with planes even this seems sorely out of date. And most of the branch lines—such as the rail link between Chicago and Louisville—are using cars that would have seemed old and moldy even to Thomas Wolfe. In all, it is hard to avoid the impression that the railroads have given up on passenger service—or at least given up in any sense of competing with the airlines—and are now merely hanging on, doing their duties with a shrug instead of a smile, until the inevitable progress in other forms of transportation renders them totally obsolete.

Not long ago, in San Francisco, I talked to a man who had just come back from Los Angeles. “I wasn't pressed for time,” he said, “so I thought I'd take a train and see what it was like.” He shook his head sadly. “I wasn't surprised when the agent said it would take 12 hours, but when she told me the ticket cost $33 I nearly flipped. Hell, I paid $12 for a plane ticket and got here in 45 minutes.”

Comparisons like that are hard to argue with. It's not so bad that trains should be slow; people expect that. But when they are also dull, uncomfortable, and expensive, with bad food and worse service, to boot—then it is pretty hard to find reason to keep riding on them, except perhaps as a novelty or a nostalgic gesture to a myth that out-lived its creators.

Thompson filled Semonin in on his trip to Louisville and New York while issuing pointed barbs about his commitment to the struggle for racial equality. Semonin had gone to Paris on a Ford Foundation grant to research Fanon
.

February 5, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Well, Bobo, your last letter had some music in it and I've been meaning to bounce some back for about 10 days, but so far—and even now—the desperate rush for money has kept me away from anything personal. (There is wisdom in that line.) The first thing you should learn in Paris is to discount any propaganda you get from Marin County. That is like somebody from Greenwich telling you New York is “great, man, just great.” You ask me for the word on San Francisco and I can only give you mine, which is “
nada
.” This is what I meant in an earlier letter when I said we should have paid more attention to the things we sensed earlier, and less to what we've learned since we got wise. (Yeah, I know—you have the handle now, but the most truthful and human of your letters are the ones in which you sound like you did a few years ago; I think all you've found in your travels is historical justification for your instincts.)