The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (10 page)

At 7,000 feet, we reach the pass where the Donner party came to grief, resorting to murder and cannibalism when their wagon train was caught by the first mountain snows, though their fate was exceptional. Planning their trips with incredible care, almost every other wagon train made it through. Even so, only about 200,000 pioneers had followed the Overland Trail to California by the time the Civil War began. The journey took five to six months, and the only alternatives—traveling around Cape Horn or across the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama—were full of worse perils.

A young railroad man from Connecticut had another idea. Theodore Judah talked so obsessively about the idea of building a railroad across the continent that people began to call him Crazy Judah. By 1860, after four years of searching, he was sure he had found his route—the one we are taking now through the Donner Pass.

The transcontinental railroad proved a remarkably easy sell, even with the country about to lurch into civil war. In part, the Union wanted it as a way of keeping California and Oregon attached to the country. Yet well before the war, America was sold on the idea of a continental road—its leaders and opinion makers remarkably prescient about the prospects of global trade. For John C. Frémont, the transcontinental meant that “America will be between Asia and Europe—the golden vein which runs through the history of the world will follow the track to San Francisco, and the Asiatic trade will finally fall into its last and permanent road.” Asa Whitney, a New York dry-goods merchant, wrote in 1845:

You will see that it will change the whole world . . . It will bring the world together as one nation, allow us to traverse the globe in thirty days, civilize and Christianize mankind, and place us in the center of the world, compelling Europe on one side and Asia and Africa on the other to pass through us.

In reality, the transcontinental railroad was not merely ill conceived but actively destructive, according to historian Richard White, who makes the case in his 2011 book,
Railroaded
, that all the rail lines eventually built through North America were run by “inefficient, costly, dysfunctional corporations” and should not have even been attempted. In their immaturity, White maintains, they were “failures as businesses” that started repeated financial panics; “helped both to corrupt and to transform the political system by creating the modern corporate lobby”; “flooded markets with wheat, silver, cattle, and coal for which there was little or no need”; wrecked communities, including many Native American nations, as well as individuals; crushed their own workers; and “yielded great environmental and social harm.”

White's criticisms are inescapable, but they seem more an indictment of the nation and the age than of the railroad itself. Certainly the Native American peoples
east
of the Mississippi fared no better than those to the west, even if it took white settlers—without trains—centuries longer to overrun them. Booms and busts had roiled America from the time of the Jamestown Colony, as had financial chicanery since at least the moment the first government bonds set Wall Street in motion. The railroad was not so much a cause as a symptom or a tool.

What remained, though, was that prophetic nineteenth-century vision of America at the center of the world, strategically situated between the economic powerhouses of Europe and a resurgent Asia. And, of course, the physical reality of the railroad itself.

Abraham Lincoln enthusiastically signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 into law with almost no opposition from Congress. His government chartered both a Union Pacific Railroad company, to build west from the Missouri River, and the Central Pacific Railroad, to build east from Sacramento. Both companies would be granted 10 square miles of land for every mile of track laid—an enormous government giveaway. Government bonds would raise $16,000 a mile for construction over flat land, $32,000 a mile in the high plains, $48,000 a mile for the passage through the Sierra and the Rockies.

Despite this subsidy, nobody was sure the job could be done. The Donner Pass route that Judah proposed might be compared to a great ramp up the mountains from Sacramento. Climbing it today, we can still appreciate how gradual it is, perfect for a means of conveyance clamped around two metal rails. But just past Donner Lake was a 1,000-foot rock wall, and all along the route were granite ridges, liable to sudden rockslides and 30-foot snowfalls.

The work required 13,500 men to hack away at the Donner Pass with the most primitive of tools—picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, and one-horse dump carts. Progress slowed sometimes to as little as 2 or 3 inches a day. The solution was nitroglycerine and Chinese immigrants. The former had to be concocted on-site, after a shipment annihilated a San Francisco dock and killed 15 people. But the largely Irish immigrant workforce still wouldn't touch the stuff, and the Central Pacific resorted to the almost entirely male population of Chinese laborers who had come to California chasing the
Gum Sham
, “the Mountain of Gold,” only to be ostracized, persecuted, and frequently lynched by local whites.

The Central Pacific loved them, eventually hiring some 12,000 Chinese men—who would work for lower wages than white laborers demanded and made up about 80 percent of the workforce—to bring the road through the mountains. Lowered along the rock walls in gigantic baskets, they drilled holes 15 to 18 inches deep, poured in the nitroglycerine, capped the hole, then set the nitro off with a slow match. They worked carefully and well, but the real benefit to the Central Pacific was that nobody much cared how many of them got blown up. Estimates vary widely as to how many died cutting their way through the Sierra, obliterated by the nitro or crushed under the rockslides it set off. It was carnage enough to provoke even these desperate men to go on strike, though they won a raise of only $5 a month.

The California Zephyr climbs steadily along Judah's great ramp, moving all the while past what remains of the rustic mountain towns founded to help build the railroad and support its operations. At 4,700 feet, we pass Blue Canyon, once a town of more than 3,000 people, with water so pure and delicious it was considered the best in the West and was served on all South Pacific Coast trains. Today the town consists of a few scattered houses, half hidden in the woods. We pass Gold Run, where hydraulic engines lifted millions of dollars' worth of gold out of the ground before the mines gave out and the town was abandoned, and Cisco, a supply depot 5,938 feet above sea level where more than 7,000 people once made their home—now no more than a few houses and some rusting sheds next to Interstate 70.

After Lake Spaulding, we move into a long snow shed, built to protect passing trains in the event of an avalanche. Once there were 37 miles of them, snaking their way through the mountains. Sparks from the old engines routinely set them on fire, but the railroad work crews kept rebuilding them. Supposedly, one third of all the forest in California was chopped down to provide the timber for them, and for all the bridges and the work sheds and the ties needed to build the railroad and keep it running. Near Norden, another tiny community, we pass the Summit Tunnel, the peak of the railroad in the Sierra, where the Chinese blasted their way through 1,649 feet of solid rock, making a way that passenger trains and freights used continuously until 1993.

After Norden, we descend in a series of dazzling, miles-long switchbacks, the end of our train visible on the mountain plateaus above us, and pass Truckee, a flourishing resort town that in the late nineteenth century held 14 lumber mills and countless saloons and burned down six times in its first 11 years; then Verdi, a tiny community with a large trailer park; and Boca, a once-thriving lumber and ice-harvesting town that went bust when the sawmill shut down and the hydroelectric dams brought electricity, and now all that remains is the ruins of its vaunted brewery and a few crumbling bridges over pretty little trout streams.

This mountain scenery is so infectious that it makes us giddy in the observation car, where we continue to chatter and take pictures. At dinner I sit with two of the friendliest people from our long afternoon over the mountains, Lilly and Jackie, a mother and daughter from California. Lilly lives in Sacramento, her daughter in Stockton, which she staunchly defends, claiming the media has it in for her town.

They are traveling together now on a sort of grand tour, going to see friends and relatives in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Atlanta. Lilly was married for many years to an air force man, and they had seven children and lived all over the world. Jackie remembers being most impressed by the cherry blossoms and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics when their family was stationed in Japan.

Jackie relates stories from her 20 years as a federal corrections officer. She tells us about drug couriers who tried to smuggle their contraband into the country inside dead babies, and about the racketeer Michael Milken, whom she calls a rascal, and Heidi Fleiss, whom she calls ugly and says was stoned when she first reported to prison. She is afraid that she became too paranoid during her years as a guard. She is proud of her knowledge of guns and self-defense, but found that for months after she retired she would catch herself searching her home for places where someone might conceal a weapon.

The scenery changes the moment we get out of the mountains, the way it does so often across America. From the train, most of Nevada looks like exactly what it is, the bed of an ancient sea, a landscape broken only by the remnants of more bridges, tiny clusters of houses, and distant highways on each side of the tracks. The exposed desert rock glows softly in the dusk, a drowsy, pastel sunset after the dramatic landscapes of the Sierra.

The headlines on the bundles of
USA Today
s brought aboard read “House, Senate Parry on ‘ObamaCare' as Shutdown Looms.” It's not of much concern on the California Zephyr. At breakfast, I reminisce with Gene—a devout Nebraska Cornhuskers fan wearing a bright red team jacket, on his way back to Lincoln, where he has been teaching mathematics for 53 years—over Johnny Rodgers's greatest game. At lunch, I talk to Leah and John, both of whom have their pilot's license and have lived and worked all over the world in public health, about Mayor Dick Lee and his struggle with the Model Cities program in New Haven, Connecticut. We speculate about a middle-aged couple who hold hands everywhere they go on the Zephyr, and whom everyone wonders about until we realize that the man is blind. I marvel anew at the range of conversations you can have on the train even as you're being Archimedied into collectivism.

As it happens, the Zephyr is unable to take its usual scenic route through the Rockies because torrential rains have washed out the track near the Moffat Tunnel—the second washout due to extreme weather I've encountered within a week of travel. Suddenly we are in a tale foretold. Ayn Rand—the devoutly atheist cult leader who has somehow become the prophet of fundamentalist Republicans—loved trains. In her major opus,
Atlas Shrugged
, one of her great heroes of capitalism—her “prime movers”—runs a railroad. In doing research for the book, Rand supposedly rode in locomotives of the New York Central and even operated the engine of the 20th Century Limited, later claiming, “Nobody touched a lever except me.”

When the prime movers of
Atlas Shrugged
decide to go on strike until they are properly appreciated, trains are transformed into tools of almost biblical retribution. They plunge off a bridge into the Mississippi, or asphyxiate all aboard in a badly ventilated mountain tunnel, or simply stop in an Arizona desert, leaving passengers and crew to be rescued by a passing wagon train(!).

Here, then, is Rand's prophecy, much echoed in recent years by Republicans from Mitt Romney on down, though usually with reference to Europe. It is finally happening! Our indulgent, unaffordable welfare state has caused our entire civilization to collapse!

Except the employees of Amtrak have made provisions for this contingency. It turns out that somehow we are not to be choked to death in our compartments or turned out to wander the prairie like so many buffalo, just rerouted through Wyoming, where we will be following the rail bed of the original transcontinental railroad.

We are hustled through the state like Lenin being carted across Germany to Russia in his sealed railway carriage during World War I. No one is allowed off the train at the brief stops, even to stretch their legs, lest we contaminate the good citizens of Cheneyland with our collectivist ways. The only exceptions are a couple of passengers who have brought dogs. We watch enviously from the windows as they cavort through the high prairie grass with their pets during a stop.

Wyoming is almost unbelievably empty, even compared with the rest of the West. Mile after mile, there is nothing: no visible water, no sign of human habitation beyond the snow fences along the tracks, just two steel lines moving across the land. An army topographic engineer once called the high plains west of the Mississippi the Great American Desert. The region averaged less than 20 inches of rain a year, and much less during its years-long dry spells. Blizzards and long cycles of drought killed off the settlers' cattle. Locusts devoured their crops. Even in the good years, they often lived in sod houses infested with spiders, snakes, and centipedes, and burned buffalo chips as their only source of fuel.

Against this dispiriting reality, the railroads took up with land speculators to turn the Great American Desert into the Great Plains and “the Garden of the World.” Posters and pamphlets promised “riches in the soil, prosperity in the air, progress everywhere. An Empire in the making!” A booster invented that dangerous absurdity, “Rain follows the plough!” The more the settlers churned up the earth, they were promised, the more moisture would be absorbed into the soil and circulated back into the atmosphere. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe insisted that the “rain line” moved west with its tracks, the steam from its engines condensing into clouds. Pseudoscientific properties were attributed to the steel rails themselves, or to the electrical impulses leaping along the new telegraph wires, or even to loud noises. If all that failed, farmers were urged to embrace “dry farming”—plowing furrows 12 to 14 inches deep, then harrowing their fields after each rainfall.