The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (11 page)

When it was finally conceded that the West could not be the East, the area was reconceived as a sort of colossal factory. Almost anything that could be extracted was cut down, torn up, dug out, shipped east by rail, then processed and shipped on again. Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, new industrial booms followed one after the other, in cattle, in timber, in coal and other minerals—even in bison meat. The railroad was, once again, its conveyor.

When World War I disrupted wheat exports from Russia, farmers on the high plains found a bonanza selling their wheat to Europe. They poured their newfound cash into mechanized plows and reapers and tractors and got rid of many of their work animals, freeing up another 32 million arable acres formerly dedicated to pasture. Wheat production grew 300 percent in the 1920s—but all this succeeded in doing was driving down the price of wheat. Desperate farmers responded by plowing up increasingly marginal land. The buffalo grass that had stitched the western plains together for 35,000 years was gone overnight.

The end was an ecological as well as an economic catastrophe. With the next, entirely predictable cycle of drought, the dust started blowing, in 1932, and didn't stop for a decade. A huge oval of land on the plains, roughly 100 million acres, 400 by 300 miles in size, soon lay desolate. The dust was everywhere, covering farm machinery and entire houses, piled up against barns like Saharan sand drifts. One third of the Dust Bowl's inhabitants—250,000 people—ended up leaving. In a generation, as the historian Donald Worster points out in his book
Dust Bowl
, much of the region had gone “from a spirited home on the range where no discouraging words were heard, to a Santa Fe Chief carrying bounteous heaps of grain to Chicago, and, finally, to an empty shack where the dust had drifted as high as the eaves.”

No traces of that devastation can be seen today. The discovery of aquifers (now rapidly being depleted) and the creation of farm subsidies and government conservation and resettlement programs allowed for the land to be restored—at least for the time being.

The trains, too, got taken in hand, by private enterprise and government alike. J. P. Morgan and others snapped up as many lines as they could. Populist and progressive revolts gave the Interstate Commerce Commission unprecedented powers to regulate rates and conditions. With our entry into World War I, every train in the country was nationalized under the U.S. Railroad Administration. This practice proved so efficacious that after the war the ICC proposed a comprehensive national plan to consolidate the rails, though it was never implemented. In the 1920s, the United States still had 1,085 railroad companies. But the mergers of many rail lines during the 1930s and more forced consolidation by the government during World War II succeeded in creating by the 1940s a more rational system.

The dining car on the Zephyr loses its air-conditioning when its electrical board malfunctions, and the kitchen becomes unbearably overheated. The menu is limited, but the staff remains remarkably helpful, and we are not asphyxiated. We move south, into Colorado, and actually reach Denver early, because of the detour. Dinner is served while we are halted on the tracks just past the center field of the Colorado Rockies' park, Coors Field, finished in 1995 at a cost of $300 million.

The next morning, we push through into the farm country of Nebraska, then Iowa. The kitchen stays down all the way to Chicago. For a day and a half and a dozen stops, no one has the wherewithal to fix the malfunction. Onboard, the bloom is off the rose, thanks to the sheer length of the trip. We resort more and more to the subterranean café car, run this time by Carol, a perpetually angry attendant, who treats any efforts at empathy with marked hostility. When someone remarks that she will surely be glad to see Chicago at the end of the sweaty, 53-hour voyage of the Zephyr, Carol snaps, “Why? I
hate
the city!”

I skip the Metropolitan Lounge on the trip back to New York, preferring to sit in a dark, beery commuter bar in Chicago's Union Station. But the Lake Shore Limited is cheery and bright, and another helpful steward serves us complimentary wine and cheese.

He gives a leftover half-bottle to a couple in their thirties. They laugh and smile and hold hands in the club car. They speak glowingly about all they have seen on the way out to Spokane, where Lisa had a speaking engagement, and back, the lights of the oil and gas fields at night in North Dakota, the beauty of Glacier National Park by day.

Eric works mostly in Maryland and Washington, but he owns a home and 50 acres in Binghamton, New York. He's hoping that it will attract a fracking company—the great dream of everyone in upstate New York not looking to hook up with one of the four casinos recently promised to the region—and he dismisses any environmental concerns: “If you look at the science, it's perfectly safe.”

In the morning, we pass the ruined cities of upstate New York again. By afternoon we are headed back down through the dappled autumn loveliness of the Hudson to New York City and Penn Station. We plunge back under Riverside Park, the sort of structure we used to routinely build above our buried trains, with what was then our endless talent for practical and gracious innovation. But today a journey of more than 7,000 miles, into our greatest city, ends where it began, the disembarking passengers staggering along a drab, dimly lit concrete platform. “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat,” wrote the architectural historian Vincent Scully after the original Penn Station was torn down, in 1963.

That building, designed by Stanford White, was a symphony in glass and steel, clad in pink Milton granite and honey-colored travertine, lit through lunette windows, and festooned with clocks and map murals of the great nation it stood in tribute to. It was something “vast enough to hold the sound of time,” as Thomas Wolfe wrote in
You Can't Go Home Again
.

But when it was thought that something more profitable might be built in its stead, its vaulted glass roofs were smashed with wrecking balls and its granite and marble walls were jackhammered to pieces. Its graceful Greek columns were sawed through, and its great clocks, its carved-stone eagles, and the maiden sculptures that represented Night and Day were pulled down and taken over to New Jersey, where they were dumped in the swamps of Secaucus, like the body of a murdered Mob stoolie.

“The message was terribly clear,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the
New York Times
. “Tossed into that Secaucus graveyard were about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.”

In addition to being beautiful, the old station was the pinnacle of an immense technological achievement, a vast network of infrastructure that included two rail tunnels under the Hudson River, four more under the East River, and the Hell Gate Bridge. To build the Hudson tunnels alone, crews of sandhogs dug toward each other beneath the river for three years, under intense heat and pressure, behind 200-ton iron cylinders or shields. Finally “the shields met, coming together rim to rim,” in the words of the historian Lorraine Diehl, “like two gargantuan tumblers.” For the first time, America was connected by rail from Montauk to San Francisco.

“It was one of those rare architectural masterpieces that are able to touch man's soul,” Diehl wrote of the station that so fittingly crowned it. “Built as a landmark, it was a monumental gateway meant to last through centuries.”

Instead, it lasted a little more than 53 years. When the decision was announced, in 1962, the only protesters were some 200 people, mostly architects and academics. Few others seemed to care. Officials posed smiling for pictures next to the lowered eagles. “Just another job,” said John Rezin, the foreman of the demolition crew. “Fifty years from now, when it's time for our Center to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest,” Irving Felt, president of the Madison Square Garden Corporation, predicted.

It has been another 50 years, and not only architects but many New Yorkers in general would gladly take Madison Square Garden apart by hand if it meant a chance to see a new Penn Station rise. But nothing gets done. The Garden was stuck atop the grave of the old Penn Station back in the 1960s because white commuters were supposedly too afraid to venture very far into the big, bad, black city—about as terrible a perversion of urban planning as has ever been practiced. Ironically, the scariest people around the new Penn Station are the drunken suburban louts in their Rangers jerseys on game night.

Plans for building a twenty-first-century train station in the Beaux Arts central post office across Eighth Avenue from the Garden have been on the books for 20 years now. Architects have churned out any number of wondrous fantasies of what a new station might look like. But the Garden and its teams are owned by a thuggish cable-TV heir who stubbornly holds out against any intrusion on his ugly cash cow. Amtrak, citing money worries, still hasn't fully committed to the proposed new facility, to be dubbed Moynihan Station (in honor of former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a leading rail advocate), and all the grand plans aside, it's unclear what passengers would get in the end—maybe just a bigger Amshack.

As one state official told the
New York Times
architecture critic Michael Kimmelman in 2012, the “project aspires to be more like the Frank R. Lautenberg Station in Secaucus, N.J.”

We have always been a country of boom and bust, and a rail has always run through our wildest schemes. The train was a wonderful tool that came into being before anyone, even the men who owned it, really knew what to do with it. As with the rest of our democracy, it was the learning, the mastering of these men and their machines, that would eventually provide us with some measure of what this country has always personified.

We did incredible things with trains. We ran them through mountains and deserts and under rivers and swank avenues and beautiful buildings. We turned them into rolling luxury hotels and made them into something so extraordinary that adults as well as children came running just to watch them as they passed. We learned how to coast them into stations without their locomotives and how to string whole cities of commerce around them. We looked 100, 200, 300 years into the future, and built railroads to match our vision. Then we discarded trains as something hopelessly antiquated and unnecessary.

The America we live in today does not even have the political will to connect a train to a platform in many places, much less build a new generation of supertrains. Amtrak and its supporters remain confident that it can endure, even triumph, and they may be right. Trains still have advocates even in the reddest of western states, and unlike so many of the public-sector areas that the right's corporate sponsors would like to fully privatize—education, health care, prisons—no one seems eager to get their hands on a passenger-rail system.

But the odds are just as good that Amtrak will vanish completely. Against the rigid ideology that now drives the Republican Party, the old politics of horse-trading and constituent services may not suffice. The government shutdown ended 12 days after we pulled back into the bowels of Penn Station, a big defeat for the Tea Party movement. But within weeks, its memory was obliterated by the Obama administration's botched rollout of its already woeful health-care plan. The unwillingness of the Democratic leadership to commit to any public good has already disfigured the liberal idea, and its continuing failure may well sweep our national rail service away, along with everything else. For all Amtrak's shortcomings, losing it would be a very bad thing. The train muddles through wonderfully, given all the restrictions we put on it. We are capable of more—or at least we used to be.

STEPHEN CONNELY BENZ

FROM
JMWW

M
ORNINGS IN MOLDOVA
: I left the flat, descended six stories in a dark stairwell—bare concrete, pervasive smell of boiled cabbage—and emerged in the tenement courtyard where, every day, stray dogs were plundering the garbage bins. Then I walked along Avenue Kogalniceanu toward the university, a 2-mile trudge on treacherous, muddy sidewalks. A dense fog made everything—buildings, trolleys, pedestrians, mongrels—appear insubstantial. Through the gloom, thousands of shadowy crows watched from tree branches. Moldova's weather was supposed to be mild for Eastern Europe, but during my time in the country it seemed to be perpetually raw and overcast. The chill went to the bones; I never felt warm, despite the high-priced cold-weather gear I had brought with me.

Stepping gingerly down the street, I always started to feel nervous as I approached the university. It was not the classes in American literature and culture that put me on edge—I enjoyed teaching the classes and I liked the students. No, the little spasm of dread I felt as I mounted the steps to the philology building each morning was entirely due to my unavoidable encounter with the gatekeeper, the Matron of the Keys—a short, stout woman about 60 years old who dressed in a starched white outfit reminiscent of a nineteenth-century asylum nurse. It was from her that I had to obtain the key to my classroom—kept with all other classroom keys in a cabinet that she guarded from behind a desk at the entrance to the building. This was her domain, and she ruled over it with an iron will and a suspicious mind.

Each day I had to ask for the key, and she would only acknowledge requests made in Russian—proper Russian. Upon independence from the Soviet Union, Moldova had adopted Romanian as its official language; nevertheless, many Russian-speakers refused to conduct business—even government business—in anything but Russian. The matron did not approve of my Russian pronunciation, and day after day she made me repeat the classroom number—458—many times, correcting each phoneme with a martinet's exactitude and demanding that I try again. She would not accept the individual numbers—
four
,
five
, and
eight
. Nyet. Only the correct complete number would meet the requirement:
four hundred fifty-eight
. She knew exactly who I was (I stood out as a foreigner, not least because of my burgundy-colored down parka), and she knew exactly which room key I needed, but she would not alter the procedure. No key could be issued until the number was stated correctly.