The Empire Builder, headed west
(Our Time or Their Time?) Train dispatch no. 1
JUST OVER A year ago, in the teeth of humankind’s latest pandemic and against good advice, I packed up my masks and began a series of train journeys.
The first of them —against the odds— became my favourite.
“I was on the Zephyr for years,” my conductor grumbled unbidden. I hadn’t even taken my seat in the sleeper car that would become my headquarters for the next forty-five hours —thirty-seven stops over 2,257 miles (3,632 kilometres) between Chicago and Portland, Oregon— and my host was already pining for another, a better train.
The California Zephyr, the one from which he had been displaced, the one that runs along the infinitely more glamorous route between San Francisco and Chicago.
“Pascal,” he mumbled, as if with his eyes between an Amtrak mask and toque, before adding, “my mother’s European."
Being aboard The Empire Builder, running across the northwestern tier of the United States, felt to Pascal like a kind of exile.
Years of cuts to funding and reductions in service (along with the cult of the automobile and highway systems) had contributed —surprise, surprise— to low ridership, leading to more cuts and reductions, etc. Mix in the coronavirus pandemic, and many Amtrak employees were knocked out of their jobs.
Only seniority allowed some, like Pascal, to hold tight, even if serving time aboard what they considered the less desirable routes.
“Amtrak used to be good,” Pascal exudes. He’s a human sigh in a uniform.
There had once been a brace of underlings to help him lug bags, to turn down bunks, to serve steaks and pour good wine.
“Back on the Zephyr . . . .” Back in time.
Now Pascal looks to retirement.
“I got a house on a big lot, with a garage, a workshop,” he says through his cigarette smoke and frozen breath on a platform in St. Paul, Minnesota, awaiting another sleeping-car passenger who never shows.
“I might just sell it for a mint.”
Pascal enjoys his spells at the intercom. These are opportunities for extraordinary feats of oratorical redundancy. The repetitiveness may stem from training, and the not unreasonable assumption that passengers will be asleep, distracted, or inattentive.
But it calls to mind the professorial housekeeping in my own working life, the gentle chivvying of colleagues, the reminders to students of deadlines, readings, assignments. During another of Pascal's nocturnal smoke breaks on some cold platform in North Dakota I chuckle over our shared fate. He isn’t as amused as I’d hoped he’d be.
IT’S EASY TO love the train, and to romanticise the journey.
Snug in my compartment, I savour the passing scenes and what a long train journey truly affords: a slowing down, a precious pause. Time to be alone with my thoughts, to follow all kinds of tracks at the same time, to project narratives onto landscape.
Just as I slip into a latest reverie I feel a twinge. Call it the twinge of history (if that doesn’t sound overblown), call it the all-too-familiar entwinement of horror in my enchantment.
The Empire Builder joins up with what was once the Great Northern Railway between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Puget Sound, a line which became a nationalised passenger service, and then finally part of Amtrak’s system (after 1971).
The Great Northern was begun in the 1880s by one of the more determined of the mogul-opportunists who dominated Gilded Age USAmerican capitalism, James Jerome Hill (1838-1916). There is no escaping how prevailing senses of innate superiority, and how violence and darkness converged as “America was made.” No escaping how other, differently suspicious harbingers of progress lay new tracks still.1
At the considerable expense of the indigenous peoples of the High Plains and of their dynamic lifeways, resources, and spaces —and on the backs of seemingly numberless labourers lured to this and other transcontinental corporate rail projects— Hill and his like trained their eyes on profit. Money was to be made from new settlers and farmers. They were the poor and perseverant, but no less ambitious invaders —many of them newly arrived from Norway, Sweden, and Germany.
It was across this contested late nineteenth-century land to the west that Hill’s mainline and its depots spurred branch lines, newly invented grain elevators, and long lines of red boxcars —the infrastructure that would get commodities, predominantly wheat and cattle, to “eastern” markets.
And here “I am,” which, as John Berger observed, “includes all that has made me so.”2
For travelling west —from Chicago in Illinois . . .
. . . getting used to the realities of train travel in a pandemic . . .
. . . heading up through Milwaukee, Wisconsin . . .
. . . across Minnesota
. . . through North Dakota . . .
and then into the vastnesses of Montana, through a sliver of Idaho —"gaining" hours as I go—
I’m reminded that I’m tangled up in these places.
In this journey by train.
Marked (in ways I’d not anticipated) by what I’ve come to know about history and a few other things. Engendered, back along the tracks. Descended from farmers who came to these parts.
THE TRAIN JOURNEY calls to mind my maternal grandparents. And especially my grandfather, whose own parents and extended family were among those immigrants from northern Europe, in their case from Norway.
They first settled in the environs of a town that took their surname —Dahlen, North Dakota— in the first years of the twentieth century, before moving north into the new western Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
In 2010 Dahlen, ND, recorded a population of eighteen.
Looking out the train window confirms it: North Dakota is to Saskatchewan as Montana is to Alberta.
W. G. Sebald, Robert Macfarlane, and Kate Brown have suggested such things, differently, and with eloquence. That places —like memories, senses of wrong, and pulses of belonging— call to mind other places.
They are as haunted, as eerie, as you let them be. Like meditations upon them, certain places defy borders and nation-states.3
Gramps was a rhythm guitar player, and a band-leading mainstay in the Saskatoon jazz scene for decades. He may have loved his string of Buicks about as much as he did the strings of his Gibson guitars.
As I fall sleep thinking about my grandfather, The Empire Builder passes on, eventually (splitting from the Seattle-bound cars and) cutting down into Washington State.
Morning, and we enter the Columbia River Gorge, following the great river for hours.
It is impossibly beautiful. The trees (along with strong coffee) and signs of the timber industry remind me of Alberta and British Columbia. (Over the border again.) I’m lulled back into thinking.
Through my entire childhood (the late 1960s and 1970s), Gramps and Grandma would load up a Buick and, at least once a year, drive some six hours across the prairies from their home in Saskatoon (where I was born) to where my parents had moved, in the parklands of Red Deer, Alberta.
Gramps had worked, first, for Marshall Wells department store, and then later for Northland Stationers, both in sales.
When he retired he was given a gold watch.
There's a grainy video cassette recording that my sisters and I must have watched a dozen times. It had been filmed in one of those windowless motor inn conference rooms. You can imagine a Captain and Tennille tribute act launching into “Muskrat Love” a little later in the lounge . . . .
About ten minutes into the video a Northland Stationers muckety-muck in a necktie stands up. You can just make out Gramps beside him, dapper as ever, but looking down. “The watch,” says the muckety-muck, all smiles, " 'cause our Ray was always on time."
A few chuckles and shakes of the head in the small audience, especially from those who knew of Gramps's musicianship. But the muckety-muck is full-on literal. "Ray was always first to the office," he beams, brandishing the watch for anyone struggling after the connection, "the coffee on by 7:00 am sharp."
THE TRAIN CROSSES a great bridge, and heads into the state of Oregon, towards my destination of Portland. It’s true what its devotees say about the Pacific Northwest. I vow to return to the Columbia River.
"WE’LL STAY FOR three days," Gramps the time-keeper always said, never explaining why this was the ideal duration for a visit.
These were big trips for Grandma. She'd become visibly tired upon arrival. Sitting in a chair and rubbing her thighs was her signal to Gramps of inner distress.
Amidst other things, travelling from Saskatchewan to Alberta (or North Dakota to Montana) meant crossing time zones, from Central into Mountain Time, "gaining" an hour.
The experience of the time zones, travelling west as I was doing, threw my grandmother every time.
She never really gave voice in complaint. And she had the right partner in life.
Just as the fondue pot was switched on at 6:00 pm for a special meal that would mark my grandparents’ arrival, Grandma would say: "6 pm . . . Is that our time, Ray, or their time?"
* all photographs by Kenneth Mills, 23 - 25 January 2021.
** one or two names have been changed.
See Clifton Crais’s forthcoming book, provisionally entitled “Born in Blood: The Violent Making of the Modern World.”
John Berger, “Paul Strand [1972],” About Looking, (New York: Knopf Doubleday, [1980] 2011) 51; 45-51.
Take your pick from W. G. Sebald’s works, but perhaps see especially The Rings of Saturn translated from the German by Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, [1995] 2016); Robert Macfarlane, “The eeriness of the English countryside,” The Guardian, Friday, 10 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane; Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review 106: 1 (2001): 17–48; and “A Historian in the Dead Zone,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52: 5 (2005): B6. My thanks also to Heidi Victoria Scott and Jeff Malpas for nudging me towards space and place and the eerie.
Wow -- Ken, fabulous! I too love this one for all the reasons you would guess. And the photos are amazing. Thank you!
Wow, my favourite post yet!