Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The librarian said the booklets were out of print and the copy machine wasn’t working properly. I asked whether she knew Mr. Young. “Not really.” Did she have a local phone directory? “Well, of course! This is a library.” She called him, introduced not me but my quest, and handed over the receiver.

  Perhaps, I asked him, he had a copy he’d sell? No, didn’t think so, he said, but even if he did, he couldn’t bring it into town anytime soon. Might we come to him? “I’m way out.” How far? “About nine miles.” Your books, I said, are worth more than nine miles — if we could stop by just long enough to ask a few questions about Starrucca. Maybe borrow a booklet to photocopy — paying full cover price, of course. “Let me look around,” he said, and gave directions.

  William Young lived in the old family place on a slope above Starrucca Creek, where he learned to swim, eight miles east of the grand bridge. His white-clapboard, Greek Revival house, fronted with big lilac bushes and surrounded by hard maples, was of an age commensurate with the building of the 1848 viaduct. His people came into the forested valley in 1815, but Young was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Jersey. In his retirement he had made himself the sixth generation to live in the two-storey house. His grandfather knew a fellow who had watched the building of the span, and an even earlier forebear may have worked on it.

  A cottage behind the house was made of the same bluestone as the bridge, rock from a quarry not far across the creek. He said he was counting down to his seventy-ninth birthday, although a sixty-ninth seemed more credible. Like the Starrucca, he had weathered well, part of the happy return for his seventy-thousand miles of cycling (not one of them across the viaduct), and his face radiated pleasure in talking history. After losing a beloved woman years ago, he had never married.

  Young knew the stone arches from the ground up; that is, from the valley they crossed on upward a hundred feet to the tracks atop them. Beyond that knowledge, he was a student and writer of American rail history, and he could tell you what a Mallet Triplex 2-8-8-8-2 was (a huge locomotive with twenty-eight wheels in a certain arrangement), and he could say when one last went over the valley. He enumerated the eight railroads that have owned the viaduct during its long existence, and he explained the corbels mysteriously projecting from each pier (to support wooden scaffolds to complete the construction of the arch).

  At age sixteen he went to work as a printer’s devil, where one of his duties was filing rough edges off Linotype lead “pigs,” a job that for him turned the smell of ink into a sweet cachet. After two years in the Army during the Korean War (he was stationed in Germany), he returned to work as a printer and occasional news-reporter in New Jersey and South Carolina. When he retired to the home place in the Starrucca Valley, he gave his time to research and writing about railroads.

  Education after high school was largely of his own creation — he read history and authors whose styles he admired: Mark Twain, E. B. White, and, more generally, other writers in The New Yorker “as it used to be.” Former jobs and research allowed him to write his illustrated histories, compose their pages, produce the booklets, and at each stage keep an eye out for errors. “I can do it all in my way,” he said, “and that helps to keep the price down in an economically depressed area.” If his chronicles weren’t a major piece of income for him, they were still a significant source of satisfaction. I asked whether his histories were his highest achievement, and he said, “I suppose they are, but there’s always the next book which I hope will be even better.” The next book was to be about the Unadilla Valley Railway in central New York.

  We sat on the side porch. Propped on a chair were his two booklets waiting for us; he hoped to have out soon the sixth edition of Starrucca: The Bridge of Stone. Young did not say it — he would never say it — but I would soon learn he was the authority on the viaducts, his knowledge the result of some forty years of research and a boyhood partly spent along Starrucca Creek. He belonged to the valley by chance of family settlement, but he belonged to the bridge by dint of learning. Early immersions in the stream and later immersions in the history of the span over it had turned a long avocation into an even longer contribution. How much of the past he alone had preserved, even he did not know.

  When I told him he wrote a good sentence, he said, “I wrote nothing good until I was forty-eight.” That was about the time Starrucca, then titled simply Bridge of Stone, first appeared. For a third of a century thereafter, he had continued to accumulate facts and to find forgotten historic photographs while taking new ones of the viaduct. Longevity taketh away, but it also giveth to those who persevere. Although never his intent, he had made himself over time, if you will, the Star of Starrucca and had carved his name not in its bluestone but in works even more durable. (Gus Kubitzki once said, “If the worst part of death is the thought of oblivion, then leaving behind something of worth makes it a little more tolerable.”)

  I mentioned to Young how much we’d like to cross the viaduct in a passenger train. “The last one,” he said, “was forty years ago, but you might have a chance again, because I hope the bridge will be properly maintained and will see more trains as part of the railroad renaissance that appears to be coming on. The line is underused now, but the Starrucca route has potential value, especially as a bypass for freight traffic that’s beginning to choke other routes. Although there’s only one now, there used to be dual tracks on it, and someday there could be twin tracks again.”

  Q confessed our urge to trespass our way across the viaduct and asked whether he had ever walked it. “I’ve been over it a few times on a train,” he said, “but never all the way on foot. I was inside one of the arches once, and I’ve taken pictures from the top. And an acquaintance claims he rode a bicycle across.” I asked about suicides. “None I know of. But somebody did jump from the Tunkhannock Viaduct just last year. For suicide, people seem to prefer a bridge down at Scranton. I don’t know why. Closer to home maybe.”

  What if use of the bridge should come to an end? “It’s been a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark for years,” he said, “but that still doesn’t give it much protection. It’s also on the National Register of Historic Places, but that only means federal money could never be used to tear it down. Should it ever be abandoned, though, I think preservation would be certain.” Especially so now, I said, with your research serving as a kind of eighteenth supporting arch. He said only, “I hope what I’ve done is positive.”

  Had there been a William Young in the valley in 1900, how much greater our comprehension would be today. The past everywhere is a huge chunk of murky ice perpetually melting in the heat of the moment, and the great drain beneath leads straight down to the River Lethe. He said, “I started collecting material about the bridge when I was twelve — just basic information then, some of which turned out to be wrong. In all those years, I’ve never learned how several silly legends got started, like the one about every train that crosses having to pay a fee to the descendants of the builders. Then there’s one about the first locomotive to cross the viaduct going over unmanned because nobody dared trust the bridge.”

  If the total population of the Starrucca Valley for the initial 150 years of the viaduct was — and I’m just guessing a number to make a point — ten thousand, then Young is the only one of ten thousand people who has had enough concern to dedicate himself toward preserving knowledge of the span, which, after the structure itself, is the most important aspect of its survival.

  Years ago a civil suit was brought to tear down the Brooklyn Bridge as a navigational hazard on the East River. If such a beloved icon can be threatened, then what future perils await an isolated viaduct — never mind its beauty and historic significance? It’s possible one day, the sturdiest thing standing between those massive bluestone arches and a wrecker’s ball will be the forty pages of Young’s pamphlet. After all, America is not Italy where the great Claudian aqueduct has been allowed to remain for two-thousand years to inspire generations of engineers, archite
cts, artists. For two millennia it has bridged not just the two sides of valleys but two sides of time, one of them the future. If William Young’s niche in American history is narrow, it also is deep.

  9

  No More Than a Couple of Skeletons

  TRAVELERS BOUND FOR RURAL NEW ENGLAND can see they’ve arrived when villages fill with houses having front-door fanlights and Palladian windows, churches near a green are pedimented, porticoed, and pilastered, ferns grow just about anywhere untrodden by man or beast, and dry-laid rock walls enclose a burying ground having two or three slate markers attesting MY GLASSE IS RUN.

  Q and I made our way toward Mount Washington and the North Maine Woods via a hot-dog wagon in Connecticut, plates of clam fritters and steamers along Narragansett Bay, and bowls of chowder in Massachusetts. We passed through Franconia Notch where, until just four years earlier, the Old Man of the Mountain, that famed profile in rock, the Great Stone Face, kept watch over things.

  After a night of heavy rain, it — he — broke loose and fell from the sheer cliff to get smithereened several hundred feet below. Up on the mountain, the yet-fresh scar — pink like a healing wound — was a sorrowful thing to see; the New Hampshire route markers, still depicting his silhouette, were continual reminders of mutability, even for men of stone. Said Q, “A regrettable loss of face.”

  Never by any method — foot, horse, auto, rail — had she made the ascent of Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the Northeast, a six-thousand-foot-high rocky island of arctic plants and home to some of the worst weather on earth. Over the course of a year, the summit will average hurricane-velocity winds two out of three days, and at least once a month, they hit 150 miles an hour; one night it was 231. Beneath the crest, permafrost reaches down two-hundred feet to hold ice unthawed since before the last continental glaciation. Not many visitors, of course, make the trip up for violent winds and ancient ice — it’s the view or climb they want. When I was on the mountain a few years earlier, visibility was three feet, but under a rare clear sky, you can see the Atlantic seventy-five miles east. So I’ve heard.

  Train buff that Q is, she was elated to take the antique cog railway to the summit. Few are the places in America where you can cover exactly the same route as travelers of 140 years earlier, and even fewer are those (at the moment I can’t think of another) where the conveyance is by the same vehicle, or one nearly so. Behind our coach, the little coal-fired, steam locomotive pushing us up was 135 years old, albeit replaced piece by piece over those years; perhaps somewhere in it was still an original brass knob or lever. After a few hundred yards of ascent, as I looked down the steep trestles that carry the entire track once it starts climbing, it was comforting to think not of antique bolts and gears but of replaced parts. Less reassuring was to see that the coach was unattached, except by gravity, to the engine, had only the locomotive and tiny tender between it and the bottom of the mountain.

  Judging from the other passengers, one of whom refused to look back down the cogged tracks, the little pufferbelly was either “decrepit” or “cute,” the latter more commonly heard after we reached the summit about an hour later — a rise of 3,600 feet over three miles. The angle of climb in one place was nearly thirty-eight percent (in a hundred feet forward, you rise thirty-eight feet; only a cog line in the Swiss Alps was steeper, and merely by a degree or so). At that pitch, a seat at the front end of the small coach is fourteen feet higher than one at the rear, although the difference didn’t appear that great. The plump boiler sat tilted so that during ascent it was parallel to, say, the Atlantic Ocean but not to the mountain slope, thereby keeping water from draining off the steam tubes. One of the delights of passage was to notice how one’s brain began to adjust to the extreme incline by seeing the world beyond the tracks as horribly slanted: I was certain several spruces — in truth growing perfectly vertically — were leaning almost forty degrees toward Vermont. On a disturbingly canted maintenance shed — one appearing ready to slide down the mountain — was a sign: THIS BUILDING IS LEVEL.

  In the 1860s, the plan to get up to the top on slick steel-tracks got mockingly called the Railway to the Moon, in part because it was the first cogger in the world to try to climb the face of a mountain. Today, the ascent up the rails begins with great remonstrance from a smoky locomotive — seemingly of a size to fit a kiddie zoo. As the engine starts up, it whistles and spouts, sputters, shakes, shivers, shudders, knocks, and rattles in racketing, clanking, clanging, groaning, grinding, screeching, squealing, squeaking, spewing, hissing, smoke-belching protestations suggesting you have just boarded a train that can only transport you to singing hymns in the Angelic Choir. Although the little, green engine looked like something out of a child’s illustrated story, no one could possibly hear in its puff-puff-chug-chug, I think I can, I think I can. The noise was more the classic lament of seniority: Oh, not again! Not Again!

  After Q entrained, she said with some expectation, “This is better than a carnival ride. We’ll actually get somewhere. We’ll arrive in another place.” Jerkily, snortingly, blowing hot cinders, the locomotive began pushing us up. If years before I’d seen only as far as thirty-six inches will allow, the legendary Mount Washington weather fulfilling itself, for Q the sky opened, and from the summit — if we didn’t see quite to the Atlantic — we did see deeply enough to get an aerial sense of the White Mountains, sometimes called the White Hills. Below in the forest it had been almost too warm; but on top, the wind — no breeze, that gusting — required a jacket or a run for cover. Mount Washington rises near a nexus of three major storm paths, and their collisions often produce weathers so unendurable only a polar ice cap in winter can equal their vehemence. If the wind blows at two-hundred miles an hour and the temperature is twenty below, what’s the windchill? Lethal.

  When the time came to go back down, I looked down the winding cogs (I mean to give some emphasis to the downs in that sentence). I’d read about a method used by nineteenth-century trackmen to return to Base Station faster than ambulation allowed. Sitting on a narrow three-foot-long board straddling the cogs centered between the rails, relying on the crudest of friction brakes, workers could toboggan toward home on what they called a Devil’s Shingle. One fellow reached the station, a descent an engine requires about an hour to make, in two minutes and forty-five seconds. Not everyone did it quite so fast, and not everyone did it without injury, and Devil’s Shingles were outlawed in 1906.

  But what I found most remarkable about the cog railway had to do not with speed but with distance: even in living memory, a traveler could once board a coach in beachy San Diego (to pick a place) and just by changing trains disembark two days and more than three thousand miles later into the arctic world atop Mount Washington.

  The portion of the northern Appalachians called the White Mountains, square mile for square mile, may have the most extensive shelf of relevant books of any range in America, a literature beginning in the late eighteenth century. The nearest comparable topography around is the Green Mountains in Vermont, but for every word they have evoked over the years, the New Hampshire range can show, so I’d guess, five times that. It’s as if some travelers come into the country through one of the three great notches and thereupon get imbued with an urge to describe the territory, to tell its tales or tell their tales about it. Were the White Mountains in the South, that land of natural tale-tellers, the stories might fill American literature and leave little room for the rest of us. And perhaps a reverse is true: were the range in Minnesota, we would not yet have heard about them.

  Beyond beauty and their proximity to a populace of generally well-educated citizens — Harvard Yard is only 120 miles away — the bookish attention to the White Hills is much the result of a national forest established there in 1918, a protection that helped keep out early-day rapacious, liquidating, timber operations to create a future of tourists, hikers, climbers, hunters, skiers, and artists who replenish themselves somewhat faster and spend more on lattes than a stand of spruce.
That wisdom of long-lasting prosperity for the many over short-term profit for the few set up my expectations for the North Maine Woods lying, geologically at least, not far from the tail end of the New Hampshire range.

  We left the mountainous forest and followed broken hills northeast to Skowhegan, Maine, where one cool and gloomy morning we came upon the Empire Grill. We were drawn to it not so much by the old red-neon Indian glowing in profile as by two simpler signs also suggesting another era: HOT MEALS. BOOTH SERVICE. Inside was that unmistakable and memory-releasing scent unique to an American breakfast café: vaporing coffee, toasting bread, hot maple syrup, a wisp of eggs-over-easy. On a morning of thorough Maine dismals, I suddenly had reason — beyond eventual necessity — to have gotten out of bed. I heard, as if an addendum to my remark: “A reason to get out of bed? How about why you’re alive? When is it you don’t hear the Empire Grills of America calling?”

  Before going again to the road, we walked worn Water Street with its shop windows of dusty merchandise. In one hung a sign: WE GOT ’EM! BUG SUITS! (Q: “Roaches dressed fit to kill?”) If you’ve ever put yourself near trees or water in northern Maine in early summer, you know the reference is not to bug toggery but to a collection of winged things, from the invisible (midges) to the whining (mosquitoes) to the silent (blackflies) and on down to crawlers (ticks). Some people refer to the North Maine Woods as “uninhabited,” but an estival stroll anywhere near water or timber will disabuse anybody of that description, for the place is fully inhabited, and the habitants are nature’s first line of defense against the sprawling of humanity into one of the last great, forested realms in the Northeast. To be sure, Americans owe a debt to the blackfly, for without it we might have Six Flags Over Moose World and its attendant parking lots, tract housing — well, you know the story.