by Chip Jacobs
“I believe so.”
“Us in management aren’t deaf. We’ve heard the tittle-tattling about bizarre goings-on. You’re a logical sort, Chance. Don’t you find campfire tales blasphemous—to God and science? I do.”
Before he answered, Nick visualized A. J. Pearson’s thunderous machine shop, which he believed was responsible for the groans and rattles around the bridge deck that disquieted some of these Nellies. He didn’t inform Chester about it before and wouldn’t notify Marcus now. Doing that might be an acknowledgment he investigated the matter.
“Sometimes,” Nick said, blowing on his hands, “it’s smart to let people vent, regardless of one’s own views. Truth’s a splinter. It always breaks the skin eventually.”
“See,” Marcus said. “That’s using the ol’ noggin.”
—
Turns out Mount Lowe Railway’s policy about allowing dogs aboard wasn’t as flexible as normal Red Cars. The railway’s humorless ticket agent was impervious to Royo’s human-esque “let-me-on” simper. He crossed his uniformed arms when Nick lamented hammily: “we’ll get you there sometime, boy, before you die.”
A pair of George Washingtons needed to come to the rescue. “Just this time,” said the agent in a muffled voice, palming the two dollars Nick slipped to him. “If he does his business, you’ll be mopping it with bleach. Take the back row.”
The math was still in Nick’s favor. The round-trip tickets that Marcus awarded Nick retailed for six dollars on what promised to be a full trolley. Mere days after the freak snowstorm, Pasadena’s spring weather was supposed to default to seasonal norm: clear skies and a seventy-degree high.
You started this three-legged voyage into the clouds at a depot at the top of Lake Avenue in Altadena, a wine-growing/farming highlands chopped from the forest and canyons northeast of Pasadena. It was eight in the morning on Sunday, with Nick peppy to show Royo what one of his hometown heroes accomplished. “Wait till we get there,” he said as the more formally dressed passengers boarded, some of them frowning at Nick’s black-muzzled companion. “You can touch the sky.”
Transporting oneself to the piney fringe of the Sierra Madre range, which stuffed shirts rhapsodized as “The Alps of Pasadena” (or its “Granite Breasts”), required two hours of endurance. This first jag was a leisurely trip on a meandering route past poppy fields and avocado-colored waterfalls, spiraling over the Rubio Canyon wash. Here, the less adventurous could decamp for a hotel pavilion furrowed into the canyon walls. Barely into wilderness, there was dancing, dining, Japanese lanterns.
Those pressing on exited the cable-type car for an open-air funicular well publicized in magazines. Tourists compared it to a stylish “opera box,” though Nick, who’d ridden it on multiple occasions, compared it more to a giant, fairy-tale sleigh cobbled by Santa’s most ambitious elves. The funicular climbed the appropriately named “Great Incline” on a unique, three-railed track, clacking upward in places at a hair-raising sixty-two degrees. Passengers stayed relatively level, but the angle still tensed jaws and induced benedictions for the vehicle’s emergency brakes.
This half-mile ascent could take forever, unless you were either new to it or a thrillseeker. As both, Royo was enthralled, with his nose sniffing terrain and his paws clamped over the side. Nick watched him, conjuring mental images of sausages to determine if he reacted by licking his chops— confirmation it was one of his mind-reading days. Royo didn’t, so Nick communicated by whispering into his floppy ear.
The funicular clattered upward, over a ravine, easing to a stop at a terminus bittersweet for many Southern Californians. Ten or so years ago, they would’ve rushed off the cab to line up for the “White City in the Sky.” Nick smiled elegiacally recalling its bygone layout, telling Royo before they got off. “When father would bring me here, he’d say this place ‘erased the line between possible and impossible. Now imagine what you’ll do.’”
Royo cocked his head knowingly. Yet he couldn’t know this history.
Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, the railway’s initiator-financier, and civil engineer David J. Macpherson, his colleague, had tackled the inconceivable. They saw this mountain and conquered it, creating a resort above the city at an elevation that blimps had difficulty reaching. Before calamities obliterated most of it, the star attraction was the Echo Mountain House, a seventy-room, circular-decked Victorian hotel: Lowe’s answer to San Diego’s posh Hotel del Coronado. Built on a promontory overlooking the valley floor, the first-class hotel was a gemstone in Pasadena’s emerging tiara. For distinction, all the surfaces were painted white, including the funicular visible from Busch Gardens.
At its outset, the White City never suffered for customers. Honey-mooners booked it. Tourists mobbed it. Outdoor-enthusiasts saved for it. If the views didn’t wow you, activities did. There were tennis courts, stables, an impressive zoo, curio shops, and a labyrinth of trails. During the Fourth of July and Christmas, the busy place could’ve used a turnstile. Reasonably affordable for the commoner, it was altitude with trimmings.
“Come here for a sec,” Nick said, clapping Royo to his side after they exited the funicular. “You don’t want to squander this.”
They walked twenty yards toward the cliff. At the edge, Nick squatted and slung his arm around his dog. “See that pile of rubble over there? Let’s say Professor Lowe’s reach exceeded his grasp. He might’ve been the city’s first scientist.”
Long before George Hale traveled west from MIT to erect his space telescopes, Lowe commissioned one on his mountaintop that’d discovered ninety-five nebulae. White City also boasted one of the world’s strongest torches: a searchlight whose Herculean beam could radiate thirty-five miles. You could shoot light all the way to the Channel Islands off the coast from it, or rile up horses in faraway towns. Some jokers once illuminated the private parts of skinny dippers at a pond below.
For those uninterested in that, there were hike-able gorges so deep that the sound-chamber effect boomeranged voices back myriad times. It was how Echo Mountain earned its name. Nick’s personal record: seven repeats.
Rohw, gurgled Royo.
Gilda Figgleberry, Nick’s now-ancient teacher, devoted a whole week engrossing her class with Lowe’s vision, and Nick never forgot an iota. He decided right then if he ever had a son, Thaddeus would be his middle name. In his school report on the railway, Nick characterized it as “the stuff of legends, fashioned as much by sheer brawn as brainy innovation.” To groom the complex track, mountainsides were dynamited and precarious crossings traversed. When pack mules defied their floggings, refusing to continue on the jagged, snake-filled slopes, Lowe’s men hefted the backbreaking loads themselves.
Lowe never started off dreaming of this. Self-taught and industrious, he aspired to cross the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. When Abraham Lincoln requested he spy on Confederate troops from one instead, a military first, Lowe fulfilled his patriotic duty. Post-war, the handsome inventor bunkered in a lab, mastering something else extraordinary. He distilled hydrogen gas from charcoal and steam, which pushed refrigeration technology into the modern age. Later, he opened ice factories, founded Citizen’s Bank here, and grew affluent enough in his adopted town to launch this rocky-top playground.
“But White City didn’t last, as some things aren’t meant to,” Nick told Royo as they hurried back to the platform, where a new tram idled for them. Only years after the resort debuted, shaky finances started eroding the bottom line. Everything except the observatory sunk into receivership and, ultimately, new ownership. Ensuing trouble made you wonder if it was hexed. In 1900, fire consumed the hotel. Then an astronomer went blind. Then electrical storms and floods wreaked havoc, almost killing several children. Even Lowe’s Grand Opera House on Raymond Avenue fizzled out.
Lowe died six months ago, at eighty, but in a sense he was already gone. “Was it worth it?” Nick muttered to Royo as they took their rear seats. “S
hould Mr. Lowe have spent his retirement counting his fortune until he was a doddering fool? Course not.”
Quickly, Nick realized he needed to cork the nostalgic observations to his furry-earred companion. A respectable couple sharing their bench leaned away from them like they were contagious. Next, a man clutching a book behind them remarked to a fellow passenger (for Nick to hear), “Only a simpleton converses with a dog as if he were a person.”
Simpleton? Nick immersed into thought, an exhilarating one, too. As soon as the Colorado Street Bridge was finished, he was establishing a solar lamp company and hotfooting it here. He could sell Lowe’s successors a hundred units, easy, to bolster the track’s spotty lighting.
From here on, the electric-traction railroad became a moderate-speed roller coaster. At first, the zzzzz-zzzzzing tram hummed smoothly past meadows, chasms, and granite walls. Up close, the trees and vegetation matting the southern side of the Sierra Madre shook alive in vivid colors; gazing up at them from Pasadena, they blended together over the ridges in speckled, blackish-brown patches and swatches of mossy green.
But the higher the tram ventured above the chaparral, the greater the frequency of corkscrewing bends on dozens of curves and bridges. Brochures never mentioned motion sickness currently turning some passengers green. A scarf-wearing old lady mouthed prayers crossing Las Flores Canyon and the drop over “The Cape of Good Hope.” Nick, whose iron stomach handled heights and spices better than herky-jerky motion, wanted off.
At last the cab swung around its final bend, toward the sign announcing they’d reached Crystal Springs, altitude 5,600 feet above sea level. The hoarse-voiced conductor reminded everyone not to miss either of the departing trains. Those cliff-swinging turns would test courage at night.
Appearing before everyone was the largest structure around: the two-story, stone-and-wood Alpine Tavern. It was as homey as Echo Mountain was once sprawling. Nick jogged to the men’s room first thing; Royo doused a redwood with what Fleet, who was occupied today studying clubbed feet and harelips, phrased as the dog’s camel-size bladder.
Accompanying the tickets—which Nick recognized Marcus gave him to ignore the Nellies, as he was already doing—were two food vouchers. Some add-on. Lunch here wasn’t like Mercereau Company’s. It was veal tough as suede and stinky deviled eggs. Royo lapped up what Nick passed on.
You were cloud dancing, nonetheless, bracketed between Millard Canyon to the west and Eaton Canyon to the east. Behind Mount Lowe loomed three sister peaks: Mount Disappointment, Mount San Gabriel, and Mount Markham, the latter named after Pasadenan Henry Harrison Markham, California’s dashing governor in the 1890s. The crisp air made it borderline sweater weather; Nick stored one in his worn daypack.
“Now what?” he asked Royo after that unsatisfying lunch. They were isolated on a touristy campground off-season with hours to kill and no White City to luxuriate in. So, they loitered inside the tavern dominated by a gargantuan stone fireplace and a vintage rocking chair, all of which whittled away five minutes. Nick examined a map highlighting caves scattered with Indian artifacts next. “Should we go?” he asked Royo. “Magnificent views, if you’re agreeable to swallowing flies along the path.”
They moseyed outside, and Nick’s canine wiggle-waggled over to a board pointing toward “Mt. Lowe’s Inspiration Point” and woofed. “Sold,” Nick answered. “Just keep that veal breath to yourself.”
Although the tram coming up was full, the overall crowd here was sparse. The exception was a gazebo whose “lookout telescope” Nick hoped to peek through. A large, boisterous group of cackling mothers, grab-ass adolescents, and fathers debating Yankees versus Cubs beat them there, though. Nick was tempted to yap that it was public property, not theirs.
At a bench behind the gazebo, he dove into his pack for diversions. He played tennis ball toss-and-fetch with Royo. He Frisbee-d saltines, tallying how many he could catch in a row (nine). He read deeper into Great Expectations. He started and crumpled a letter to his mother. His acoustic guitar would’ve been swell here.
When the gazebo-hoggers left, Nick and Royo jumped into it, chasing each other and wrestling under the roof; that was good for nine minutes. Afterward, Nick squished his face into the pivoting telescope for a gander at Pasadena’s Mesopotamia: the Arroyo Seco. What else was there to do? Let Royo scarf a whole sleeve of crackers?
Nick let his eyes take a lazy trip from the canyon’s start at the Red Box Saddle watershed onto the high, alluvial plain. They followed the wash, which demarcated upper Pasadena with the La Crescenta Valley, on its serpentine route around trails and old camps, into the Devil’s Gate expanse and the Hahamonga area. The Arroyo then slashed downward past the Linda Vista hills, the Scoville pump house, Nick’s magnificent bridge, and all the way into the Los Angeles River.
The ravine might’ve appeared peaceful from these heights, but city folks knew it could be schizophrenic. In the dry season, mountain waters produced either a trickling stream of residual snowmelt or a parched, riparian gulch. During hard winter rains and deluges, its personality was hardly gentle. Indeed, swift-moving currents often swamped the banks. The most potent mudflows would flatten most anything in their way, living or inert.
This raw power wasn’t lost on Indians long attuned to nature. To the Tongva tribe, the roar of slapping waters downstream from Switzer Falls was the clamor of an otherworldly wager between the tributary and the Great Coyote Spirit.
It was along these banks where a Mexican land grant launched Rancho San Pasqual of early, unincorporated Pasadena. Fifty years later, members of the Indiana Colony aggregated south, on what was now Orange Grove Boulevard, to fashion a water-fed town. Talk about great expectations.
Or, for Nick now, great languor: the last time he was so bored out of his gourd was leading a Cawston tour for a convent of nuns that’d taken a vow of silence.
He tilted the telescope up to see if he could locate Catalina Island, but he overdid it, aiming the lens into the sky at nearly ninety degrees. For a few seconds, the lens caught the blazing sun dead center, which reflected the glare from the Earth’s ten-thousand-degree star directly into his left eyeball.
Oww. He shut his eye, reeling away from the cliff like he’d just electrocuted himself by stupidity.
Under his eyelid, yellow dots buzzed in circular orbits, and a sharp headache cropped up with them. Squinting out of his right eye, he backpedaled to the bench where he was before, and sat down clumsily on it. Somehow, he was able to scrounge into his backpack to grab ahold of his Bayer aspirin and canteen. He shook out some pills and swigged water. Then he lay down, draping his arm over his jackhammering skull.
Once the whizzing dots slowed, he cracked his sun-blasted eye. Blurry vision was better than viewing only black out of it. Wherever Thaddeus Lowe was in the ether, Nick hoped he missed this. He massaged his temples and tried forcing himself to doze off.
Arf-arf-arf-arf-arf. Rohrrrrr. Rohhhh.
Royo’s fusillade barking ended his nap after seven minutes. Nick popped up and saw, in fuzzy optics, his bigmouth dog up an embankment about fifteen yards behind the bench. Something in the shrubberies around a purple wisteria there was inciting him to sleuth.
An achoo rang out from inside the bushes next. There was a person hiding in there.
“Present yourself,” Nick said. “My dog will pounce.”
Nick, figuring it was one of those kids from the gazebo trying to prank him, summoned Royo back when no one answered. Royo didn’t move though, and then three consecutive achoos rattled the branches. His Mount Lowe stalker was an allergy-sufferer.
He hopped onto his boots, noticing an object by the bench he could weaponize in case he’d underestimated the threat. It was a pinecone. “Jig’s up,” he said. “Get out here.”
Royo now was poking his curious snout through the shrubbery, sniffing at whoever was crouching beside the wisteria’s gnarled base. His tail was wag
ging propeller-esque, which he usually reserved for greeting Nick or chasing a Busch Gardens’ swan. Soon, he vocalized recognition—Oh-roh-yur ow—at the intruder.
“Don’t make me throw this, uh, rock,” Nick said. “It’ll hurt. Probably.”
Displeased by the silence, he fastballed the pinecone against an oak near the wisteria, which exploded in a brittle burst. “There’s more where that came from,” he added.
A creamy female hand crept up in surrender. “No need for that,” said the hiding woman in gray hiking pants and a lima-bean sweater rolled up at the arms. Jules Cumbersmith swiped through the bushes and emerged. “Spit it out,” she said. “You must be crafting some witticism.” Achoo.
Nick’s afternoon was officially pear-shaped. “I tend not to make light when someone is spying on me,” he said. “Not even someone experiencing a sneezing fit.”
“May I sit down to defend myself?” she asked.
“That’d be sensible. One of the bushes you waded through was poison oak.”
“Oh, grand,” Jules said. She examined her forearms for rashes and trod sheepishly down to the bench, sitting at the far end from Nick. Royo, the traitor, immediately mashed his butt against her knees in a “rub-this” demand.
“Before you chide me for any nefarious intent, you should know I’ve been up here overnight on committee business for Lilly. “It’s—oww. Ants are biting me with their tiny teeth.” She pushed off the bench, swiping red dots off her neck.
If Nick weren’t so cheesed off, he would’ve found that endearing. “On business?” he said once she sat down again. “Bunk!”
“It’s the truth. She requested I conduct research at the Alpine Tavern. I was in there, rifling through an old diary, when I observed you two arriving on the noon train.”
“And you decided you’d surveil me, in case you needed to inform her of any sordid behavior I revealed up here. That’s one razor-thin alibi.”
Jules didn’t say anything. Her hands were active, though. When she wasn’t scratching at her neck and her arms, she was rubbing Royo’s bristly hind.