by Tom Cunliffe
One day, Roz and I had taken the Plymouth into Charleston to buy a part for the boat. Homeward bound across the narrow river bridge one of the tyres blew, so we stopped to change the wheel. This blocked up one lane. The more athletic traffic managed to squeeze by outside us, but we had soon created a tailback. I opened the trunk to grab the spare and discovered it was flat. Help was needed, so I left Roz in charge and flagged a lift to the creek a mile or two further on. Ricky mustered the troops and we found a wheel that looked as though it might do. Then we all piled into the massively illegal Cadillac; Ambrosio, the carrot-haired girl, Ricky, myself, a mechanic named Andy, his girl who was memorable for the legend on the bulkhead of her boat, ‘Isn’t this a lovely day? Just watch some bastard louse it up!’ and a shady fellow said to have murdered several people.
The pink monster careered out on to the bridge in fine style. Its offside front panel flapped like a broken wing and its nonexistent shocks had it pitching like a ship in a heavy sea. On we went in a blue haze of marijuana smoke with Andy sitting on the trunk hanging on to the spare wheel and Ambrosio serenading us on a beat-up guitar. Breasting the summit under the criss-crossed girder structure, we could see a mile-long queue ahead on the other side of the road.
‘I think,’ said Andy, leaning into the accommodation space, raising his voice against the slipstream and the roar of the lace exhaust, ‘we’d better keep right on going.’
‘Waddayamean?’ shouted Ricky, a joint the size of an empty toilet roll clamped firmly in the side of his mouth against the buffeting wind.
‘Jus’ take a look at the car behind the Plymouth,’ drawled the mechanic with laconic deliberation.
We did. It was a state trooper.
‘Oh shit!’ Ricky hit the gas. As we swept by on the other side, Roz was being slowly pushed, fender to fender, by an angry-looking cop. The Plymouth was limping badly and the only place for our car-load of crime to be was anywhere but here.
By the time we returned to the creek, Roz had managed to chat up the trooper who had seen to the tyre and had even bought her a burger. By the mercy of God, he left just before the Cadillac lurched into the yard.
We heaved up the wriggling crab pot, Suzie arrived with a crate of beer and life kicked in once more.
That night, Ambrosio gave me the album, Music of the Ozarks.
‘This is the very best music ever made, man,’ he confided, his eyes bloody with booze and bonhomie. ‘And you can’t buy the tape.’
Ambrosio was right.
The last we saw of him was some weeks later. He was motoring the battered yacht northwards out of the creek, with Carrot giving him major earache, just as the murderer was driving into the yard, tanked up on rum.
‘That bastard’s got my money,’ raved the enemy, dashing around the boats looking for one he could steal to give chase. ‘He did a job on my yacht an’ it’s all turned to horse-crap. The thing’s sunk an’ now he’s away out of it. I’ll kill him. Just gimme a boat!’
The assassin made off with a small, tatty speedboat and tore out into the harbour heading south. I hope they never met, though Andy had suggested we tip off the cops anonymously to look out for the sport boat, near to which there could well be a ‘homicide in progress’.
I still have Ambrosio’s original tape. Music of the Ozarks is a collection of folk songs and instrumentals from amateur players in the mountains that now lay ahead of us, twenty years after Ambrosio puttered out from Shem Creek. There are tales of faithful horses, ‘The Tennessee Stud’; gospel songs from a cleaner, simpler time; obscure ballads about people dismembering their lovers for no apparent reason while the river flows on to Knoxville Town. Moonshiners fool the Revenue Men, and Old Bill Jones slips his reluctant mistress an anaesthetic dose of hooch then marries her while she is still unconscious. Pounding all through like the weft of a woven cloth, run wild fiddle and banjo rhythms, lifting the spirits of any but the dead of soul.
I have listened so often to Ambrosio’s music that I know every lilt and slide as well as I know the tides of the Solent. Riding across that fertile plain west of the Mississippi, it took over my mind while the Harley churned ahead through the sultry afternoon, vibrating all through my body, urging onwards to the subliminal rippling of the long-dead hillmen’s reels. The small farms of eastern Arkansas flashed by on the board-flat land as we turned off the main highway of Route 412 to jink our way via an unprecedented eight turnings between lunchtime and the storm-determined end of the day.
The threat of storms stalked us all the way from the Appalachians to the high plains of eastern Montana. Back in the hill country, or along the border of Tennessee and Kentucky, it had been tough to get a fix on cloud movements and impossible to organise any avoiding action, so we took what came on our chin straps. As the country opened out into wider spaces and large-scale chequer-board road patterns, storm dodging developed a remarkable similarity to operating at sea in squally conditions. We made radical course alterations using the 90-degree road junctions to enable the storm clouds to shift their relative bearings in the changing apparent wind. Half a lifetime of subconsciously analysing airflow patterns must have helped, and so long as we could keep the nearest edge of the rain moving backwards against the horizon, we stood a fair chance.
In the afternoon, we were passing though the town of Sedgewick when rapidly darkening clouds suddenly stopped cruising around aimlessly and gathered with ominous intent. Sedgewick didn’t grab our fancy, and as it was only four o’clock we decided to chance our luck and blast up the main road towards the imaginatively named settlement of Pocahontas. For me, at least, romantic names formed the mainspring of parts of this trip, and Pocahontas was surely a queen in this department. Nearby was a smaller village called Powhatan. We had no special interest in this father-and-daughter team and their English chum John Smith the chart maker, but the name alone was pulling us in when we felt the now-familiar blast of cold air from the heavens. The bike was blown sideways by the gust, while away to the north-east a black wall of rain was establishing itself and advancing athwart our course with the speed of a modern mechanised division. The anvil cloud above it was striding straight towards where we would be in five minutes time and all seemed lost when we came upon a road junction offering a way out to the south-west. ‘Hoxie’, read the signpost. In the intermediate distance we could actually see the buildings rising above the plain. Two miles, maybe three.
I decided unilaterally to swing the corner and together we opened up wide and let the rubber rip the road. For a few heady moments, Roz lost all speed-shyness as we cracked on up to the railroad crossing that stood between us and the single main street of town. The bells were ringing to announce a train, but the barriers were still up so I dropped the clutch and lurched across a rough set of rails. Turning to check Roz, hard on my back wheel, I saw her glance towards the storm. Shining out of the roaring blackness like a warning beacon, the powerful headlight of a locomotive was in plain view up the track, growing fast. Roz watched it coming, stopped and appeared mesmerised. Just as the barrier started to drop, condemning her and Betty Boop to an unavoidable soaking, the train whistle blew. ‘Whaaaa, Whaaaa!’
The American train siren has the psychological effect of a gigantic invisible hand sweeping anyone near the tracks clear of the approaching judgement day. The car-count on the freight trains pounding through Hoxie ran well into three figures, pulled by four locomotives strapped together weighing in at hundreds of tons apiece. Squealing to a sudden halt to avoid crushing a yellow motorcycle would not be an option for the engineer, even had the timetable permitted its consideration. To my astonishment, therefore, having apparently committed herself to the discomfort of the safe option, Roz scrutinised the storm cloud, glanced at the locomotive, then flicked the Sportster into gear with her left boot and shot across the iron road, arriving on the dry side just as the barrier slammed shut behind her. The rain was cutting towards us like a scythe with the train hot on its heels. I could hear the falling water hissing on
the melting tarmac as we turned to flee before it, racing along a one-sided street with buildings to our right and railroad to the left. We wheeled into the shelter of the portico outside the Ol’ Hickory Motel with not ten seconds to spare.
Thirty yards across the road, the giant diesel rumbled by shaking the ground, dirty yellow, with ‘Union Pacific’ proudly painted down its flanks, the tail-end of its train fuzzing out of vision in the heat haze beyond the storm. The tan-vested engineer peered through the rain-lashed window of his cab and raised a hairy arm in ironic salute to Roz. It took two full minutes before the guard’s van clanked by, leaving the scene oddly quiet and bare, with only the Mack truck drivers heading down to Little Rock, Arkansas behind their slapping windscreen wipers, and the brown swooshing sound of the rain on the shingle roof.
A little later, I strolled across the street to examine a stationary freight train. The wheels of the first boxcar I came to were chest-high from where I was standing and the whole unit was as tall as my cottage back in England, and considerably longer. I paced out the length of the carriage, added a few feet for the space between the wagons, and then multiplied the sum by one hundred. Totalling up a further 50 yards or so for three or four diesel locomotives, the train was a mile and a half long.
With the setting sun behind me, I drifted along the edge of the ballast for half a mile, fetching up at the caboose. The guard leaned out and put me in the picture about how they would be here for another five minutes while a train further down the line cleared the tracks. Divided from the engineers up front by over 2,000 yards of ironmongery, he was on his lonely way towards Wyoming to load up from the open-cast coal mines that are ripping the face off swathes of that fair state. He had worked on the Union Pacific all his life, and his father before him. Now, his only daughter’s husband had gone clean off the rails into the new world of information technology. The railroad man saw no dignity in the boy’s calling.
‘It’s fine and dandy communicating quicker and better than ever, but in the end, you gotta have steel. No steel: no automobiles, no dishwashers, no street lighting, no ships, no buildings, no United States.’
‘But surely, all this new technology has its place? Otherwise we’d be back with the Pony Express.’
‘Sure it does, but this country was built on industry. Heavy industry. Making things that have a function, things that folks want to buy. You can’t cook with a computer and you can’t climb in it and ride it to California. This Internet craze will settle down in a few years and he’ll be out of work. But the trains’ll still be around.’
Something beeped inside his cab and he turned away from me to attend to the mysteries of his craft.
‘Here we go, then. Be seein’ you, mister.’
A cloud of black exhaust appeared from the front of the train, followed five seconds later by the deep throb of a diesel beginning to pull. It took that long for the sound to reach us. From along the line of cars came the steady clanging of couplings taking up the slack and the squeak and rumble of truck wheels starting to turn. Twenty cars to the westwards, the train was in motion. In no time, the guard’s van smoothly followed. I watched it shrink into the distance beyond town until it was lost in the dazzle of the setting sun.
Back in the Ol’ Hickory, I slumped on the bed and stared at the ceiling. To a European used to ceilings plastered from wall to wall, the cladding that covers the joists in North America is startling. Often, ceilings are panelled with board or even polystyrene held up by narrow timber strips or a light metal framework. The sections can be anything from 2-feet square to half the ceiling, although the method of support remains the same. The smaller variety make working on the plumbing or wiring easier than levering up floorboards in the room overhead as most Brits are constrained to do when the central heating starts to drip black filth on to the best carpet. Yet even here, a downside lurks. Years before, I was hired to help renovate a Boston flop-house. I removed one of these panels, delighting in the ready accessibility, only to be showered with ex-mice and other dust-caked horrors that had opted not to die honestly out in the yard. Except at their best, which in roadside motels they often are not, these ceilings at first look home-made and untidy, yet after a few months they fade from the traveller’s consciousness and become an unnoticed part of the indoor scenery.
As the coolness eased the aches of the day, I inspected the room in more detail and realised that it was a classic in quintessential American styling. To our eyes, the general effect is often dark, the walls lined with wood-effect composite material in preference to the stuff that comes from trees. As a lover of timber, I can never understand this preference for the laminates that proliferate even in smart homes. There is an intangible fifties and sixties feel to furnishings and light fittings, while the efficient, but aesthetically disastrous Venetian blind remains popular, often without a vestige of curtain to ease its starkness.
The Ol’ Hickory was also typical in the bed-linen department, with tightly tucked blankets reminiscent of a post-war childhood instead of modern quilts. But the price was right, and in any case, the main decision to be made at bedtime in summer is whether to leave the air-conditioning on and suffer the stress-inducing racket, or turn it off and risk dissolving under a damp sheet somewhere in the mazy world before morning.
It seemed as though a train passed through Hoxie every half-hour between dusk and dawn, so that the long-standing importance of the railroad to American continental culture was rammed noisily home. Surrounded by the sound of heavy commerce, in the middle of the night, in a small town that only existed to be on the way to somewhere else, it was easy to empathise with the guard’s frustration over his daughter’s choice of husband.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, investment in the transport of goods and people by rail proved a winner for both fly-by-night gamblers and conservative shareholders. Funding could be raised for any viable enterprise and, as early as 1850, Washington was firmly connected to New York, Boston and even Maine by regular trains. In the antebellum South, branch lines forked away through the plantations, into the forests and across open grassland to join Charleston with Atlanta, and Savannah with Chattanooga. Similar development was fanning out from Chicago, Detroit and the Great Lakes, but it was not until 1866, fifteen years after the California gold rush, that the momentous decision was taken to link the East and West Coasts.
From the East, gangs of Irishmen, black and white men from the defeated Southern states were hired by the Union Pacific. Construction teams graded the route ahead of the iron road, while in their wake came the unstoppable army of up to 10,000 track-layers and their pack animals. Behind these shuttled a backup stream of trains, Typically, forty cars each carried 10 tons of track, ties, spikes and timber sleepers, as well as domestic supplies for the navvies. Such a load would represent an advance of no more than a single mile of track.
As the thin, shining line crept west beyond the longitude of our present lodgings, the Central Pacific Railroad was pushing its own track eastwards from San Francisco, mostly with coolie labour from China. Their men are said to have refreshed themselves with tea, while the heavies of the Union Pacific were powered by whiskey. A subsidy of $16,000 per mile promised by the government proved so inadequate when the Central Pacific hit the high Sierras that it had to be jacked up threefold.
Two years was all it took for these men of astonishing ingenuity and fortitude to fight their way across the Rockies. They had no technological support save dynamite and, with the exception of timber, all materials were delivered on their own trains, having arrived in California aboard square-rigged sailing ships obliged to beat around Cape Horn.
The straight roads across the plains of North America are still delineated by traditional telegraph wires on lofty wooden poles. These began with the first transcontinental railroad, carrying messages from station to station and bringing a huge improvement in efficiency and safety. As East Coast met West in the impossible remoteness of 1869 Utah, the telegraph was joined at the s
ame time as the railroad track. Its commercial potential was obvious, but the first message sent from coast to coast is said to have been tapped out by a lineman leaning back against his leather strap high in the wind on his historic pole. ‘Stand By! We have done praying.’
In the morning we sheered off from the railroad. Riding on rising ground towards Mountain Home, Arkansas, we soon found ourselves in idyllic countryside of the type we’d expected to see along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, but hadn’t. Small fields interspersed with sweet-smelling copses of pine and neat, fresh-painted farmsteads. In one meadow by a stream three handsome horses were standing knee-deep in grass and wild flowers; one white, one caramel and one a yellow butterscotch colour. I swung Madonna into the roadside, dismounted and was leaning on the gate when Roz arrived. I’d stopped for her, really, because I knew it was a scene she would want to savour, but instead of exuding sweetness and peace, she was clearly uptight about something. I chose to ignore the signs, half-heartedly hoping the mood would lift. I should have known it wouldn’t.
She joined me at the gate, but said nothing.
‘Lovely riding,’ I tried again. ‘Nice and cool.’ The temperature was easing as we climbed towards the hills, but I’d got something badly wrong.
‘It probably is for you,’ Roz responded, ‘but until you stopped, I haven’t been able to enjoy a thing about it. I have to concentrate so hard on these twisting roads that all I see is your back-end, the tarmac and the traffic coming towards me.’