by Peter Millar
‘What about Galileo?’ I venture timidly, thinking of the Catholic Church’s persecution of the great Renaissance Italian scientist. I might have expected Bakker’s response:
‘Yeah, Galileo was a jerk. He was right, but he was a jerk. What got him into trouble was he was a show-off. He annoyed people. A bit like Dawkins.’ That, at least, is one analogy I know Dawkins could live with. I respect Dawkins but I can see where Bakker is coming from. If I were a TV producer with a brief to turn out more intellectual programmes for Channel 4, I would love to put these two head-to-head. There might not be a winner but it wouldn’t half be colourful.
Set against the vast calendar of the ages spread out all around us, human life spans seem suddenly incredibly short, our time terribly constrained. Especially if you’ve got a train to catch. And I have. Amtrak waits for no man, even if it does frequently expect men and women to wait for it. We climb into the rig and head back for Malta halt.
We take a different route only to be jerked brutally back into twenty-first-century Montana as we pass by an outcrop of rock with even more spectacular views across the Cretaceous ocean – the reason we came this way – spoiled by dozens of tin cans littered across the slopes.
‘Damn kids,’ says Jack as he halts the rig and we climb down to briefly survey the marred landscape. The cans, I notice, have all got holes in them. ‘Like I said, there’s not much to do around here. They just drive out, have a few beers and shoot ’em up.’ Malta’s young men, maybe some of them back from Iraq, maybe some of them thinking about signing up, sitting out here, under the stars, in the face of a treasure trove of the earth’s primordial history that to them must just look like an endless emptiness, hurling empty beer cans into the sky and firing holes in them with six-shooters.
‘Guns,’ says Bakker with what I think – but can’t be sure – sounds like disapproval, and not just of the despoilation of the landscape.
‘I always carry three rifles and a pistol in the rig,’ says Jack, just a mite defensively, as we climb back in.
‘Is that ’cause you’re paranoid?’ asks Sue, apparently genuinely.
‘Hell no. You might get kidnapped,’ he adds with a grin.
‘Like by those wild men in Idaho?’ says Sue. The neighbouring state has a reputation as a haven for white supremacist woodsmen militias.
‘Oh no,’ says Jack with a gesture that suggests anything Idaho can do, Montana can do better. ‘We got some of our own.’
‘How long did it take you last time you bought a gun, Jack?’ asks Sue. And he laughs. ‘Well, last time they did a full background check, so it took nearly 20 minutes. But if you have a criminal record or something, heck it can take – I dunno – maybe at least half an hour.’
Jack puts his foot down. My train is due, in theory at least, in just 20 minutes. The chances of it being on time are slight, but you can never tell. If I miss it, the next one is the same time tomorrow. And that would throw my whole itinerary for this section of the trip out at least by 24 hours. Outside the short distance commuter lines in New England and between Washington and New York there aren’t many Amtrak trains more than once a day.
Given just how empty the roads are, though, I’m willing Jack on to go just a little bit faster than 55 mph.
‘These roads can be a death trap,’ he says.
‘Why?’ I wonder, staring out into the emptiness in both directions.
‘Ice, elks, speed, people driving too fast just to see how fast they can go and then they find out – too fast, and drunks of course.’ He nods towards a ditch beyond a curve in the road. ‘There was a young girl got stuck in there. Lost half her butt. Imagine that. Entertaining as hell, sitting there with your butt burning. The grease’d only add to the flames. Mind you, she survived.’
‘When I die,’ says Sue genuinely, almost cheerfully, if a trifle obliquely, ‘I’d like my ashes spread out here,’ and she waves an arm back towards the vast fossil fields.
‘Well,’ says Bob, ‘I guess we could do that, including your butt and all.’
‘Right,’ says Sue.
Back at Malta halt in the shadow of the great grain silo the track stretches forever into emptiness in the direction of Glasgow, and onwards towards the still invisible continental barrier of the Rockies.
The two ladies who greeted me are there to see me off. Like I said, not a lot happens in Malta. These days.
One looks at her watch and then at the other.
‘Could have been a derailment,’ she says.
The other smiles at me reassuringly and says:
‘No. We haven’t had a derailment in ages.’
I’m not as reassured as I might be, even when they explain they mean freight, not passenger.
Then the big blue-and-silver snub-nosed snake appears in the distance glinting in the afternoon sun and grows until it is bearing down on us, snorting and panting. I climb aboard and wave goodbye to Montana.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. True grit.
1 CAT scans carried out on site were used in July 2008 by the Ford motor company’s parts protoyping system to make life-size models of Leonardo intended to tour the world.
MONTANA TO SPOKANE
TRAIN: Empire Builder
FREQUENCY: 1 a day
DEP. MALTA, MONTANA: 1:25 p.m. (Mountain Time)
via
Havre, MT
Shelby, MT
Cut Bank, MT
Browning, MT
East Glacier Park, MT
Essex, MT
West Glacier, MT
Whitefish, MT
Libby, MT
Sandpoint, Idaho
ARRIVE SPOKANE, WASHINGTON: 1:40 a.m. (Pacific Time)
DURATION: approx 13 hours, 15 minutes
DISTANCE: 600 miles
10
Bingo
YOU WILL HAVE GATHERED by now that taking the northerly land route across the vastness of continental America means travelling if not quite literally in the footsteps of the great Lewis and Clark then very much in their wake. Their exploration is one of the great American legends.
In this there are two breeds of modern American: those who are in awe of that epic pioneering journey and consider its hardships and sense of wondrous discovery at almost every moment. And those who never think of it at all.
Bob Bakker for example – and my cousin Barry, whom you will meet later – definitely belong to the first camp. And right now I was with them, as the Empire Builder rattled across western Montana, admiring the purple silhouette of what the train guide tells me is those same Bear Paw Mountains rising on the far horizon. If I were Bob Bakker would I be interested in the romance or the geology? Probably both.
The land belongs to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and somewhere out there Chief Joseph, last great leader of the Nez Percé Indians, finally took off his war bonnet in the face of the relentless advance of the homesteaders and surrendered to the US Army with the words: ‘From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’
A few miles further along I spotted a sign on the parallel highway that says simply ‘Chinook 20’. Prior to my introduction to Lewis and Clark I might have suspected it was a road sign to a military helicopter plant, but I know now the Chinooks were the last tribal group of Indians the explorers encountered.
Ironically – given that their name is remembered primarily on fearsome weapons of war – the original Chinooks were peaceful river dwellers. In contrast to the many so-called ‘primitive peoples’ who bared their breasts, it was the Chinooks’s custom to go naked from the waist down, literally without a stitch, in order to make it easier to hop in and out of canoes to catch fish. It was a habit that, you can imagine, caught the attention of Lewis and Clark’s male-dominated party of explorers. The Chinooks, as it happened, were more than happy to share both their fish and their women with the white men. Unfortunately they knew nothing of syphilis.
I’m only just alert enough to catch a glimpse of the too easily missable small obe
lisk atop a low hill on the left, commemorating the point where Lewis and Clark were first forced to contemplate with grim foreboding the intimidating barrier of the snow-capped Rockies rising ahead of them.
Over the next hour we climb rapidly – far more rapidly than they could ever have contemplated marching on foot and dragging their canoes – up through ashes into conifers with a barbed wire fence on either side to keep grizzly bears off the tracks, as the distant mountains with their dirty snowy peaks grow closer in the darkening sky, and then finally rise dramatically all around us.
I wonder when we will pass the state line for our brief traverse of northern Idaho (and whether I should be watching out for white supremacist militia in jeeps planning to hijack the train). But by now the dusk has descended fully and the places we travel through, with exotic names such as Glacier Park and Whitefish – camping, fishing and hunting resorts – can be glimpsed only in the low glow of lights at wooden lodges.
There is at least one consolation: I can finally tear myself away from the observation car and escape the clutch of my fellow passengers who fall categorically into that other breed of Americans: the ones who probably don’t know Lewis and Clark ever existed and couldn’t care less because neither of them probably knew how to purl. Yes, dear reader, for much of the past six hours I had been forced to watch the majesty of the great American Northwest unfold in the company of the knitting ladies.
‘Are you crocheting? Oh, I see, no, well you need to use two strands.’
‘I’ve tried that. But now I usually use three.’
‘I like crocheting too.’
‘This isn’t the same as crochet though.’
‘Well, obviously not, But you know what I mean.’
From the moment I entered the observation car and cracked open a can of beer to watch the world go by, I had an acute sense of déjà vu, except that this time it was multiple: instead of a single pair of keen knitters, I was all but surrounded by half a dozen of them, a gaggle of grandmothers on God-only-knows-what-motivated transcontinental expedition, apparently intent not only on spending the next thousand miles or so knitting booties/scarves/woolly vests or whatever women of a certain age with more manual dexterity than brainpower do.
And what was worse, most of them were determined to discuss the intricacies of their craft incessantly all the way: ‘You’ve dropped two stitches, if you go back on the left needle you can recatch them.’
The advent of night, therefore, is at least a blissful excuse to escape the world of knitwear and its fabrication and descend a flight of stairs to the altogether less scenic but much more intellectually stimulating world of the refreshment cabin, presided over by a man with a brain. And one to spare.
Rodney Pascoe, I found the rest of the train crew universally agreed, was wasted on Amtrak. One of these days he was going to make it big time as a stand-up comic. What Rodney wanted, however, I discover as he pours me a glass of Chilean Merlot, was to make it in the movies: at the very least as a scriptwriter.
He had already co-directed a couple of amateur shorts and was working on a whole raft of ideas. All he needed was a fairy godmother to pluck him out of the downstairs club car on the Empire Builder and take him to Hollywood. He was aware that at 40 time was not on his side.
The difference is that in Britain he would almost certainly be dismissed as a ‘Walter Mitty’ figure – a stereotype for a daydreamer that has improbably entered the language from a sentimental Danny Kaye movie – while here in the US his colleagues not only take him seriously but expect him to succeed. And I sincerely hope he does.
It’s very easy to feel in modern Britain that the transatlantic cultural traffic has for decades been overwhelmingly one-way – witness ‘Walter Mitty’ – but there are exceptions, like Bob Bakker with David Attenborough.
Rod Pascoe’s interests lay elsewhere but still had a surprisingly British dimension. On discovering I was from ‘across the pond’ he immediately declared his passion for perhaps the only serious British rival to the Star Trek/Star Wars-dominated constellation of sci-fi cults: Doctor Who. He had latched onto the series via the doctor’s least known incarnation – his comic book life after death (when the original long-running BBC series was finally cancelled) – and then, with the true devotion of a fan, seeking out videos of the most iconic of the original doctors, Tom Baker.
‘Y’know, you look a bit like him,’ he added, making an observation which had been made before, to the point where I admit that at university when the Baker doctor was a virtual student cult my wife-to-be crocheted (yes, she actually crocheted – but at least she spared me the technical details) a 13-foot multi-coloured scarf.
‘Wow, man, that’s awesome,’ says Rod.
I feel obliged to point out that at five-foot-six, I am a good head – possibly even a foot – shorter than the real-life Baker, though also even with middle-aged spread, of rather less circumference than the once-and-future Time Lord has attained today.
But by then Rod is already enthusing about the doctor’s latter-day reincarnation. I find it slightly weird that here we are on a train somewhere deep in the heart of the Rocky Mountains discussing whether Christopher Ecclestone or David Tennant made the better Doctor Who.
‘I still miss Rose,’ declares my wannabe Steven Spielberg, revealing an undreamt-of (by me) global audience for Billie Piper.
From there it’s on to yet another British invention: Warhammer 5000. Rod is also a fan of the novelised versions of the futuristic tabletop war game played with little metal soldiers, which my sons and I at one stage would spend hours on Sunday afternoons painting. Look, I know this is sad, and the crocheting sorority among you will be laughing their heads off, but I only got into them because of the kids. I can almost see a broody look in Rod’s eyes.
Over a second Merlot and in fairness now to the transatlantic spirit, I feel obliged to reveal a childhood and early teens brought up on a diet of Marvel Comics: Spiderman, The Avengers, and Thor, w-a-a-a-y before we thought Hollywood would ever get around to putting them on the big screen. This is Rod’s opportunity to pass on a few tips on finding the off-the-wall reimagined versions of those classic superheroes: spin-offs even beyond the Dark Knight graphic novels that took Batman and company so far beyond the children’s comic vision of their initial creators.
I try to offer something in return, appealing to both his fantasy world interest and offbeat sense of humour by encouraging him to seek out the lesser-known creations of Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creator, Douglas Adams: Detective Dirk Gently and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, in which Nordic gods lurk among the exotic Victorian Gothic chimney stacks of London’s St Pancras, which fortuitously leads us to the topic of the grand old station’s magnificent restoration as the Eurostar terminal. Because, after all, Rod’s obviously interested in the railways too. (Yes, yes, yes, I know. Get back to your crocheting!)
And then all too early it is the witching hour of 11:00 p.m. when, like British pubs in the bad old days (and an unfortunate number still), all Amtrak’s onboard bar services close, and I take the remainder of my little bottle of Merlot and retreat to the half-world above where my fellow passengers grunt and snore like trolls hiding from the daylight, and sadly without the ability to travel instantly in time and space, I have another two and a half hours to go before Spokane.
By the time we clatter into the terminal, I am wishing I really did have super powers as I ‘detrain’ into a well-lit Amtrak station which for once happens to be in the city centre, only to find it faces an all-too-familiar landscape of empty parking lots and no taxis. And of course, my budget hotel is nowhere near. It turns out, inevitably, to be literally on the wrong side of the tracks, with no way of getting there other than to venture through a darkened underpass along a road with no footpath, past an encampment of hobos beneath an elevated highway. Happily the hobos are all asleep, huddled within their wagon train of shopping trolleys filled with black bags.
This is hardly the lap of lux
ury – the Quality Inn chain is about on a par with Econolodge (already booked up). But by the time I get there, anywhere well lit, warm and with a soft bed looks more than welcoming. Outside the metropolises budget price American hotel/motels offer a very considerable basic level of comfort indeed to the weary traveller. Sleep. And dreams of Spiderman knitting baby booties out of his web.
Next morning, the world, and Spokane in particular looks very different, at least to start with. The sun is out and even the hobos under the flyover look happy, up and animated, chatting to one another in a sunny patch out of the shadow of the elevated highway. One of them is on point duty with the begging cup and cardboard sign: ‘Times are hard; anythin’ll do’, and if he doesn’t seem overly grateful, he at least doesn’t overtly sneer at the three quarters I hand him.
But then from a local perspective I soon realise he may be not so much ragged as almost stylish: check out that fleece cap with peak turned backwards, contrasting layers of fleece and checked shirt, baggy jeans – crotch almost down to the knee – and unkempt beard.
In early October it is easy to see how the fashion the rest of the world adopted as ‘grunge’ had its origins in the US Pacific Northwest. It’s not hard to imagine it really began right here in Spokane rather than more sophisticated Seattle. Maybe the name of the better-known city just got attached, the way we say Dresden china for porcelain from Meissen, or Venetian glass for the delicate products of the nearby island of Murano.