All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  It isn’t of course. Never had been. That indicator on the map, like the sign outside, proclaiming ‘Governor’s Mansion’ was ‘historic’. What it meant was that this used to be the governor’s mansion and as it was oldish (probably about the same age as my London semi), someone had declared that it ought to be proclaimed a monument and preserved. But then I spot the guy sitting placidly in the shade provided by the wrapping, at a little table next to the doorway. He gets up, holds out a hand and introduces himself as John. John seems inordinately pleased to see me. This is because, as I was about to discover, John is a mine of information that almost nobody ever cares to excavate. And he was just bursting to dig up his treasures.

  The building I’ve come to see, John explains, handing over an entrance ticket and waiting for me to proffer a couple of dollars, is the ‘Old Governor’s Mansion,’ so called, he explains, because it’s very old, and also because it’s no longer the governor’s mansion. It dates, he goes on enthusiastically, hustling me inside the door, all the way back to 1877. He’s looking at me expectantly here so I do my best to smile encouragingly while not exactly letting my jaw drop; 1877 of course doesn’t seem particularly old to me, but we have been here before: it’s only when dealing with dinosaurs that Americans and Europeans agree on degrees of antiquity (and that’s assuming you’re not dealing with the types who believe the dinosaurs are actually just 4,000 years old like the rest of the planet and put on the earth as a clever trick by God to test our faith).

  The house, most of which I couldn’t see from the outside because of the giant dishcloth draped over it, in fact looked splendidly like something the Addams family would have inhabited: a turreted, Franco-Italianate monster of a place, all made out of wood. If it were made of brick it would look at home in posher Parisian suburbs. I can tell this because there are photographs of it on the walls. John, meanwhile, is pouring out its history like one of those computers on a science-fiction spaceship that has been waiting two hundred years for the humans to emerge from hibernation and press the ‘on’ button. ‘The mansion was originally build in 1877 for Albert Gallatin who was a well-known Sacramento businessman. It was purchased by the State of California in 1903 for $32,500 and includes furnishings left behind by many previous governors. Altogether the mansion has been the home of 13 governors, from George Pardee who was the first to live here to Ronald Reagan, who was the last.’ For a moment he slips into an aside, pointing out the sanitary facilities: ‘Nancy Reagan would have used that toilet.’

  Thankfully by now he is pointing out the 1902 Steinway piano that belonged to Governor Pardee and the Persian rugs that once belonged to Governor Pat Brown. Brown, it seems, remains the house’s guiding spirit and John has an obvious fondness for him, taking pains to direct my attention to a photograph of Brown with JFK in the mansion. Most of the mansion’s downstairs decor is heavy Victorian in appearance, all chintz and brocade, though the furniture, John reveals, is actually mostly replica stuff bought by Governor Warren’s wife in the 1940s. The upstairs, he says, mostly dates from the ‘Brown period’, including the outdoor swimming pool. Hey, it’s California, the governor had to have a swimming pool.

  ‘The mansion is unusual among museums in that it is not a replica or a restoration,’ John is saying, but I’m not quite sure what that means until I think of ‘Old Sacramento’. ‘It stands much as it did when vacated by the Reagans in 1967,’ he adds helpfully.

  ‘So why,’ I have to ask, ‘did the Reagans do a runner?’

  ‘Well, it’s kinda like this,’ John starts, and I gather I’m in for a bit of a story. What it boils down to in the end, is that Nancy just didn’t like the location. Or the house, come to that. Back in 1967 when Ron and Nancy moved in, the street outside was still part of US40, the main highway connecting New York to San Francisco. US40 was one of those legendary US highways that had gradually taken the place of the railroad as the nation’s favourite means of transportation. If you wanted to get from coast to coast, the grand transcontinental railroad that had united the nation and cost so many lives and so many millions of dollars had been replaced by the strip of tarmac that ran right past the parlour windows of the governor’s mansion. ‘There was a gas station right across the road,’ adds John, shrugging his shoulders as if that was something you could obviously not expect future First Lady Nancy Reagan to have put up with.

  The wooden house, John tells me, was also considered a fire hazard, although why it should be deemed more of a fire hazard than any of the tens of thousands of other wooden homes across America and indeed down the California coastline, was a mystery to me. Maybe governors were deemed more inflammable.

  There was another problem for the Reagans too as the first Hollywood-anointed occupants of the governorship: celebrity dinner parties. ‘They had just one big table that filled the dining room, but wasn’t big enough to cope with all their guests. Some had to sit on a folding table they put next to it in a kind of T shape. But that poses a question: when you’ve got John Wayne, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra round for dinner, which of those guys do you make sit at the little table? Obviously not Frankie!’ Obviously! Even the Krays wouldn’t have dared ‘diss’ Frankie.

  The Reagans moved out, into upscale rented accommodation. And then of course they were given government accommodation, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. None of the following governors ever moved back in, least of all the present incumbent. But that doesn’t stop the curator of the mansion being the big man’s number one fan. He’s less interested in whether Barack Obama or John McCain makes it to the White House, than the change in the law that means only US-born citizens can become president.

  ‘Unstoppable! Absolutely unstoppable!’ gushes John, with a twinkle of genuine enthusiasm in his eye. ‘That was my first thought when I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to run for governor. If they changed that law, he’d be president! And I’ll tell you why: people like a cartoon hero, a guy who puts the bad guys in their place and always comes out on top.’

  We can even imagine his re-election slogan: I’ll be back!

  So where does big Arnie live in Sacramento when he’s up here running the state that would on its own be the world’s tenth largest economy? It appears the governor may share some of his fellow southern California residents’ ideas about their state capital. He’s only here when he has to be. As befits a movie star – even one who’s moved into politics, Arnie still lives in LA, rents a top floor apartment of the Hyatt Regency Hotel next to the Capitol, home to the governor’s office and state legislature, and flies back and forth at his own expense (he can afford it), even to the extent of occasionally taking a helicopter which lands on the pad on the Hyatt roof. He can then descend via a private elevator to a basement level passageway that crosses the road into the Capitol, where another lift takes him up to his office. Or so the popular legend has it, and I see no reason to contradict it.

  It’s not, after all, as unlikely as another politically incorrect piece of Arnie legend which the great man himself has confirmed, and even boasted about: the ‘stogie tent’ in the governor’s courtyard. The courtyard in question is a closed-off quadrangle in the middle of the Capitol building with access directly from the governor’s office. Shortly after his arrival in November 2003 Schwarzenegger had it ‘grassed over’ with AstroTurf and erected a 12 by 16 foot tent on it. The purpose: specifically to get round California’s anti-smoking laws, which ban smoking not just inside but within 20 feet of a government building. The man who had twice graced the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine was not about to give up the habit of a lifetime. Whether or not Schwarzenegger’s smoking – given the mild California climate, the tent effectively became his office – was breaking the law remained a moot point, hotly disputed by anti-smoking campaigners. As was the time in 2007 when he was seen lighting up a Havana Partagas, even though it is illegal for US citizens to buy them: Schwarzenegger picked one up in a hotel shop, but had an aide pay for it. Unsurprising, therefore, that the
Governator was not lectured to by the anti-smoking lobby, and was as proud of his tent as Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi is of the Bedouin tents he regularly uses to receive world leaders. Arnie too regularly invited guests from state politicians to visiting celebrities out to the tent to ‘join me in a stogie’. It’s a ‘stogie-smoking, deal-making meeting tent,’ he described it.

  Right now it is gone – not a victim of political correctness – but at a request from the maintenance people who needed to take it down to perform essential repairs to the building. As a result, for the first time in four years, California’s August budget debate – a matter of tense negotiations between legislators and the governor – was carried out in the open air rather than behind a veil of smoke in a tent. Whether or not the outcome was any clearer remains to be seen. Will the tent stage a return? It would be a brave man who bet against it.

  Heading towards the Capitol itself, I can’t help thinking that it looks remarkably like a rival to the one in Washington, except that here its glistening white dome is picked out against a perma-blue sky and framed by a long avenue of towering palm trees. It is an impressive building. I am discovering that when it comes to state capitols, they pretty much all come out of the same box – a standard variation on the Washington-shape but a little smaller depending on the pretensions of the state – but somehow California’s looks that little bit special. Ah, yes – the avenue of 40-foot palm trees! And the sprinklers embedded in the lawns.

  The guards on the door of the Capitol are California State Troopers, but to my inexperienced eye they look like Canadian Mounties in mufti, with their wide-brimmed hats and beige short-sleeved uniforms. The one at the door smiles broadly and says ‘Welcome to the Capitol, sir.’ Compared to entering most British government offices the security seems rather lax – as if even under George W. Bush Americans are encouraged to believe that government is something that supposedly belongs to them as opposed to the established attitude of British officialdom that we belong to the government and had jolly well better not speak until we’re spoken to.

  On the other hand we have nothing quite to compare with a US state legislature – except perhaps for the devolved assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales. There’s always a bit of a wrangle in America over just how important state laws and the men who make them actually are. For example California has legalised the medicinal use of cannabis, which unsurprisingly led to the establishment of a wide number of ‘alternative therapy doctors’ who have successfully applied for a licence to distribute it. In fact over a relatively short period of time it is quite remarkable how many illnesses, physical and psychological, it apparently helps. It is also remarkable how many of these ‘alternative therapy doctors’ have been raided by the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau. In response they have argued that they are operating legally under California law. The result has yet to be decided. I can’t help thinking that what is needed is a variation on the pragmatism of the Dutch: the Netherlands banned smoking tobacco in public premises from 1 July 2008, but has continued to tolerate the widespread, though technically illegal, sale and use of cannabis in ‘coffee shops’, strictly providing that a ‘joint’ no longer contains tobacco. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, California!

  It says much about the relative powers of state and federal legislatures these days that much of the California Capitol – almost the whole ground floor – is a museum, given over to how these rooms of state would have looked a century ago. America may have begun life as a federation – and the states still jealously cling to their limited autonomy – but the tendency of recent years has been for centralization, at least to the extent of making abundantly clear that federal, i.e. national, law takes priority.

  But there is nothing modest about the sign above the door of one office, guarded by two armed ‘mounties’. The name of the occupant is emblazoned above it in huge gold letters that given the length of the name stretch almost the width of the double doors: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, and on the line below: GOVERNOR

  ‘Is the governor in?’ I ask as politely as possible.

  ‘Can’t say, sir,’ one of the state troopers (I’ve tried to stop even thinking ‘mountie’ in case he can read my mind) replies equally politely.

  ‘Is that because you’re not allowed to or because you haven’t seen him?’

  ‘He has his own elevator,’ he replies, not quite answering my question, but confirming the answer to one I hadn’t quite dared ask. I wanted to see where the tent had been, but apparently the inner courtyard is only visible from the offices above, and none of them are open to the public.

  So there you go, I’m not going to meet the Terminator after all. Well, not here. Maybe in LA? On the way back to the riverboat I come through the psychedelic underpass again. The syncopated jazz is still playing, and all of a sudden I realise its true purpose. There’s nobody here. Nobody stinking of urine and sleeping in a heap against the wall. Nobody hanging around drinking from bottles. They just can’t stand the goddamn music.

  Actually, I know how they feel. On an impulse I plug in my iPod and treat myself to a large dose of nostalgia with Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’. Most of the time I believe travellers should keep both their eyes and ears open to where they are: to miss out on one sensory input is to get the whole picture wrong. But there are moments, just now and then, when it can be a little luxury to be able to use modern technology to treat yourself to your own, on-demand soundtrack. I didn’t just choose old Neil because of Sacramento’s connection to the original gold rush, but just because listening to that west coast voice whining nasally on about ‘mother nature on the run in the 1970s’ is pure personal self-indulgence.

  Ahead of me the Delta King sits lazily on the calm blue waters of the Sacramento River – they really are blue, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another river that was blue, and certainly not the Danube – while over on the deck outside Joe’s Crab Shack waitresses are serving up cold beers. This may be toytown America but right now it’s too good to turn away from.

  And then, just as I’m about to unplug again and return to the world of preproduction values, the small god of the iPod makes his mischievous presence felt. This may take some believing, but I swear that just as I was about to extract the tight little plugs of my Sennheiser headphones I caught the unmistakable opening chords of REM’s ‘All The Way to Reno’. My next destination.

  I kid you not: this is the way religions are born. I’ve only been in California for 24 hours and already I’m going native.

  SACRAMENTO TO RENO

  TRAIN: California Zephyr

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA: 10:54 a.m.

  via

  Roseville, CA

  Colfax, CA

  Truckee, CA

  ARRIVE RENO, NEVADA: 3:51 p.m.

  DURATION: 4 hours, 57 minutes

  DISTANCE: 131 miles

  13

  After the Gold Rush

  GIVEN THAT THE WESTERN END of the great railroad project which created America began in Sacramento it is scarcely surprising that this is home to one of the finest monuments to a mode of transport it has all but abandoned: The California State Railroad Museum. And it says something for the romance and nostalgia which the railroads still evoke that it draws 600,000 visitors a year.

  But just walking through the door it is easy to see why. Standing in front of you – on a par with any reconstructed dinosaur (even Leonardo) – are some of the world’s great locomotives, beautifully restored and most of them available to be explored and in some cases even climbed over. For a start – almost literally – there is the magnificent Gov. Stanford, a great black brute of an engine with a funnel like a popcorn machine, a cow-catcher that could carve its way through a corrida and a vast, front-mounted lantern the size of a World War II searchlight. It is, even to modern eyes, a stupendous thing: somehow antique, futuristic, impressive and ridiculous all at once. In an electronic age of ever-diminishing moving pa
rts, it is outrageously – almost frighteningly – mechanical. When we want to praise something we say it has ‘all the bells and whistles’; take one look at a train like this and you see why.

  The Gov. Stanford, named after a California governor and one of the men who made the railroad possible (and himself rich), was built by the Norris Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and transported by sailing ship all the way around South America via Cape Horn to Sacramento, where it arrived in late 1863. It would become the first locomotive on the Central Pacific Railroad, the western branch of the transcontinental track.

  What makes the Sacramento Railroad Museum special is not just the trains but the staff: this is a railway anorak’s dream job. You can see it in the faces of the mostly male, retired volunteers who beam as they welcome you aboard their own particular charge: one of the hulking behemoths of the early steam age, or maybe The Gold Coast, a restored, ridiculously opulent nineteenth-century dining car with heavy draped curtains, mahogany panelling and tables set with linen, fine china and candlesticks. Or a Streamliner from the 1930s, glistening with polished stainless steel and aluminium (and even air-conditioning), one of the few luxuries that survived even in the Great Depression.