My artistry, as you can see, was bedeviled by useless reminders of precariousness. What the hell, a photojournalist whose first thought is safety needs to shift to copyediting. I calculated exposures and framed different compositions, and I managed to click off several frames as I became almost oblivious to anything but the photographs.
She poked me. “Did you hear that?” What? “There it is again.” The third time, I heard it, and it was a sound more dreadful than a cornet of God calling a sinner home. Maybe it was a cornet of God calling home a sinner — he who has failed to gain forgiveness for his trespasses. Or maybe it was just the horn from a locomotive. Just? Surely an impossibility on a line of such light traffic. We all know getting caught on railroad tracks happens only to fools or inebriates whose names you read in the paper the next day.
Because of a curve in the track and a large grain elevator near it, the east end of the bridge revealed only comforting darkness. Nothing there. Then suddenly something was there: a large, bright, single beam emerging from around the bend and freezing me in disbelief. Impossible! I felt my arm being pulled, and I yelled we couldn’t outrun it. Get down between the ties! “Are you crazy?” she shouted and gave a hard yank and began jerking me and my tripod over the black gaps. “I can’t swim!” she was crying out. “I can’t swim!”
Especially if a locomotive is behind one, hopping on open-spaced railway ties is injudicious, but that’s what she was doing, dragging me along. We’re not going to make it, I yelled, even though I had the daft hope we might reach the high trestle on the far shore before dropping between the ties. Neither of us looked away from the decking to glance back. Surely we’d first hear the engine snorting down our necks.
If you’ve ever tried to run from something in a dream, you know the feeling then in my leaden legs. The west end of the bridge remained invisible in the darkness, and I thought, If it weren’t for her, I’d right now be hanging out of harm’s way. Why did I wear such heavy shoes? If I’d climbed up a truss for the picture, I’d be safely clear. Is that as fast as she can go?
Then, for the first time, I could see the end of the bridge where the trestle began, and I started to think we might make it, and I slowed to look back. There the big, blinding light was. But it seemed to be holding steady. I got yanked forward again, on toward the trestle, until at last we got off it and jumped to the side of the earthen approach. Lying in the cool dust, squinting at the light, we waited for it to reach us. We listened for the horn to blast me for stupidity and trespass.
But there came no horn. There came nothing. There was no sound except two people panting, then laughing the laughter of the temporarily insane. We watched the light, still waiting for it to come on and rocket past. We watched, we waited. It just held steady. Either the train was moving dead slow or it wasn’t moving at all. Then an impossibility: the light began to recede. It got smaller, smaller, smaller, only to vanish as if the train never were. Had it stopped partway across the bridge only to back up out of sight? Whoever heard of a train reversing itself on a bridge on an active, single track — and doing so in the dark?
That’s when I realized: No wonder I can’t run properly — I’m dreaming. In a moment, I’ll wake up and discover it’s the night before I’m to go out onto the bridge. This dream is nothing but anxiety. I just need to force myself awake.
I couldn’t do it, and the dream went on: I found myself driving us back over the river to town, and at that moment I came up with a second possibility, one more probable than a train reversing itself off a bridge. I told her it could be we were dead — maybe that’s the way death works: you think you go on and you believe you’re still alive. “I saw a movie like that,” she murmured. I added how surprising to get run over by a locomotive and feel no pain. If people only knew how easy death —
“Look at that,” she said as we came up to the bend in the tracks on the east side. Obscured from the bridge, just where the road crossed the rails, was a huge white light, the kind some people who survive cardiac arrest report seeing as they start to slip away. Proof! The Great White Light truly exists!
That particular Great White Light, however, was attached to the front of a dieseling locomotive. She whispered as if to keep higher powers from overhearing her, “I think we’re still alive.” If we are, I gloated, then I’ve escaped with half-a-dozen photographs. “The photograph out there wasn’t of Glasgow,” she said. “It was your face when you saw that big light coming our way.” She was a bit smug in offering that, but I suppose her having rejected my plan of hanging like baboons from the creosoted ties warranted smugness. Her evaluation, of course, assumed we were in fact yet among the living.
Evidence of reality and improbability — instead of a dream — came the next day when I developed the film: On six negatives were clusters of black spots that were the lights of Glasgow reflecting off the Missouri River. One of those images got selected for the book until a sensible kid hired a plane on a sunny afternoon and went aloft for an aerial photograph of the town, and my death-defying picture went for naught.
Yet, it seems to me, there continues the possibility I’m having one hell of a long dream (or, less likely, the Other Side does indeed exist and even admits those who deny its existence and — to stretch credibility to the breaking point — allows them to have a spanking good time there). Only you, fortunate reader, in hearing this story, will ever know for certain: dream or not? But please don’t write to assure me: if you enter my consciousness, then you could be part of a dream, and I prefer the other conclusion — that one about actuality.
Initially, I intended the bridge misadventure, evincible as I now believe it to be, to occupy some miles across Pennsylvania, but it turned out to have potential for an additional purpose after Q and I arrived in Lanesboro on the Susquehanna River in the far northeast corner of the state. Her first glance at what we’d come there to see told me the incident on the Glasgow bridge had been for her mere entertainment. (I’m speaking of a woman, her left leg carrying a four-inch scar from a cycling crash, who had said recently as she whizzed along on a slick-riding bicycle I’d just given her, “It’s so smooth, it makes me want to get reckless on it.”) She was looking up at the historic Starrucca Viaduct, probably the least-known great bridge in America, a marvel of nineteenth-century engineering.
Where is the traveler who has never experienced arriving at a destination only to find anticipation surpassing reality? If the worth of the objective depends on expected awe, then one’s disappointment may double. How many times have you heard “Is that it? Is that all of it? Isn’t there more?” The gorge wasn’t deep enough, the mountain high enough, the famed roller coaster frightful enough.
But for the Starrucca (Star-RUCK-ah), the first time I came upon the 1848 masonry railroad bridge, it was unquestionably enough, and the longer I looked, it became more than enough, both at that moment and in recollection: its age, height, length, and solidity, its unembellished grace, its beauty of plainness — qualities residents living in its shadows almost take for granted. If they cherish it, to them it’s still just “the stone bridge.”
The Starrucca Viaduct at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, circa 188 0.
Q and I arrived beneath it one morning when the sun had about finished turning the eastern face of the viaduct into seventeen golden portals. Surrounded by interrupted woodlands, the tall arches of big blocks of bluestone appeared to be a rock wall of massive doorways opening into some country beyond America, a land that finds use and beauty in structures of yore. A few old two-storey houses with backyards extending right up to the big stone piers introduced a dollop of reality and a sense of scale. Atop the sharp peaks of their steeply pitched roofs was space to set a seven-storey building which would reach only to the level of the viaduct parapets edging the deck carrying the tracks that, when first laid, were a section of the longest railroad (at less than five-hundred miles) in the world.
By the time of completion of the span, thirteen years before commencement of the Civil War
, the surrounding hills had been heavily timbered off, and the bridge stood better revealed than today. It looked even longer and higher, much in the way a closely cropped head makes ears look bigger. Pieces of opened forest had returned to beautify the valley while somewhat minifying the span, although it could still call to mind a great, multiple-arched, classical Roman aqueduct, especially the one of the first century A.D. called the Claudian.
A ten-storey-high bridge a thousand-feet long is big enough to reach across most American rivers, yet under it, a child could toss a pebble over Starrucca Creek and in many places wade to the opposite bank without wetting more than a shirttail. To say this another way, the span is about forty times longer and a hundred times higher than necessary to get over the stream. Because the Susquehanna River is less than a half-mile west, a visitor can be forgiven for thinking the contractor built the bridge above the wrong waterway. It was, of course, not the creek but its rather deep Appalachian valley that the old Erie Railroad — on a route from the Hudson River to Lake Erie — needed to cross. Even though Starrucca Creek is a fraction of the width of the Mississippi, its valley is deeper than anything the big river flows through in its two-thousand-mile descent.
America has other huge bridges. Only twenty-five miles southwest, to name one, is the great Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct, a splendid 1915 monument of reinforced concrete. But, beyond that, since alterations to the rebuilt High (or Aqueduct) Bridge over the Harlem River north of Manhattan, no longer is there a span anywhere in the country (and few in the world) of such size and age as the Starrucca. Designed to support fifty-ton engines of the mid-nineteenth century, its pure and scarcely modified masonry, 160 years later, carried two-hundred-ton locomotives with monstrous loads behind them, and until not long ago might bear two trains at once. The Starrucca Viaduct, in architecture and undeserved anonymity, stands supreme.
Q has been known, on a slow Saturday afternoon, to go down to a switchyard to watch locomotives rumble around, and she’s dreamed of tucking her hair under a cap and dressing like a hobo and hopping a boxcar for Arizona. Such a woman, looking at such a bridge, is almost bound to say “What do you think about walking across it?”
Because Q is counsel licensed to stand before a judge’s bench, I assumed she was referring to the issue of trespass. She corrected me: “I’m not asking about the legality of it.” Oh, I said, you mean the sanity of it.
She knew my long record of misdemeanor trespasses, all of them probably brought about by the version of the Lord’s Prayer drummed into me as a child: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Yet what she said was something else, something devilishly alluring: “A writer writing about quoz would have an interesting chapter if he got tossed into the clink for pursuing a quoz. Readers love complications. A writer who takes things right to the edge.”
Edges: telling her about the Glasgow bridge had been bootless, and worse, my earlier mention of the death-defying, one-legged bicyclist who allegedly rode across the Starrucca Viaduct on the narrow parapet had only encouraged her. Trying to counter with my fractured understanding of jurisprudence involving torts of trespass, I repeated a phrase I’d heard her and my father say, a tenet students of the law cannot escape: a tortfeasor takes his victims as he finds them.
Q pointed out, while my quoting the law sounded good, it was more amusing than accurately applied. Thinking how much I also would like to see the view from the top of the viaduct, I reminded her of putting another woman’s life at risk on another railroad bridge as I remembered my vow never to do anything similar again. But my brain was calculating risks against rewards. To slow it, I said, Let’s go to lunch.
8
Forty Pages Against a Headache Ball
WE WENT INTO LITTLE LANESBORO to Joe’s Country Store. It had the look of an old village-grocery, an institution seriously diminishing across America but perhaps less so in the Northeast. It still contained the standard meat-and-cheese counter at the rear where once a Bert — now more commonly a Betty or their granddaughter — could assemble a lunch of ingredients you select from a slant-front glass case. My fare in such a grocery is often the sandwich of several names: in western Pennsylvania people may call it a zeppelin (after the shape of the stubby loaf), but in the eastern corner, it can be a hoagie or a bomber, and a little farther on eastward, it becomes a grinder. The rest of the country, generally, has seen other names vanish in the corporate campaign of attack submarines, even though a franchise sub is to a well-filled grinder from a grocery as shaken milk is to a milk shake. In Joe’s, Betty was Patricia, the third in a line of four females who have assembled hoagies and rolled out homemade pizza dough, the fifth generation soon to enter the throng of Planet Earth.
Of all ingredients, none exceeds bread as key to the quality of the finished whole, and into my short loaf Pat stuffed green peppers, banana peppers, pepperoncini, pimiento olives, Greek olives, sliced tomatoes, chopped lettuce, two kinds of sharp cheese, and a good shot of black pepper held in place with olive oil and vinegar. My running commentary on why those were necessary ingredients turned a transaction into a conversation leading to details of a recent irruption the Susquehanna made through Lanesboro.
“You might be interested in this,” she said, and handed me a pamphlet of historical highlights of the village. “We’ve got pictures too, if you want to see them.” I expected the customary, personal archive a visitor may find in hinterland America: an album of blurry snapshots or a folder of yellowed news clippings, one of which always seems to be an article about the place published forty years ago in the Saturday Evening Post. “Sarah,” she said to her daughter, “run home and bring back your laptop.”
About the time Q and I finished our hoagies, Sarah returned and sat down with us in one of the four wooden-booths. While Mama rolled pizza dough, the daughter opened her computer to run a video she made of Old Man Susquehanna coming into town and, with neither invitation nor a wiping of his feet, slipping into parlors to leave behind mud and stink. To everyone’s sorrow, that’s what he did in the historic hotel, the lone building once giving Lanesboro the appearance of a village rather than a mere collocation of several houses around a general store.
Coming is the day when a curious traveler asks a question of a resident of someplace and gets treated to a digital album of moving history. To see the Susquehanna flow through town was a different experience from seeing its motion held forever static in a photograph. What if we could watch the great viaduct rising, men climbing scaffolds, donkey engines hoisting stones, could hear the chink of hammers, Irish brogues and Yankee twangs calling to each other? The future will surely view us, at the forefront of the personal-video age, in ways we can never see our nineteenth-century ancestors who got held rigidly still by portrait photographers’ head-clamps. “Good god!” we say. “Were they really that solemn? Was existence so hard it washed out even a flicker of joy?” To judge by the old tintypes — incapable of catching a chuckle, a wink, a nod — the answer would seem to be yes, but stories reveal it wasn’t. As the means of recording history change, so will the appearance of history.
Following Pat’s directions, Q and I headed on down the highway a mile to Susquehanna, the whilom railroad town that had turned its defunct switchyard into a small shopping-center below the main commercial street. Q went to the library while I looked around downtown and uptown — the latter several actual feet above the other — for the Lanesboro historical pamphlet and any other information on the viaduct. I came up empty. That proved fortuitous because, had I found anything, I might have ceased my hunt there.
The highest form of travel for me is a wandering into a quoz and the subsequent search for its quintessence and a try at elucidating its mysteries. Investigative journeying brings you quickly into a local milieu and gives you a handful of new acquaintances, some of whom may become friends. I’ve grown old with people I met perhaps only a couple of times in distant places — Kankakee and Kyoto, Kennebunk and Killarney, Manhattan and M
antua. To receive from an acquaintance an occasional letter with a photograph, to see them move through time as I do, to share that time across space is a great thing, and slowly and inevitably to lose those faces makes death not so much a state of nonexistence as just another stop on a long itinerary.
The temporary citizenship a questing visitor may earn, beyond lending meaning to travel, grants the privilege to ask questions without (usually) being considered intrusive or getting told to get the hell on down the road. Not all people a traveler meets want to give up their stories or relate the history of the town pump or explain why the Podunk up the road is called Toad Suck or Hot Coffee. But, so goes my estimate, ninety percent (under the right conditions) will discover they are happy to teach you. Being a teacher, being considered a master of certain knowledge, is a pleasure. Proof of that is the number of times when — in a formal interview with a tape recorder — I reach to shut off the machine and the master says, “I’ve got more time if you want it.” Never have I heard anyone say, “Are we about finished here?” The single thing a master native asks from the traveler is nothing more than genuine curiosity.
And — if you’ll allow one last notion on this topic — entry into other lives can turn a forgettable locale into indelibility, your recollections forever inscribed with faces and words and times shared. To deepen memory may not be the major goal in a human life — at least not one we’re usually cognizant of — but as our days proceed to stretch out ever more behind us, it seems to me deepening memory has got to be no lower than second place. And, beyond that, to bring a quoz to life, to bring it into your own life — now that surely, ultimately, is the highest end of exploration.
I returned to the library in the former train yard. A gleeful Q stood at the checkout desk, and in her raised hands were a pair of booklets, neither the one I was looking for, yet her expression said, “Bingo!” One was about the Tunkhannock Viaduct, the other about the Starrucca, both written by the same man. I took the histories to a corner of the library. The author, William Young, clearly had done detailed research, and information in his booklets raised questions until that moment I didn’t know I had. Bingo.