A FIVE-TRAIN TREK, OUTBOUND
Motivated by a family reunion in Fort Scott, the late Gladys Boring’s home town; initiated by a performance of Travels with Charley attended with close friends in Seattle; continued with visits to longtime friends in Salinas, California and another quest for the California Condor; and concluded on a VENT bird-watching tour out of Duluth, Minnesota, on which the Great Gray Owl, Greater Prairie-Chicken, and Sharp-tailed Grouse are the most exciting possibilities among my eight target species, this trip will absolutely confirm that I’ve been in all fifty of our states, Nebraska being the only one about which I have even a shadow of a doubt. (And if that isn’t a “sentence” worthy of Julius Caesar, I’ll eat my Latin Dictionary.) The Amtrak Cascades, business class from Bellingham to Seattle, was fine as always, although the pressure of summer tourists was becoming non-trivial, but the staff of my favorite hotel in the Seattle Center area was typically gracious and friendly on my arrival. I’ve noticed on several previous occasions that any production in which a man portrays a dog is a guaranteed hit; his getting down on hands and knees and then raising a leg always produces gales of laughter. The young man playing Charley–I would use his name, but the low-budget Book-It-Repertory Theatre, performing in the modest Center House Theatre, requested return of its programs for reuse–was unusually effective in this mode, and his lines were very cleverly written. The set was simple, containing basically only a model of Steinbeck’s vehicle that turned and rolled to introduce scene changes. The actor playing him was very effective, even suggesting John in appearance, and the six supporting cast members ably portrayed everyone else, some acting in as many as four roles. Best of all, the lines were straight from the book. The play prepared me for a long visit to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, which I didn’t get, and for the vast diversity of our country that these days is all too easily found and often not for the better, I fear. In recent years I’ve ridden four major Amtrak routes, excluding the Amtrak Cascades, of course, and the Coast Starlight remains unquestionably my favorite, due in large part to the presence of a nineteen-fifties vintage “Pacific Parlour Car” complete with booths, swivel chairs, a bar, and always a most hospitable bartender, especially on this trip, that separates the sleepers from the diner. Sure, all major trains have a Sightseer Lounge Car, including this one, but the parlour car is unique to the Starlight and is reserved for first-class passengers. We left Seattle on time, but as has happened to me before, soon fell behind. Our largest deficit, between four and five hours, was mostly accumulated while the train sat, and I slept soundly, in Klamath Falls, allegedly awaiting help for a freight train, stalled in front of us and unable to make it unaided over the Cascade crest. A few days before departure I received a most intriguing letter from Monterey; the name and return address were unknown to me, but the writer also stated on the envelope, in parentheses, that she was a friend of my soon-to-be Salinas hosts. “Terve [Hello] Vahani [Vance]” was the salutation neatly added to a photocopy of a handwritten letter. After suggesting that I likely didn’t remember her because we had drunk “a lot of that fine Finlandia vodka” on our icebreaker trip from Copenhagen to Helsinki, she continued, “We had gone snow shoeing in Upsala looking for game to make paisti [stew].... Soon we found reindeer, ptarmigan and boar…. We all skied home after meeting the peruna [potato] farmer.... He hung and dressed our game in exchange for half the boar. That gave us time for a slow sauna.... We took the thermometer up to over 100 degrees C. We slapped ourselves with birch branches dipped in ice water. Later, we ran outside and plunged into the silky water of the Baltic. In that moment of sweet shock when my hot skin met the near frozen sea, I thought....” It was then that the hot breath and whispered plea from a lovelorn friend, “Let me go instead,” interrupted my reverie as I pondered over a third reading of the letter, this last time with a pint of beer at a favorite pub. No matter, by then I had things well sorted out and looked forward to enjoying a “feast in the Finnish style” and wearing the provided nametag, Vahani, all of which I did. The Starlight made up enough time that I was able to shower, change, and share the final bottle in Bin 41, a 1985 Bollinger Grande Annee, with its and my Salinas hosts before scurrying off to the hills above Monterey for the Finnish dinner. Or did we save it until the next evening when once again we scurried off to the hills, but this time to those overlooking Salinas, for another fine meal with much the same group of friends? Unhappily, this excessive dining did nothing to attract condors to us the next day, but even so I thoroughly enjoyed another fine outing to the Big Sur, both along the coast and inland, and the driver’s and my perceptions were not that bad at the monthly wine tasting that evening of six red wines served from bottles concealed in brown paper bags. After a few moments of what passes for quiet at these gatherings, she whispered to me, “Could these be Syrahs?” I nodded and added, “Three of them definitely suggest Australia to me and they may be labeled Shiraz.” And indeed they were. We had been promised at the outset that all six contained a substantial amount of one and the same grape varietal. My Salinas host is accustomed to making unilateral “executive” decisions, and for the next day he came up with two dandies: we would spend that evening in an Emeryville motel to reduce the chances of my missing the next morning’s Zephyr, and much more exciting we would enjoy dinner at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ signature restaurant in Berkeley. Getting to the motel was not easy, partly because of the confusing spaghetti spirals of freeways one atop another, but also because he eschewed the use of maps until too late; ultimately and uncharacteristically he sought assistance at a service station. That was trivial, however, compared to getting to the train station from the motel; the two were only a few blocks apart, but on opposite sides of the tracks. Several attempts were necessary before we found a reliable route, checked in my bag, and then drove out a long spit into the Bay for a short walk and a view of the City; the girls had chosen to shop instead, probably at Trader Joe’s. The mudflats of Emeryville have long intrigued me as the home of Grape Expectations, for many years an importer of some of the finest foreign wines distributed in the Seattle area; in fact Dow and I visited its owner there nearly twenty years ago. The outstanding event on this visit was our dinner; I don’t recall another to rival it except perhaps that at The French Laundry, which presented us an extensive tasting menu as guests of two principal shareholders. Everything worked for me on this night: the food on a set menu; the wines, from a list showing considerable involvement of Kermit Lynch; an extremely personable waitress with complete grasp of both food and wine; a thoroughly competent backup staff; and of course, gracious companions. It’s sad to realize that Bin 41 is now empty and that condors are still invisible, but it may be worth returning just for food, wine, and companionship. Of course, I could instead try to locate a California Thrasher; I understand they spend quite a lot of time near the ground, which would certainly make the task easier. The van ride from Omaha to Kansas City through the green agricultural land of the prairie was largely uneventful, but in the thirteen miles from the Nebraska border to Rock Port, Missouri, some of he superficial differences between “red” and “blue” states were all too apparent. Stuckey’s Trail’s End Travel Center, with a separate entrance for truck drivers, advertising cigarette outlet, smoking inside, unleaded 1.839, diesel 1.579, was our designated breakfast stop, largely unneeded since the Zephyr was sufficiently late to allow a leisurely breakfast before disembarking on this, the morning of June 18. The delay also gave me a view of Lincoln in daylight, and by God, Dad had driven us that way once in the nineteen-fifties. Nearby signs on the Interstate completed the color transition: Liberty Fireworks/Friendly People and I Love Jesus/Life. As we approached Kansas City, I found its skyline quite familiar; I’d only been there once, I think in 1954, the summer after our marriage, when Gladys took her daughter and son-in-law to visit her parents, who lived on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. The Grandparents Boring were extremely cordial and made certain that I saw what interested me, which even included the finest Kansas City steak imaginable. Their other two surviving daughters lived near them with their husbands, so I was introduced to a fair fraction of the Boring clan during that visit. As the van pulled in near the Amtrak station, I was pleased, and relieved, to see familiar faces; two of my wife’s cousins and their wives were waiting to join me in a happy reunion. A quick look inside the station showed a high quality restoration reminiscent of Union Station in DC, although the latter is considerably busier. The Boring Reunion itself was largely spent eating, drinking, talking, and sleeping, particularly by my generation. All five surviving cousins were there, one, recently widowed, with her eldest daughter, the other four with their wives. A deceased cousin was represented by her four daughters and two of their daughters; with three cars among them, they saw far more of the area than all the rest of us put together. The widow of another deceased cousin was unable to attend, and I was honored to represent my deceased wife. Many other relatives were also present for various functions. Nothing about Fort Scott seemed familiar to me, and after an extensive trolley tour through the city I was convinced I had not been there before. It’s far enough away from Kansas City that Gladys evidently didn’t take us there fifty years ago. What impressed me most were all of the old homes in beautiful condition; a lot of residents are working very hard to preserve the past. One afternoon when two of the cousins took the wrong medicine after lunch and fell sound asleep, their wives, who had access to a car, asked for suggestions of what to do. Now Gladys’ first husband, Roscoe, had spent his formative years ten miles to the west, in Redfield, where Grandfather Lynn started the Redfield State Bank in a modest brick building constructed by Grandfather Boring. The former also managed to destroy the Lynn family mansion there by igniting a dried-out Christmas tree in the main-floor fireplace, the resulting updraft of sparks setting the roof ablaze unknown to the occupants downstairs until too late. Fortunately some neighbors noticed the flames, many townspeople rushed in to help move most of the family’s possessions to safety, and no one was injured. So it was to Redfield we went, but a simple brick cube, in bad repair with the word “BANK” over its door, was the only sign we found of the past. “Well, the boys are still sleeping; what do we do now?” asked the driver. “It’s maybe twenty-five miles east, into Missouri, but I would enjoy seeing Cotter College in Nevada–still pronounced “New vary’ ad”, just as Gladys did.” Grandfather Boring put up some buildings there, and when Miss Cotter lacked cash, she sent what she could: a grand piano and a surrey are two items Gladys remembered. The campus surprised me with its size, but nothing suggesting early twentieth-century construction was apparent to me despite Maggie’s heroic efforts, even driving the wrong way on a one-way street. It had been a challenging afternoon for her, with confusing signs at critical turns, obvious routes obscured by highway construction detours, and our continuous uncertainty of where we were headed, but she broke all of the driving rules I had been taught without batting an eyelash. By then the boys were ready to look for gravesites, a macabre project I skipped. A few weeks before this trip a rather unusual problem afflicted my condo unit in the form of bees crawling out of the walls somewhere and usually appearing on the window in front of my desk. At first I tried swatting them, and even when I was on target, I only succeeded in stunning them momentarily. They were definitely as hardheaded as Baptists but much more docile in offering no retaliation for my apicide. Although displaying what looked like a stinger during their death throes, not one of the seventy-five I ultimately dispatched with the merciless efficiency of the Inquisition, crushing them against the window with a magazine becoming my favorite approach, ever threatened me. John came out from–and in–the Bio Bug, but he was unable to find nests in my place nor in the unit beside mine nor in the one above. He was baffled and quite ready to pursue more obvious targets elsewhere, so he advised me to wait and see what happened and waived any charge for his visit. Midway through the bird-watching trip, on June 25 to be exact, I returned from dinner to find a message from Kristen; a firm had been hired to investigate water damage reported by my next-door neighbors, and “deconstruction” of siding and decks of their and my units had already begun, but no interior work was anticipated. When she unexpectedly was waiting for me at the Bellingham Amtrak depot on the evening of July 1, I knew much more was involved. On her return to work on June 29, she discovered workmen already in my apartment, having taken off the doors to both decks and a width of sheet rock on each floor. Which is how I came to spend six nights over the Independence Day weekend in a motel until she returned from vacation and helped restore a little order to the place. July 1 was also the day the city showed the Red Card. The damage from dry rot–mold–was much more extensive than anticipated, and the construction firm apparently tried to rush the job to completion without a permit, but failed. The workmen nailed plywood panels over both doorways and the downstairs wall before beating the demanded hasty retreat, and Kristen thoughtfully covered the upstairs wall with a colorful bedspread. And, oh yes, the invaders were indeed carpenter bees. The Red Card remains in effect, and I continue to wonder when the next game will start.
W. Vance Johnson 02 Aug 04