All Gone to Look for America (35 page)

WHEN PEOPLE TALK
of the romance of train travel there is always an element of the sinister involved. For every brief encounter with strangers on a train, there is a scene of swirling mist on an empty platform at night.

Believe me it is worse when there is no platform at all, the train is running late and you are the only person getting off a once-a-day train at 10 o’clock on a dark October night in a clearing in the middle of the woods surrounded by mountains.

You may gather that I was not altogether full of confidence when the
Southwest
Chief lurched to a ‘request halt’ in the pitch darkness and the conductor comes up to where I was sitting comfortably doodling in my little notebook and suggests I get off. I give him an aggrieved look wondering what cardinal sin I have committed that gives him the right to make me walk the railroad
equivalent
of the plank. He points at the little piece of cardboard he had scrawled on earlier and wedged in the rim of the luggage rack above my head. It said WJ.

‘This is your stop. Williams Junction. That’s why we’ve stopped.’

It is? I thought bleakly, hauling my rucksack down and making my way downstairs, peering without much hope into the blackness of the night as he opens the door and I clamber down the steps to the platform. Except there isn’t a platform: just cold hard earth, with trees growing all around. Lots of them.

‘You have a nice night, now,’ says the conductor, leaning out the window with what seems to me like a sadistic smile on his face as the door closes on the world of warmth and light. My sense of deep misgiving only grows as the long silver cocoon of safety and civilisation slides off with a screech of steel wheels on steel rails into the night. I peer apprehensively around me for a station building or sign of some sort to indicate that I am indeed where I’m supposed to be. If this really is Williams Junction then whatever it once was a junction with has long since vanished.

I’m not sure whether to be reassured or more worried still when, as my eyes gradually adjust to a world lit only by a few stars peeking out from behind the clouds, I make out what looks like two human figures and a large looming bulk on the edge of the clearing. It occurs to me I’ve been reading too many Stephen King novels. Then headlights flare, blinding me for a brief instant of near panic, until with a palpable jolt of relief I see the white van facing me has a logo on the side: Grand Canyon Railway. This isn’t an ambush after all, it’s a
welcoming
party. Not just for me, though tonight I am their only passenger. Transport from the little railway turns up to meet the big one every time a train passes through – there is only one a day, remember.

The Grand Canyon Railway is just about the only show in town these days in Williams. With a population of 2,842 at the 2000 census, Williams, Arizona – named after an old trapper called Bill Williams, is little more than a ‘village’. I hesitate to use that word about small American communities almost as much as they hesitate to use it themselves. This is not a country used to thinking of ‘small’ as good, and virtually any settlement of any size calls itself a town if not a city. Any ambition Williams might have had to grow into either ended in 1984 when it became the last community to have its section of the famous Route 66 bypassed as Interstate 40 was built a few miles north.

It was the train that put Williams on the map in the first place when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway built a branch spur in 1901 to link the main line with the little settlement that had begun doing a brisk trade in tourists on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Incredible as it seems today, it had taken time for the tourist potential of the canyon to be recognised. Its speedy success, and the fact that even today 90 per cent of the four and a half million visitors each year see it from the south rim, was originally down to the railway and an entrepreneurial runaway from the East End of London called Fred Harvey.

Fred ran away to America at the age of 15, became a waiter in St Louis, then a mail clerk on the railroad. Nothing in Victorian Britain had prepared him for the terrible conditions of the American West: dirty fly-blown
accommodation
where travellers were fleeced by hoteliers who never expected to see them again. Harvey thought he could make money offering them good food and civilised service. He opened a railway restaurant in Kansas that did
unexpectedly
well, helped not least by his policy of hiring neatly dressed, intelligent young women from the east coast and paying them a good wage.

Over the next two decades he set the model for American hotel chains, opening one after another, approximately 100 miles apart, along the Santa Fe
Railway. ‘Harvey Houses’ became famed throughout the country, as did the ‘Harvey Girls’. In a region more accustomed to horse thieving, train
robberies
, bar-room brawls and attacks by Indians, the Harvey girls in their starched white aprons, tailored black shirts and dresses, were a reminder of another world.

Their moral well-being was catered for by mature ‘housemothers’. Their good reputation was vital. Mr Harvey had no desire to be seen as a
whoremonger
: gentlemen callers were permitted at certain hours only in the
well-chaperoned
parlour. Before long ribald westerners were escorting Harvey girls to church. One contemporary newspaper article remarked in wonder that Fred Harvey had made ‘the desert blossom with beefsteak and pretty girls’. By the end of the century two of the most common boys’ names in the west were ‘Fred’ and ‘Harvey’.

He also ended the railroad cheat where diners at station stops paid in advance for meals which were only brought when the train was about to leave. As soon as it was put on the table the crew shouted ‘All Aboard’. The same meals were recycled for successive trains – and the train crews received a 10 per cent tip. Harvey offered the crews a similar tip for doing it his way: passengers placed orders in advance which were telegraphed ahead. A mile out of town the train blew its hooter and by the time the passengers arrived at the station starters were already on the tables. A five-minute signal was blown to warn those still dallying over their meals.

He was quick to see the potential of the Grand Canyon and in 1901 built hotels in Williams and at the canyon rim. But by the 1960s America’s love for the car – and cheap petrol – nearly finished off this railway for good too. On 30 June 1968, the Santa Fe and Topeka Railway ran their last service, with the locomotive hauling just one passenger carriage with four passengers and one baggage car. For lovers of the railroads it was a heart-rending blow, but for the people of Williams, it was far worse; it was the beginning of a long period of economic decline that could have spelled the end of their settlement altogether.

Williams had been two-timing the railroad for quite some time. It also lay on the main ‘paved’ route between Chicago and Los Angeles, a road that had by then, thanks to Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and others entered the nation’s consciousness as a modern myth: Route 66. Every year, particularly in the sixties as the cross country trek west to join the California cult of sunshine, cannabis and free love accelerated, the number of kids
flooding
through to ‘get their kicks on route 66’ provided an improbable but much appreciated economic lifeline for small towns like Williams.

And then the inexorable logic of the automobile revolution came full circle and closed the loophole. The romance of the old roads winding through small town America was rapidly being overtaken by the freeway, the new
transcontinental
‘interstates’, successors to the railroads, dedicated to the internal
combustion
engine and the victory of cheap ‘gas’. Petroleum was plentiful. America had its own stocks, the world was full of it, and American oil companies
dominated
the world.

Williams may have been the last town on 66 to be bypassed by the
Interstate
, but being the last didn’t ease the pain. When the final segment of tarmac was laid in 1984, the silence in the little town was deafening. Over the next few years it went into steady decline, haemorrhaging population, the young men in particular drifting away into that time-honoured route out of Nowheresville, USA, the military.

One man and his wife broke the cycle of decline. In 1989 Max Biegert, from Phoenix, who had made a sizeable fortune out of crop-dusting decided he and his wife Thelma would do the impossible: reinvent the railroad. They raised $15 million, bought up the land, track and decaying depot from the Santa Fe Railway which had been content to let it rot, and put together some vintage rolling stock. Their purchase included 65 miles of track held together with 30,000 ties (sleepers), a run-down crumbling property in Williams that had once been Harvey’s hotel, and a fabulous if neglected log depot up at the southern rim of the canyon. They caught the mood and have been hugely
successful
, building a new trackside hotel in Williams, and taking up to a quarter of a million passengers a year on the most ecologically friendly way to visit the canyon. The Biegerts since sold off to a large company called Xanterra, but the railway is definitely there to stay.

Thanks to the lads who’d turned up at the ‘junction’, within half an hour I’m checked in and heading out to sample the Williams nightlife. Except that there isn’t any, it seems, for the first 20 minutes, as I trudge past one closed
establishment
after another – even the hotel bar had closed at 10:00 p.m. The only sign of (bleak) hope in the town is a cavernous so-called ‘cocktail bar’ with pool tables, incredibly loud music and no customers. I’m just beginning to think it’s time to cut my losses and settle for an early bed when I follow my nose round one last windswept corner. There, like a siren emerging from the waves, out of the darkness off the main street – and Williams is very much a one-street town – is a sign in blue and red neon that reads Grand Canyon Brewing Company.

It turns out to be even more of a miracle than I knew. The brewery has only been open a matter of weeks, after 18 months hard slog by three brothers: John,
Josh and Jeremy Peasley. I know this because Jeremy himself is serving me a foaming pint of Williams Wheat beer, and before long giving me a tour round the stainless-steel vats of the brewing equipment:

‘We worked 100-hour weeks, 18 hours some days, me and my brothers, putting this place together,’ he says. ‘It was John’s idea originally, right after he got out of the navy, but we all sweated on it.’ They bought up and tore down an old barn ‘on the edge of 66’, and re-used the wood. John chainsawed
ponderosa
pine logs to make rustic bar seats, and they installed that essential for any American small-town bar: a pool table. Then their most important
acquisition
: a head brewer, Tom Netolicky, a 20-year veteran of the American
microbrewery
revolution. And as I switch from my Williams Wheat to a rich velvety Oatmeal Stout, I can testify to the man’s talent.

John, the ‘big’ brother, has just arrived, and two things are immediately obvious: 1) that he’s the man in charge, and 2) that he’s the man who’s served in the armed forces, even though he was lucky enough not to be sent to Iraq. His destination was rather different. In fact, that’s where he met his first ‘Brits’: on a tropical island half a world away that is one of Britain’s most far-flung remaining colonial possessions: Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, leased to the US as a military base. I didn’t know there were any British forces there at all, but according to John there are ‘a few dozen’, alongside more than 3,000 Americans, who are split between official military and civilian ‘contractors’. He was in the navy. The few British servicemen who maintain a token presence on a coral atoll that is effectively an American aircraft carrier are Royal Marines. Given that the nearest sizable land mass is a thousand miles away, these guys are pretty much thrown together for their tours of duty. He remembers one in particular: ‘Man, that guy was tough. He could lift an icebox and throw it around. They were all good guys, they just didn’t have any money.’ I make a mental note to pass on his comments on the state of British servicemen’s pay to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Defence.

It doesn’t look like money is going to be a problem for John and his
brothers
. The Peasleys are, in fact, probably number two after the Xanterra
corporation
and the railroad in keeping Williams alive. In addition to the brewery they also own Cruiser’s, a bar-café in a former ‘gas station’, complete with a Texaco pump converted to a neon sign, dedicated to the memory and mythology of the ‘good old days’ on Route 66. And I stress the word ‘mythology’ here, not least because neither John, Josh nor Jeremy can have any memories of it. John, the oldest, has still several years to go before his thirtieth birthday. It’s hard not to be impressed at the get-up-and-go.

Right now it’s time for me to get up and go ‘grab some shut-eye’, as John puts it, if I’m going to make the next day’s appointment with America’s second natural wonder of the world.