Essays of E. B. White (36 page)

Railroads are immensely complex, and they seem to love complexity, just as they love ritual and love the past. Not all sick roads die, as I have pointed out, but a road can sometimes put on a pretty good show of dying, and then its ritual seems to be part of the scheme of dying. During 1959, because of some sickness of my own, and of my wife's, and of other members of our two families, she and I patronized the railroad more often than usual, observing its agony while using what remained of its facilities. There was one memorable night last fall, when, sitting forlorn in the deserted waiting room of the Portland depot, waiting to take the sleeper for New York, we seemed actually to be the principal actors in the deathbed scene of railroading in America; no Hollywood director could have improved on the thing. For reasons too dull to go into, we were taking our departure from Portland instead of Bangor. The old station hung tomblike above and around our still forms, drear and drafty. (No social crowd was gathered here.) The only other persons in the place were the ticket agent, at ease behind his counter, and a redcap in slow conversation with two friends. Now and then the front door would open and a stray would enter, some fellow to whom all railroad stations are home. Shortly before train time, a porter appeared, dragging a large wooden table and two chairs, and set the stage for the rites of ticket-taking. The table looked to be the same age as the depot and to have been chewed incessantly by porcupines. Two conductors in faded blue now walked stiffly onto the set and seated themselves at the table. My wife and I, catching the cue, rose and approached the oracle, and I laid our tickets down in front of one of the men. He grasped them, studied them closely, as though he had never seen anything quite like them in all his life, then turned to his companion and shouted, for all to hear in the room where no one was, “B in the Twenty-three!” To which the other replied, in a tremendous voice, “B in the Twenty-three!” (and seemed to add, “
for the last two passengers on earth
”). Then he tore off the stub and handed it to me.

The words of the ceremony, spoken so loudly, although familiar to us seemed unnaturally solemn and impressive, and we felt more as though we were taking marriage vows than taking a train. After the ceremony was over, we followed the redcap with our luggage, walking slowly out, the last two passengers, into the cold train shed, and picked our way across the tracks toward our waiting sleeper. Halfway there, we passed an ancient trainman, his arms full of kerosene lanterns, on his way to harness the Horse with the honored trappings of the past. There was something ineffably sad about the departure of this train; death seemed in the air.

When I came to live in Maine, the depot was twenty-three miles away, in Ellsworth. Then the depot got to be fifty miles away, in Bangor. After tomorrow night, it will be a hundred and forty miles away (for a sleeping car), in Portland. A year from now, there may be no depot in the whole state—none with a light burning, that is. I cannot conceive of my world without a rail connection, and perhaps I shall have to pull up stakes and move to some busier part of the swamp, where the rails have not been abandoned. Whether I move away or stay put, if the trains of Maine come to a standstill I will miss them greatly. I will miss cracking the shade at dawn—and the first shafts of light in the tinted woods, and the old excitement. I'll miss the Canada geese in the Kennebec in the seasons of migration, and the breakfast in bed, drinking from the punctured can of grapefruit juice as we proceed gravely up the river, and the solid old houses of Gardiner, and Augusta's little trackslide glade with the wooden staircase and the vines of the embankment and the cedar waxwing tippling on berries as I tipple on juice. I'll miss the peaceful stretches of the river above Augusta, with the stranded sticks of pulpwood along the banks; the fall overcast, the winter brightness; the tiny blockhouse at Fort Halifax, at Winslow, mighty bastion of defense; and at Waterville the shiny black flanks of Old No. 470, the Iron Horse that has been enshrined right next to what used to be the Colby campus—the steam locomotive that pulled the cars on the last prediesel run from Portland to Bangor.

Early last spring, as my train waited on a siding for another train to go through, I looked out of the window and saw our conductor walking in the ditch, a pocketknife in his hand. He passed out of sight and was gone ten minutes, then reappeared. In his arms was a fine bunch of pussy willows, a gift for his wife, I don't doubt. It was a pleasing sight, a common episode, but I recall feeling at the time that the scene was being overplayed, and that it belonged to another century. The railroads will have to get on with the action if they are to boost that running speed from twenty-eight to forty and lure customers.

Perhaps the trains will disappear from Maine forever, and the conductor will then have the rest of his life to cut pussies along the right of way, with the sand a-blowing and the blackberries a-growing. I hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime, for I think one well-conducted institution may still regulate a whole country.

P.S. (May 1962). Death came quickly to the railroads of Maine. The passenger trains not only disappeared “in my lifetime,” they disappeared in what seemed like a trice. The trains are gone, the station houses are gone. I was watching television one day and saw the tower of Portland's Union Station fall over, struck down by a large steel ball swinging from the boom of a crane. I could feel the blow in the pit of my stomach.

The freights are running as usual, and at higher speeds, but the expected spurt in business and profits has not occurred. At the annual meeting of the Maine Central a few weeks ago, the president of the line told the stockholders that “sunshine and shadow” lay ahead for them. The cat-food factory in Lubec has decided to close down, and this event casts a long shadow over the stockholders by jeopardizing the branch line that runs from Ayer's Junction to Eastport; it may have to be abandoned unless some business can be taken away from the truckers. I don't know why the cat-food plant is quitting; perhaps Puss has lost her appetite, or possibly the people who operate the cannery would prefer to live where there is passenger rail service.

A lady in North Belgrade wrote me not long ago and said, “Though the great change has been made, it is still the freight train that we depend on to warn us about the weather. If we can hear the freight come through Oakland at nine in the evening, we know that the wind is the wrong way and there will be rain.” I still believe the wind is the wrong way and there will be rain; a land without rail service is a land in decline, or in suspension.

In the West, railroading still enjoys good health, and a few of the Eastern trains are rolling at a profit, notably the trains that connect Florida with the cities of the North. But in the East generally, the sickness spreads. The New Haven, in a bankrupt condition, filed for reorganization last summer; the Boston & Maine is in hard shape; the merged Erie-Lackawanna is poorly despite the merger; and the B. & O. doesn't feel good at all.

Railroading in America enjoyed its monopoly status much too long for its own good, and the characteristic American genius for new shapes, new ideas, new ways to exploit demand, although it infects every other business, has been lacking in railroading. Inflexibility is still the trouble with the Iron Horse. I am reasonably sure that there are thousands of car owners who would like to go to Florida or California by train if without any fuss they could drive their car, fully loaded, on board the train, as onto a ferryboat, and drive it off when they reached their destination. This kind of piggyback ride would eliminate the long, arduous drive through what one of my correspondents calls a “homogenized” landscape, it would save spending nights in motels and eating meals along the way, and it would save general wear and tear on man and machine. If it works in Europe, perhaps it could be made to work here, where distances are much greater. The
Bluenose
, a car-carrying ship plying between Nova Scotia and Bar Harbor, is a sellout every summer; people are willing to pay to avoid the long drive around.

In those last days of the rails in Maine, I remember most clearly the remark of a Bangor citizen, which I read in the paper. This fellow walked downtown on the day after the razing of the depot; he stared in surprise at the new vista. “Hey!” he said. “You can see Brewer from Exchange Street!” (Brewer is Bangor's twin, a few hundred yards distant across the river.)

In the old days, when the railroads were in their prime, you couldn't see Brewer from Exchange Street, but you could close your eyes and see the continent of America stretched out in front of you, with the rails running on endlessly into the purple sunset, as in an overwritten novel. I loved it when I couldn't see Brewer from Exchange Street, the rest of the view was so good.

D
ECEMBER
,
1934

There is no doubt about it, the fierce desire to write and paint that
burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to the
St. Nicholas Magazine.
In the back pages of that wholesome periodical, in the early days of the century, there flourished a group of minors known as the St. Nicholas League. The members wrote poems and prose, took snapshots with box cameras, drew pictures at random, and solved puzzles. They submitted the results of their fervor to the League, and the lucky ones pocketed the Gold or the Silver Badge of extreme merit.

A surprising number of these tiny geniuses are still at it today, banging away with pen or brush for dear life. A hardy and sentimental old League alumnus like myself comes across their names in odd places—in the fall book list, in the classified phone directory, or among a bunch of Pulitzer Prize-winners—and thinks back to that “union of cheerful, fun-loving industrious young people, bound together by worthy aims and accomplishments and stimulated by a wide range of competitions that offer to every member a chance of recognition and success.” We were an industrious and fiendishly competitive band of tots; and if some of us, in the intervening years of careless living, have lost or mislaid our silver badge, we still remember the day it came in the mail: the intensity of victory, the sweetness of young fame, a pubescent moment immortalized by one of our League members in October of 1904, a lad named Robert E. Jones, who wrote to the editor, from Milton, N. H.:

Incidentally, the hope expressed in Robert's letter was fulfilled. He did work hard. Late that same year he was crowned with the badge of pure gold and became an Honor Member. They say he is even now doing the same high grade of work in the field of stage design.

Occasionally a writer or an artist, in a fit of biographical confession, jokingly admits to his public that he once won a badge from the St. Nicholas League. His jocosity is to hide his emotion. Nothing has ever taken the place of the League in his life. The Pulitzer Prize was a pleasant reward to Edna St. Vincent Millay, I have no doubt; but it was faint fun compared to her conquest in 1907 when, as E.
Vincent
Millay, 15, of Camden, Me., she opened her August number of
St. Nicholas
and found, “accepted for publication,” her poem beginning “Shine on me, oh, you gold, gold sun.” This poem was called “Vacation Song.” Here are the first and last stanzas:

Even in 1907 Edna was already an honor member of the League. She had won honorable mention in June 1904, for a prose piece called “A Family Tradition.” She had scored again in November 1905, February and September 1906, and really hit her stride in the spring of 1907. Three years later, her bureau drawer heaped with all the trophies the League could bestow on an illustrious member, Mill Millay, now a ripe girl of eighteen, sat down and penned her valedictory, published in the October issue:

Thus Edna walked statelily out of the League, a copy of Browning in her hand, leaving a youngster named Scott Fitzgerald holding the fort in the same issue with a prize-winning photograph called “Vacation Scene.” The poem “Friends,” for which she received five dollars, is reprinted hereunder. The editor seemed to have had some vague notion that he was dealing with an authentic talent, for the verses appeared at the head of the League section and were prefaced with this editorial comment: “This contribution is a little gem in smoothness and perfection of its rhythm, in its deft use of contrast, and in its naturalness of expression from first to last.”