Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (49 page)

I should declare here that part of my naval training entailed an abandon-ship exercise beginning with a jump off a twenty-foot tower, followed by a long swim, followed by fifteen minutes of treading water. A large buddy whom I had to help — that is, push off the high platform — whose sorry swimming barely got him to the treading, had to keep an underwater hand clandestinely locked to my hip to stay afloat. We made it. I should also remark, as a sixteen-year-old I completed a Red Cross water-safety course called Junior Lifesaving.

Those professed qualifications, unfortunately, did not ease her mind as she kept fixed on the river below. They didn’t much ease mine either, and I had to remind myself not to rush the work while she, holding to a girder of a bridge without any safety rail whatsoever, tossed out distractions about dumb ideas and her stupidity in not watching from shore. I suggested she stop looking down. She said, “If a train comes along, there’s no place to go
except
down. I’m saying my life right now is all about
down.
D-O-W-N. It rhymes with D-R-O-W-N.” A moment later she added, “Of course, there’s also back the way we came, but I doubt even you, Mister Hotshot, can outrun a train.”

You don’t try to outrun a train, I said. You drop between the ties and hang until it’s safe to come up. “Or,” she said, “until you fall into the Missouri.” That’s better than being greased by a locomotive. It was about then I accidentally dislodged a piece of something, and we watched it drop to the river. The splash was not so unsettling as the time required to get to the splash.

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.