The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (7 page)

“Some people think he was really trying to help the Arabs,” he replies, “but others think it was all a trick, that Lawrence was actually working for the British Empire all along.” When I press for his opinion, the sheik grows slightly discomfited. “May I speak frankly? Maybe some of the very old ones still believe he was a friend of the Arabs, but almost everyone else, we know the truth. Even my grandfather, before he died, he believed he had been tricked.”

It was a comment that seemed to encapsulate the ultimate tragedy of both Lawrence and the Middle East—but there is a far more graphic illustration of that tragedy. It is to be found at Carchemish.

It was at Carchemish that Lawrence first came to despise the despotism of Ottoman Turkey and to imagine an independent Arab nation with Syria at its heart; today, of course, Turkey is a democracy while Syria is in the grips of an unspeakably savage civil war. Karkamis, where the town's sleepiness gives way to a tinge of menace, sits at the very dividing line between those two realities.

The hilltop sprawl of Hittite ruins is now a Turkish police post, off-limits to visitors, while at the base of that hill a 15-foot-high concrete wall topped with concertina wire has recently been erected. On the other side of that wall, in the Syrian town of Jarabulus, fly the black-and-white war flags of a rebel group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, an Islamic fundamentalist faction so murderous and extreme it has been disavowed by its former umbrella organization, al-Qaeda. In Karkamis's grim little park, idle Syrian men who managed to escape tell of family and friends being butchered at the hands of ISIS, of how Jarabulus has become a ghost town.

A Syrian refugee in his mid-forties, unwilling even to disclose his name, tells me that he had planned to escape with his family six months earlier when, on the eve of their departure, ISIS had grabbed his teenage son. “I sent my wife and younger children on to Lebanon,” he says, “but I stayed behind to try and get my son back.”

He points to a teenager in blue jeans and a red T-shirt sitting on a brick wall a few feet away, gazing up at the canopy of trees with a placid, faraway smile. “That's him,” he says. “After six days, I managed to get him back, but the terrorists had already destroyed him.” The father taps a forefinger against his own temple, the universal gesture to indicate a person gone mad. “That's all he does now, smile that way.”

From the Turkish side could be heard the call to jihad wafting from ISIS's loudspeakers. Somewhere over that wall, a half-mile from the Carchemish ruins, sits Lawrence's old research station, a former licorice storehouse that he lovingly repaired and converted into a comfortable home. Now it is a place that no Westerner will likely see for a very long time to come.

KEVIN BAKER

FROM
Harper's Magazine

W
E START IN DARKNESS
. After fighting our way through the dingy, low-ceilinged, crowded waiting room that serves as New York City's current Pennsylvania Station, we pull out through a graffitied tunnel that follows one of the oldest roadbeds in America. Freight trains once clattered along open tracks here, spewing smoke within a few dozen yards of the mansions along Riverside Drive and attracting one of the most dangerous hobo encampments in the country, before it was finally all buried beneath a graceful park in the 1930s. Today we emerge into sunlight for the first time in Harlem, following a route up the glorious Hudson River, past Bear and Storm King Mountains and the old ruined Bannerman castle on Pollepel Island.

A dining car is attached at Albany—a delay that takes an hour. For that matter, we are not actually in Albany but in Rensselaer, across the river, where in 2002 Amtrak completed the largest train station built in this country since 1939—a structure that has all the individuality of a shopping-mall Barnes & Noble. But we gladly seize the opportunity to stand on the open platform and stare across the Hudson at the capital. It's a splendid early-fall evening, and we're at the start of an adventure. We smoke and stretch our legs, and I chat with Derrick, our sleeping-car porter, who is in charge of providing for all the passengers in his five compartments and ten “roomettes.” He tells me he emigrated from Uganda and has been working for the railroad for the past two and a half years.

Amtrak's long-distance dining and sleeper-car crews tend to be efficient and almost indefatigably friendly, despite the long trips and the relentless demands of their jobs. A high percentage of them are people of color, an old railroad tradition. (George Pullman, searching for an uncomplaining workforce to service his new cars, began the practice of recruiting former slaves to work as porters soon after the Civil War. Yet they did not prove as pliable as Pullman would have liked; though it took them decades, they organized their own union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, under slogans such as “Fight or Be Slaves,” and hired a socialist firebrand named A. Philip Randolph to run it.)

By the time we step back on the train in Rensselaer, we can hear the dining-car crew setting up for the evening meal. Once, railroad-dining-car chefs produced some of the best food in America at almost any time of the day or night, serving up regional specialties on real china, with glass, silver, and fine linen napkins. Today the food is prepackaged and warmed up, airline-style meals served mostly on hardened paper or plastic dishes. All across America the menus are the same: a choice of reasonably edible steak, hamburger, chicken, salmon, or pasta, accompanied by a couple of dinner rolls and an anemic salad. But the real attraction is the strangers you're seated with.

My first night I sit with a merry retired couple, Mark and Linda, a former middle-school teacher and an accountant from Hyde Park, New York, who love train travel. They constitute, I will discover, one of the three leading categories of long-distance train passengers: train enthusiasts, derisively called foamers by Amtrak crew members. (The others are tourists from Britain and those who, for one reason or another—physical or psychological—cannot tolerate the many inconveniences of air travel.)

Mark and Linda are foamers. They buy everything on their Amtrak credit cards in order to run up rewards points, as do many of the enthusiasts I encountered. Mark is also a model-train buff. They are New Deal liberals, and though outright politics is almost religiously avoided around the close quarters of an Amtrak dining table, most sleeping-car passengers will let on quietly, almost conspiratorially, that they believe in things like public investment, and not just for trains.

Mark can reel off the names of the towns we are passing in upstate New York even in the darkness—“Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse!”—from his time spent camping in the area with his two sons. But he and Linda are disheartened by the economic disaster that has hit much of upstate, and wonder what is to become of the region where they've spent so much of their lives.

We are following the route of the New York Central's most famous train, the 20th Century Limited, which once rivaled Europe's Orient Express in extravagance. At five o'clock every evening, porters used to roll a red carpet to the train across the platform of Grand Central Terminal's Track 34. The women passengers were given bouquets of flowers and bottles of perfume; the men, carnations for their buttonholes. The train had its own barbershop, post office, manicurists and masseuses, secretaries, typists, and stenographers. In 1938, its beautiful blue-gray-and-aluminum-edged cars and its “streamline” locomotives—finned, bullet-nosed, art deco masterpieces of fluted steel—took just 16 hours to reach Chicago, faster than any train running today.

The 20th Century Limited became a cultural icon. It was a luxury train, but middle-class people rode it, too. In the heyday of American train travel after World War II, they also rode the Broadway Limited, the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles, and the California Zephyr, which were nearly as celebrated and beloved.

Some 20 years later, it was all over. Virtually every privately owned passenger rail line had died by 1970, done in by cheap gas and jet engines. The pathetic mishmash of decaying stock that remained was lumped together into a Nixonian experiment: a publicly funded, for-profit corporation dubbed Amtrak. It was widely believed that this arrangement was set up to fail, because saving trains seemed pointless. Americans wishing to travel long distances could drive their cars on the interstates or take a plane or intercity bus. Railroads seemed as archaic a mode of transportation as the wagon train.

But unexpectedly, ridership began to creep up—from fewer than 16 million in 1972 to more than 21 million in 1980. After 9/11, when air travel turned into unmitigated misery, it shot up to 30 million. Along the northeast corridor, between Washington and Boston, which generates 80 percent of Amtrak's revenue, the train's share of all combined plane and rail traffic has more than doubled, from 37 percent in 2000 to 75 percent today.

Barack Obama, during his 2011 State of the Union address, promised to lead America into a green industrial economy, and he committed his administration to a vision of giving “eighty percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within twenty-five years.” In 2009, invoking our history—Lincoln starting the transcontinental railroad while the Civil War raged, Eisenhower building the interstates during the Cold War—and challenging our national honor (“There's no reason why we can't do this: this is America”), the president made the argument that “building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper, and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system—and everybody stands to benefit.”

Trains would help end our dependence on oil as well as our rapid transformation of the earth's climate and allow us to recreate sustainable communities. Now we would have new trains, fast trains, magnetic-levitation trains that never touch the ground. Not just between nearby cities but across entire states and regions, eliminating the need for new airports and highways, replacing countless barrels of oil with electricity, or maybe using no traditional power source at all!

Yet by the fall of 2013, plans for any new high-speed national rail system—plans even for seriously upgrading our existing rail system—had been delayed for the foreseeable future. How had this come to pass? We used to value trains, used to imbue them and their stations with all the grace, beauty, and efficiency we were capable of as a people and a democracy.

To cross the continent by train in the fall of 2013, just as the organized right was about to shut down the national government, was an opportunity to trace our country's entire fantastical boom-and-bust progress. It was also a chance to glimpse an American treasure that if squandered might never be regained.

The Lake Shore Limited is not, strictly speaking, a limited train, since it makes 18 stops on its way to Chicago. The name is due mostly to Amtrak's effort to evoke the great trains of the past, but it does follow the old water-level route around the Great Lakes, advertised as superior for sleeping because it does not climb and descend the mountain grades of the Alleghenies.

Nonetheless, I'm awakened repeatedly by the banging of cars and the grinding and wrenching of metal wheels along the track. The Lake Shore Limited pulls into stations or onto sidings to let other trains pass, then sprints to make up the time—a constant slowing and accelerating that is characteristic of long-distance Amtrak trains and that makes sustained sleep difficult.

At half past three in the morning we stop again, and I peer outside into the darkness. There is only a flat little box of a train station visible, and a small parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. A few figures hurry furtively to their cars. I watch as they drive out past a single, towering wind turbine, a tangle of utility wires, and a looming football arena with a sign proclaiming it FirstEnergy Stadium. Only by looking at the Lake Shore's timetable can I tell that we are in Cleveland.

“FirstEnergy” is appropriate enough. Cleveland was the hub of America's first real energy boom, in the original oil fields of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. This is where John D. Rockefeller made his fortune, not so much because of any expertise he had in finding or refining oil but because of a deal he cut with the railroads whereby they agreed to charge all his competitors as much as double the rate while providing Rockefeller with a secret discount and kickbacks on his competitors' shipments.

The landscape before me today, a hundred years later, tells a different story of corporate hegemony. The old Cleveland station, where intercity trains stopped until 1977, was an outstanding example of Beaux Arts design constructed in the late 1920s by local brothers named Van Sweringen in imitation of New York's Grand Central.

The station is still gorgeous, but trains don't run there anymore, save for a few local commuter lines. Amtrak couldn't afford the rent, so instead it lets anyone who wants to go to Cleveland off where we are, at Lakefront Station. Lakefront is what foamers call an Amshack—a building that looks as if it might be a storage facility for the files of an accounting firm that went out of business sometime during the Ford administration.

It used to be that private corporations could be relied on to build exquisite public spaces at their own expense, not just slap their names on a finished product. American train stations were once the most magnificent in the world. Even in the smallest towns, they tended to be little jewels of craftsmanship. In bigger cities, they were the first monumental modern buildings erected without reference to God or king, built by the people to move the people.

Most of the leading American architects from the 1890s through the next 40 years tried their hand at a train station, or more than one—Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Charles Follen McKim, Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White. What they produced were predominantly Beaux Arts beauties but also pretty much the entire array of architecture practiced in this country up through the 1930s, including some astonishing amalgams of styles.