The Empire Builder Pt. 1

Eastern Washington

The Empire Builder

            My train was scheduled to leave Seattle at 4:40 pm, but we were all stuck at the Canadian border waiting to be let into the States.  Our bus driver, Jack, was Canadian-Asian, a small happy man that shuffled while he talked and laughed, which was often.  He spoke pidgin English and loved to make grand gestures and jokes.  When I had boarded the train, all my tickets for my trip were stapled together.  Jack tore off the ticket for Seattle then investigated the rest, as if preparing to interrogate me.  His face was serious. He stopped shuffling to look at them.

            “Wes Glacier,” he said.  “Where is that?” 

            “Montana,” I said. 

            “Ahhh,” he leafed through the other stops, Minneapolis, Chicago, Pittsburgh. He lip-read each quietly.

            “An adventure,” he said then smiled at me and handed me the tickets. 

            At the border we waited behind four other buses that were deboarding to have their passports and luggage scrutinized.  While we waited Jack mock-interrogated the passengers that didn’t have U.S. passports.  He held their customs forms high in the air against the light; he stopped shuffling, put his neck back and stood very stiffly.  His face was intensely, cartoonishly serious.  He was pretending to be American.

            “And what you doing in the States?” he asked a fellow Chinese passenger.  He interrogated three Asian passengers with Chinese passports and encouraged each of them.  “You are good.  They will let you in.”  Then he’d throw back his head, shuffle and laugh.

            After we were ordered off the bus, Jack stood with us in line at customs.  The line was long and my train would leave in less than two hours.  A couple reassured me that we might still make it.  

            “I hear we are only an hour and a half from Seattle,” I said to Jack.

            “By plane.”

            “How far by bus?”

            “Two and a half hours.”

            “We won’t make it,” I said.  I was resigned and calm about this fate.  After my last border crossing I could no longer be ruffled. 

            Jack shrugged, shuffled, smiled, “Anything can happen.”  He said this twice more before we boarded the bus.  Then he announced he would make an unscheduled stop in Everett, Washington to drop off the five passengers trying to board the Empire Builder due west.  The train was heading north and we were headed south.  By stopping in Everett, we would head it off before it turned west. 

            A good or bad driver determines the fate of your experience.  Aside from your safety, their job is to get you to your destination, but some drivers are strict about their company policy, and they adhere to every rule, regardless of passengers’ circumstances.  Some drivers are more concerned about staying on schedule then who gets where.  I am not the only one to be left behind for marginal miscalculations, or because of the strictness of the driver. 

            Jack was a good driver.   He balanced flexibility, personal judgment, and policy, and took it upon himself to make sure we got where we wanted to go.  He asked if there were any objections on the bus to his change of schedule, and while I am sure a few riders wanted to protest, nobody did, because nobody wanted to cross Jack’s good humor and generosity, or because they didn’t speak English. 

Everett Train Station

            “You’re the best driver I’ve had,” I told him when I got off.  He shrugged and smiled and shuffled back onto the bus.  He stood at the front and faced his remaining passengers, told an unintelligible joke in pidgin English then threw his head back and laughed wildly to himself.  Then he drove away.

            The Empire Builder runs 2,206 miles to Chicago from either Portland or Seattle.  I had thought the grand name was due to the location and length of the track, a set of rails that originates in the hub of the Midwest and squirms across frontiers of North America that often still remain unpopulated.  Instead, the train was named after James Hill, the ambitious owner of Great Northern Railway who first laid the track and operated the line.  It takes 45 hours, not only because of the length, but because of the geography, which is formidable in Washington and Montana.  The train can reach speeds of 79 miles per hour, but because of frequent stops and mountains, it only averages 50 mph during the trip.  I broke it up into three segments to enjoy my time on the line, with my first stop scheduled the next morning in West Glacier, a railroad depot just outside Glacier National Park..    

            When I boarded the train, the clouds dissipated and the sun came out, the first time I’d seen it since I left California. 

            The woman in front of me covered her eyes.  “What is that great big globe of light in the sky,” she cried, “It’s blinding!”  Later, double rainbows appeared over the lakes of Eastern Washington, one of the most beautiful stretches of earth I had seen out a window. 

            A representative from the National Parks Service narrated the sights out, the flora and fauna, the waterfalls, and the industrial histories that once flourished at the peak of railroad travel, but are now empty and small. In some cases, the depot was abandoned, now just a sight out the window, a footnote, and not worth the minute needed to stop and start again.

            The natural history was beautiful.  Man’s part in it was violent.   To make a railroad you have to thread rock, carve a line through the earth so that you can pass you can pass through it quickly and safely.  It required a lot of sweat equity, a lot of men paid very little hacking away at the land and rock and guiding crude machines.  It required a lot of dynamite. 

            We passed through North Cascades Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel of its type at 7.8 miles.  It is just narrow enough to fit a train, so narrow that as we entered it, it looked like would crash into its walls.  A guide shined a flashlight out the window.  The tunnel wall was only inches away.  It took Northern Railroad three years, from 1926-1928, to build it.  They used dynamite often.  Even back then, they didn’t just lay the explosives against the rock and light a fuse as I might have imagined.  They used complex machinery to drill pressurized holes then line the holes with explosives. Each detonation gained them eight feet of space.  They used five million pounds of dynamite.  It was not common to document fatalities back then, but it’s hard to imagine the operation was conducted without injury, especially because the tunnel often flooded during construction.  The result was that freight and passenger trains cut 12 miles of zig-zagging from their route and the tracks and trains were less vulnerable to avalanche damage. 

           

             We emerged on the other side of the tunnel and the views resumed.  Great tall ponderosas and lodgepole pines fenced the track.  Firs and cedars lined class-five rapids a few shades greener than the evergreens around them. Wildflowers dot the ferns like periods under the pines. 

            In the Northwest it stays light until almost 10 pm.  I watched the woods out the window instead of reading, writing, drinking, talking.  It looked the way I imagined North America looked centuries ago, before we settled it with cities and towns, paved roads and laid track, blew holes into mountains.  I watched until it was finally night, and it was just like the tunnel, a plunge into darkness.  Except there was no wall inches from the window, but the open range of the Rockies and evergreen forests, the waters still running fast over rocks and fallen pines, all of it there but invisible, and only the imagination capable of predicating the possibilities to see how green it really was, even in the dark. 

            I imagined it until I fell asleep.  When I woke up it was light again and we were entering Glacier National Park, where the peaks were higher and snow-capped,  the lakes bigger and more clear, and I packed my bags and prepared to get off the train again.