THE WHISTLE OF THE TRAIN BY NIGHT
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Whistle Of The Train Bv Night By RICHARD L NEUBERGER San Francisco THE way to appreciate your own country is to cross its vast expanse with a company of foreigners. We Americans take many...
...The cliffs of the gorge frowned down in the night like the ramparts of some crenelated fortress...
...Tennessee Pass was spanned, and the train coasted down onto Utah's 7,000-foot plateau...
...From far up ahead the mournful whistle of the locomotive was blown back on the night winds...
...On the afternoon horizon, faint and far off in the haze, the Rockies appeared...
...The tilted plains merged with rocky crags...
...Here and there a lofty redwood stood...
...Still Going West' Where else such a spectacle...
...They had come from coast to coast, from New York and Washington to this —across mountain ranges, through valleys and forests, over endless plains, and as the Yugoslav put it, "still the land is America...
...In the middle distance the canyon of the Green River opened cavernously...
...Now we realize what America is...
...The Bay Bridge rimmed San Francisco's skyline...
...I wonder what those foreign delegates back there think of our country...
...Oakland suddenly lined the right-of-way...
...We have never seen anything like this before...
...A second engine was added...
...He told me of his soldier son, wounded in France...
...We shall mean this so great country across which a train can go for so many days and nights...
...In many lands one never knows, when a journey starts, how and when it will end in violent disaster...
...The afternoon shadows lay heavily across the alkaline beaches of Great Salt Lake as the train breached the Utah-Nevada desert...
...Far overhead the rim-rock was etched sharply against the Colorado sky...
...said a tall Norwegian...
...The Feather River foamed white against the rocks in its path...
...In the narrow corridor of the Royal Gorge the train stopped...
...Louis greeted the evening...
...Roosevelt would have approved...
...At Grand Coulee he once said that Horace Greeley "shall live in a later day, and we shall have the opportunity of still going West...
...The plains commenced to slant...
...At 55 miles an hour we ascended the passes and gorges where the men of Fremont and Kearney had trekked...
...We went up the steps and the train started again...
...And so I told this Frenchman, representing France at the United Nations conference, about Ben Wagner, whose son had been wounded fighting for France's liberation...
...Tell me, captain, what sort of man was the engineer...
...Grain gave way to sagebrush...
...I walked up the track with a lean delegate from Yugoslavia...
...Lord Halifax gossiped with the British consul at San Francisco...
...In the gathering dusk we ascended a third range—the Sierra Nevada, steeper and more rugged, but not so wide as the Rockies...
...Who knows...
...The visitors from Europe and Asia—Yugoslav diplomats and Chinese admirals—stood at the club-car windows and pointed excitedly...
...We did not tell him of those other American chasms—the Colorado, the Snake, the Salmon—which dwarf the Green...
...Once more the diesel coughed and hummed in the mountain night...
...For hours the train twisted through wide valleys and across gentle swales...
...My country has no deeper canyon than that...
...In the distance the Golden Gate's thin span stood between the city and the open Pacific...
...Five short blasts of the whistle "called in the flag...
...Ben speculated...
...Scrub pines sighed in the wind...
...In the dawn at Helper, Utah, I talked to the engineer looking over the diesel with practiced and proprietory eye...
...China is broad and deep, but can it match America's kaleidoscopic panorama...
...Perhaps, before his life was snuffed out by a stroke, he planned it that way...
...Tom Connally inquired of a brakeman what the altitude was...
...He asked me where I had served in the Army...
...Tom Connally' talked to reporters...
...The slanting walls of the Feather River Canyon framed the background...
...The clean pine forests began to give way to the fern-choked stands of hemlock which mantle the rainy side of the Sierras...
...Roosevelt was always an advocate of seeing this country...
...We Americans take many things for granted...
...Russia is a vast and mighty land, but has it this diversity...
...Pueblo's scattered lights waned in the distance...
...America, So Great A few hours later I was back in the Pullmans, as the train inched into Salt Lake City...
...The train edged onto Oakland mole...
...We travel n-Qw, day after day, night after night, and still the land is America...
...Again the whistle of a steam locomotive split the night and caromed between the crags...
...The brakeman jogged up and swung aboard...
...The crags stiffened into mountains...
...Some people think that the late Franklin D. Roosevelt selected San Francisco as the scene of the United Nations Conference in the deliberate hope that the delegates would see the United States—not merely New York or Washington or Chicago, but the whole United States of America, spread out in a 3,000-mile scenic vista from Atlantic to Pacific...
...To see these things through the eyes of someone from abroad is to realize, at last, that we on this continent are fortunate, indeed, and that the Almighty, as Bismarck said, "takes care of fools, knaves, and the United States...
...In Europe we would have crossed many-nations, many boundaries, many customs and oh so many passports...
...Now when we say 'America' we shall know exactly what we mean...
...One can only think that had our late President been on the train twisting through the Shenandoah Valley and over the Sierra's summits, as the men from abroad watched in wonder, that Mr...
...The men from abroad—Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Chinese, Russians, Norwegians, Belgians, Egyptians— looked up at the dark precipices...
...We stood outside in the gravel of the road-bed, listening to the Arkansas River surge toward the Missouri...
...asked a French delegate in obvious excitement...
...Kentucky's fields interposed their hospitable vista, and then St...
...The walls of the canyon rolled back into vineyards and orchards...
...Across the uplands the transmission towers of the Hetch-Hetchy project stretched...
...But mainly the delegates—particularly those seeing America for the first time—drank in the scene...
...So you rode in the engine...
...The train snaked through farms and small towns, and then across the gentle hills that frame the valley...
...As darkness cloaked the train for a third night...
...Riding Up Front At Pueblo, Colorado, railroad division point where puff ing locomotives idled in the mountain air, a Chinese general asked for True Story at the news-stand and Sen...
...The smell of the sea seaped in through the car windows...
...Again the reassuring whistle hollowed out the night, and a second dawn lighted up the plains and oil derricks of Kansas...
...It is a most assuring sound, that," said a delegate from Norway...
...In the bright sunlit morning the train stopped on a siding near a grove of Ponderosa pines...
...The long chain of Pullmans rolled out of the Washington and into the darkening Virginia countryside...
...He inhaled the mountain air and looked off toward the distant peaks...
...We were coming down into the Sacramento Valley...
...Salt water tinted the air...
...On a ferry we crossed the bay...
...In the morning the broad windows of the dining car yawned out on the green landscape of West Virginia...
...The Chinese generals and admirals met compatriots from across the bay...
...Across the endless prairie the train rolled, a long black dragon against the dull brown of wheat and bunch grass...
...America is the so great country, captain," he said...
...It tells us that we are on our way, that steady hands guide us, that a safe journey is in prospect...
...So I sat next to Ben Wagner, as he eased out the control lever and the long train commenced its climb of the Wasatch Range...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 23
