Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (50 page)

Q pointed out, while my quoting the law sounded good, it was more amusing than accurately applied. Thinking how much I also would like to see the view from the top of the viaduct, I reminded her of putting another woman’s life at risk on another railroad bridge as I remembered my vow never to do anything similar again. But my brain was calculating risks against rewards. To slow it, I said, Let’s go to lunch.

8

Forty Pages Against a Headache Ball

W
E WENT INTO LITTLE LANESBORO
to Joe’s Country Store. It
had the look of an old village-grocery, an institution seriously diminishing across America but perhaps less so in the Northeast. It still contained the standard meat-and-cheese counter at the rear where once a Bert — now more commonly a Betty or their granddaughter — could assemble a lunch of ingredients you select from a slant-front glass case. My fare in such a grocery is often the sandwich of several names: in western Pennsylvania people may call it a zeppelin (after the shape of the stubby loaf), but in the eastern corner, it can be a hoagie or a bomber, and a little farther on eastward, it becomes a grinder. The rest of the country, generally, has seen other names vanish in the corporate campaign of attack submarines, even though a franchise sub is to a well-filled grinder from a grocery as shaken milk is to a milk shake. In Joe’s, Betty was Patricia, the third in a line of four females who have assembled hoagies and rolled out homemade pizza dough, the fifth generation soon to enter the throng of Planet Earth.

Of all ingredients, none exceeds bread as key to the quality of the finished whole, and into my short loaf Pat stuffed green peppers, banana peppers, pepperoncini, pimiento olives, Greek olives, sliced tomatoes, chopped lettuce, two kinds of sharp cheese, and a good shot of black pepper held in place with olive oil and vinegar. My running commentary on why those were necessary ingredients turned a transaction into a conversation leading to details of a recent irruption the Susquehanna made through Lanesboro.

“You might be interested in this,” she said, and handed me a pamphlet of historical highlights of the village. “We’ve got pictures too, if you want to see them.” I expected the customary, personal archive a visitor may find in hinterland America: an album of blurry snapshots or a folder of yellowed news clippings, one of which always seems to be an article about the place published forty years ago in the
Saturday Evening Post.
“Sarah,” she said to her daughter, “run home and bring back your laptop.”

About the time Q and I finished our hoagies, Sarah returned and sat down with us in one of the four wooden-booths. While Mama rolled pizza dough, the daughter opened her computer to run a video she made of Old Man Susquehanna coming into town and, with neither invitation nor a wiping of his feet, slipping into parlors to leave behind mud and stink. To everyone’s sorrow, that’s what he did in the historic hotel, the lone building once giving Lanesboro the appearance of a village rather than a mere collocation of several houses around a general store.

Coming is the day when a curious traveler asks a question of a resident of someplace and gets treated to a digital album of moving history. To see the Susquehanna
flow
through town was a different experience from seeing its motion held forever static in a photograph. What if we could watch the great viaduct rising, men climbing scaffolds, donkey engines hoisting stones, could hear the chink of hammers, Irish brogues and Yankee twangs calling to each other? The future will surely view us, at the forefront of the personal-video age, in ways we can never see our nineteenth-century ancestors who got held rigidly still by portrait photographers’ head-clamps. “Good god!” we say. “Were they really that solemn? Was existence so hard it washed out even a flicker of joy?” To judge by the old tintypes — incapable of catching a chuckle, a wink, a nod — the answer would seem to be yes, but stories reveal it wasn’t. As the means of recording history change, so will the appearance of history.

Following Pat’s directions, Q and I headed on down the highway a mile to Susquehanna, the whilom railroad town that had turned its defunct switchyard into a small shopping-center below the main commercial street. Q went to the library while I looked around downtown and uptown — the latter several actual feet above the other — for the Lanesboro historical pamphlet and any other information on the viaduct. I came up empty. That proved fortuitous because, had I found anything, I might have ceased my hunt there.

The highest form of travel for me is a wandering into a quoz and the subsequent search for its quintessence and a try at elucidating its mysteries. Investigative journeying brings you quickly into a local milieu and gives you a handful of new acquaintances, some of whom may become friends. I’ve grown old with people I met perhaps only a couple of times in distant places — Kankakee and Kyoto, Kennebunk and Killarney, Manhattan and Mantua. To receive from an acquaintance an occasional letter with a photograph, to see them move through time as I do, to share that time
across space
is a great thing, and slowly and inevitably to lose those faces makes death not so much a state of nonexistence as just another stop on a long itinerary.

The temporary citizenship a questing visitor may earn, beyond lending meaning to travel, grants the privilege to ask questions without (usually) being considered intrusive or getting told to get the hell on down the road. Not
all
people a traveler meets want to give up their stories or relate the history of the town pump or explain why the Podunk up the road is called Toad Suck or Hot Coffee. But, so goes my estimate, ninety percent (under the right conditions) will discover they are happy to teach you. Being a teacher, being considered a master of certain knowledge, is a pleasure. Proof of that is the number of times when — in a formal interview with a tape recorder — I reach to shut off the machine and the master says, “I’ve got more time if you want it.” Never have I heard anyone say, “Are we about finished here?” The single thing a master native asks from the traveler is nothing more than genuine curiosity.

And — if you’ll allow one last notion on this topic — entry into other lives can turn a forgettable locale into indelibility, your recollections forever inscribed with faces and words and times shared. To deepen memory may not be the major goal in a human life — at least not one we’re usually cognizant of — but as our days proceed to stretch out ever more behind us, it seems to me deepening memory has got to be no lower than second place. And, beyond that, to bring a quoz to life, to bring it into your
own
life — now
that
surely, ultimately, is the highest end of exploration.

I returned to the library in the former train yard. A gleeful Q stood at the checkout desk, and in her raised hands were a pair of booklets, neither the one I was looking for, yet her expression said, “Bingo!” One was about the Tunkhannock Viaduct, the other about the Starrucca, both written by the same man. I took the histories to a corner of the library. The author, William Young, clearly had done detailed research, and information in his booklets raised questions until that moment I didn’t know I had. Bingo.

The librarian said the booklets were out of print and the copy machine wasn’t working properly. I asked whether she knew Mr. Young. “Not really.” Did she have a local phone directory? “Well, of course! This is a library.” She called him, introduced not me but my quest, and handed over the receiver.

Perhaps, I asked him, he had a copy he’d sell? No, didn’t think so, he said, but even if he did, he couldn’t bring it into town anytime soon. Might we come to him? “I’m way out.” How far? “About nine miles.” Your books, I said, are worth more than nine miles — if we could stop by just long enough to ask a few questions about Starrucca. Maybe borrow a booklet to photocopy — paying full cover price, of course. “Let me look around,” he said, and gave directions.

William Young lived in the old family place on a slope above Starrucca Creek, where he learned to swim, eight miles east of the grand bridge. His white-clapboard, Greek Revival house, fronted with big lilac bushes and surrounded by hard maples, was of an age commensurate with the building of the 1848 viaduct. His people came into the forested valley in 1815, but Young was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Jersey. In his retirement he had made himself the sixth generation to live in the two-storey house. His grandfather knew a fellow who had watched the building of the span, and an even earlier forebear may have worked on it.

A cottage behind the house was made of the same bluestone as the bridge, rock from a quarry not far across the creek. He said he was counting down to his seventy-ninth birthday, although a sixty-ninth seemed more credible. Like the Starrucca, he had weathered well, part of the happy return for his seventy-thousand miles of cycling (not one of them across the viaduct), and his face radiated pleasure in talking history. After losing a beloved woman years ago, he had never married.

Young knew the stone arches from the ground up; that is, from the valley they crossed on upward a hundred feet to the tracks atop them. Beyond that knowledge, he was a student and writer of American rail history, and he could tell you what a Mallet Triplex 2-8-8-8-2 was (a huge locomotive with twenty-eight wheels in a certain arrangement), and he could say when one last went over the valley. He enumerated the eight railroads that have owned the viaduct during its long existence, and he explained the corbels mysteriously projecting from each pier (to support wooden scaffolds to complete the construction of the arch).

At age sixteen he went to work as a printer’s devil, where one of his duties was filing rough edges off Linotype lead “pigs,” a job that for him turned the smell of ink into a sweet cachet. After two years in the Army during the Korean War (he was stationed in Germany), he returned to work as a printer and occasional news-reporter in New Jersey and South Carolina. When he retired to the home place in the Starrucca Valley, he gave his time to research and writing about railroads.

Education after high school was largely of his own creation — he read history and authors whose styles he admired: Mark Twain, E. B. White, and, more generally, other writers in
The New Yorker
“as it used to be.” Former jobs and research allowed him to write his illustrated histories, compose their pages, produce the booklets, and at each stage keep an eye out for errors. “I can do it all in my way,” he said, “and that helps to keep the price down in an economically depressed area.” If his chronicles weren’t a major piece of income for him, they were still a significant source of satisfaction. I asked whether his histories were his highest achievement, and he said, “I suppose they are, but there’s always the next book which I hope will be even better.” The next book was to be about the Unadilla Valley Railway in central New York.

We sat on the side porch. Propped on a chair were his two booklets waiting for us; he hoped to have out soon the sixth edition of
Starrucca: The Bridge of Stone.
Young did not say it — he would never say it — but I would soon learn he was
the
authority on the viaducts, his knowledge the result of some forty years of research and a boyhood partly spent along Starrucca Creek. He belonged to the valley by chance of family settlement, but he belonged to the bridge by dint of learning. Early immersions in the stream and later immersions in the history of the span over it had turned a long avocation into an even longer contribution. How much of the past he alone had preserved, even he did not know.

When I told him he wrote a good sentence, he said, “I wrote nothing good until I was forty-eight.” That was about the time
Starrucca,
then titled simply
Bridge of Stone,
first appeared. For a third of a century thereafter, he had continued to accumulate facts and to find forgotten historic photographs while taking new ones of the viaduct. Longevity taketh away, but it also giveth to those who persevere. Although never his intent, he had made himself over time, if you will, the Star of Starrucca and had carved his name not in its bluestone but in works even more durable. (Gus Kubitzki once said, “If the worst part of death is the thought of oblivion, then leaving behind something of worth makes it a little more tolerable.”)

I mentioned to Young how much we’d like to cross the viaduct in a passenger train. “The last one,” he said, “was forty years ago, but you might have a chance again, because I hope the bridge will be properly maintained and will see more trains as part of the railroad renaissance that appears to be coming on. The line is underused now, but the Starrucca route has potential value, especially as a bypass for freight traffic that’s beginning to choke other routes. Although there’s only one now, there used to be dual tracks on it, and someday there could be twin tracks again.”

Q confessed our urge to trespass our way across the viaduct and asked whether he had ever walked it. “I’ve been over it a few times on a train,” he said, “but never all the way on foot. I was inside one of the arches once, and I’ve taken pictures from the top. And an acquaintance claims he rode a bicycle across.” I asked about suicides. “None I know of. But somebody did jump from the Tunkhannock Viaduct just last year. For suicide, people seem to prefer a bridge down at Scranton. I don’t know why. Closer to home maybe.”

What if use of the bridge should come to an end? “It’s been a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark for years,” he said, “but that still doesn’t give it much protection. It’s also on the National Register of Historic Places, but that only means federal money could never be used to tear it down. Should it ever be abandoned, though, I think preservation would be certain.” Especially so now, I said, with your research serving as a kind of eighteenth supporting arch. He said only, “I hope what I’ve done is positive.”

Had there been a William Young in the valley in 1900, how much greater our comprehension would be today. The past everywhere is a huge chunk of murky ice perpetually melting in the heat of the moment, and the great drain beneath leads straight down to the River Lethe. He said, “I started collecting material about the bridge when I was twelve — just basic information then, some of which turned out to be wrong. In all those years, I’ve never learned how several silly legends got started, like the one about every train that crosses having to pay a fee to the descendants of the builders. Then there’s one about the first locomotive to cross the viaduct going over unmanned because nobody dared trust the bridge.”