1945

  photo by Ethan Newby, a lake on the eastern side of the Sierras, July 22, 2019

Coming down out of the Sierras, oak trees flashing by, brown dirt, yellow grass, and it must have looked like this at the end of June in 1945 and I must have looked out at it. This was California, an exotic idea.

I was nine years old, within weeks of turning ten and we had spent the last four days on the Overland Limited, a transcontinental train that traveled through the scenic parts of the west at night when the City of San Francisco traveled through them in daylight. The train was filled with soldiers and sailors bound for the Pacific Theater of the war with Japan. They were young, eighteen, nineteen and twenty and we spent our days in the Pullman cars, and in the evening in the diner while the porter pulled down the overhead berths, made up the beds and drew the heavy green curtains that were on both sides of the central aisle.Many of those young men would not return, but that was something I was not aware of.

Paul and I shared a lower berth. Through the windows we could see passing trains and watched Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada roll by. I took a photo of Paul with my Box Brownie in Green River when we changed engines. He stood on the conductors’s stool while I pressed the lever and the shutter clicked  and then the whistle sounded  and we were once again going west

In 1945 the Overland still used steam locomotives and over the Rockies and the Sierras they used Malleys (Mallet, after the French designer, the biggest and most powerful steam engines). What did I expect in California?  At the Sixteenth Street station in Oakland I saw a pair of palm trees, I remember them. I had no idea what California claimed. I was a product of Illinois, snowy winters, hot humid summers, a victory garden in Arlington Heights, sledding out of the cemetery in Elgin, farm cousins where there were corn cribs and hay stacks and barn lofts filled with swallows and pigeons and horses that pulled the rope lifting hay bales into the barn loft..

What I remembered of that train trip were the soldiers standing at the sinks in the men’s room at the end of the Pullman car, stripped to the waist, shaving, and the black porter who spent the night shining shoes. There must have been snow in the Rockies along the tracks and perhaps on Donner Summit as well.

Somewhere in Nevada the train stopped, letting another train pass, and Paul and I looked out to see the letters BM on a hillside. Battle Mountain Nevada.  In our house those letters stood for bowel movement.  Did you have a BM today? my  mother would ask. And there, on the side of what, to a pair of Illinois boys, nine and six, was a mountain, were those letters. We broke out in fits of laughter, until our mother from the berth above us, hissed a caution that there were people sleeping all around us.

I do not remember much else about that trip. Soldiers and meals at a table with a linen cloth and napkins and silver and flowers in a vase attached to the wall.  Black waiters and porters and cooks crowded into the narrow galley where steam rose and the movement of the train rocked the pots and pans.

Now I have, once again, crossed Donner Summit on a train and am descending into the Central Valley It is the same and it is different.