Good Vibrations (11 page)

‘It's fine and dandy communicating quicker and better than ever, but in the end, you gotta have steel. No steel: no automobiles, no dishwashers, no street lighting, no ships, no buildings, no United States.'

‘But surely, all this new technology has its place? Otherwise we'd be back with the Pony Express.'

‘Sure it does, but this country was built on industry. Heavy industry. Making things that have a function, things that folks want to buy. You can't cook with a computer and you can't climb in it and ride it to California. This Internet craze will settle down in a few years and he'll be out of work. But the trains'll still be around.'

Something beeped inside his cab and he turned away from me to attend to the mysteries of his craft.

‘Here we go, then. Be seein' you, mister.'

A cloud of black exhaust appeared from the front of the train, followed five seconds later by the deep throb of a diesel beginning to pull. It took that long for the sound to reach us. From along the line of cars came the steady clanging of couplings taking up the slack and the squeak and rumble of truck wheels starting to turn. Twenty cars to the westwards, the train was in motion. In no time, the guard's van smoothly followed. I watched it shrink into the distance beyond town until it was lost in the dazzle of the setting sun.

Back in the Ol' Hickory, I slumped on the bed and stared at the ceiling. To a European used to ceilings plastered from wall to wall, the cladding that covers the joists in North America is startling. Often, ceilings are panelled with board or even polystyrene held up by narrow timber strips or a light metal framework. The sections can be anything from 2-feet square to half the ceiling, although the method of support remains the same. The smaller variety make working on the plumbing or wiring easier than levering up floorboards in the room overhead as most Brits are constrained to do when the central heating starts to drip black filth on to the best carpet. Yet even here, a downside lurks. Years before, I was hired to help renovate a Boston flop-house. I removed one of these panels, delighting in the ready accessibility, only to be showered with ex-mice and other dust-caked horrors that had opted not to die honestly out in the yard. Except at their best, which in roadside motels they often are not, these ceilings at first look home-made and untidy, yet after a few months they fade from the traveller's consciousness and become an unnoticed part of the indoor scenery.

As the coolness eased the aches of the day, I inspected the room in more detail and realised that it was a classic in quintessential American styling. To our eyes, the general effect is often dark, the walls lined with wood-effect composite material in preference to the stuff that comes from trees. As a lover of timber, I can never understand this preference for the laminates that proliferate even in smart homes. There is an intangible fifties and sixties feel to furnishings and light fittings, while the efficient, but aesthetically disastrous Venetian blind remains popular, often without a vestige of curtain to ease its starkness.

The Ol' Hickory was also typical in the bed-linen department, with tightly tucked blankets reminiscent of a post-war childhood instead of modern quilts. But the price was right, and in any case, the main decision to be made at bedtime in summer is whether to leave the air-conditioning on and suffer the stress-inducing racket, or turn it off and risk dissolving under a damp sheet somewhere in the mazy world before morning.

It seemed as though a train passed through Hoxie every half-hour between dusk and dawn, so that the long-standing importance of the railroad to American continental culture was rammed noisily home. Surrounded by the sound of heavy commerce, in the middle of the night, in a small town that only existed to be on the way to somewhere else, it was easy to empathise with the guard's frustration over his daughter's choice of husband.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, investment in the transport of goods and people by rail proved a winner for both fly-by-night gamblers and conservative shareholders. Funding could be raised for any viable enterprise and, as early as 1850, Washington was firmly connected to New York, Boston and even Maine by regular trains. In the antebellum South, branch lines forked away through the plantations, into the forests and across open grassland to join Charleston with Atlanta, and Savannah with Chattanooga. Similar development was fanning out from Chicago, Detroit and the Great Lakes, but it was not until 1866, fifteen years after the California gold rush, that the momentous decision was taken to link the East and West Coasts.

From the East, gangs of Irishmen, black and white men from the defeated Southern states were hired by the Union Pacific. Construction teams graded the route ahead of the iron road, while in their wake came the unstoppable army of up to 10,000 track-layers and their pack animals. Behind these shuttled a backup stream of trains, Typically, forty cars each carried 10 tons of track, ties, spikes and timber sleepers, as well as domestic supplies for the navvies. Such a load would represent an advance of no more than a single mile of track.

As the thin, shining line crept west beyond the longitude of our present lodgings, the Central Pacific Railroad was pushing its own track eastwards from San Francisco, mostly with coolie labour from China. Their men are said to have refreshed themselves with tea, while the heavies of the Union Pacific were powered by whiskey. A subsidy of $16,000 per mile promised by the government proved so inadequate when the Central Pacific hit the high Sierras that it had to be jacked up threefold.

Two years was all it took for these men of astonishing ingenuity and fortitude to fight their way across the Rockies. They had no technological support save dynamite and, with the exception of timber, all materials were delivered on their own trains, having arrived in California aboard square-rigged sailing ships obliged to beat around Cape Horn.

The straight roads across the plains of North America are still delineated by traditional telegraph wires on lofty wooden poles. These began with the first transcontinental railroad, carrying messages from station to station and bringing a huge improvement in efficiency and safety. As East Coast met West in the impossible remoteness of 1869 Utah, the telegraph was joined at the same time as the railroad track. Its commercial potential was obvious, but the first message sent from coast to coast is said to have been tapped out by a lineman leaning back against his leather strap high in the wind on his historic pole. ‘Stand By! We have done praying.'

In the morning we sheered off from the railroad. Riding on rising ground towards Mountain Home, Arkansas, we soon found ourselves in idyllic countryside of the type we'd expected to see along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, but hadn't. Small fields interspersed with sweet-smelling copses of pine and neat, fresh-painted farmsteads. In one meadow by a stream three handsome horses were standing knee-deep in grass and wild flowers; one white, one caramel and one a yellow butterscotch colour. I swung Madonna into the roadside, dismounted and was leaning on the gate when Roz arrived. I'd stopped for her, really, because I knew it was a scene she would want to savour, but instead of exuding sweetness and peace, she was clearly uptight about something. I chose to ignore the signs, half-heartedly hoping the mood would lift. I should have known it wouldn't.

She joined me at the gate, but said nothing.

‘Lovely riding,' I tried again. ‘Nice and cool.' The temperature was easing as we climbed towards the hills, but I'd got something badly wrong.

‘It probably is for you,' Roz responded, ‘but until you stopped, I haven't been able to enjoy a thing about it. I have to concentrate so hard on these twisting roads that all I see is your back-end, the tarmac and the traffic coming towards me.'

‘But there isn't a lot of that.'

‘No,' she acknowledged, ‘but every time one of those wagons goes past, I feel as if it's attracting me like a magnet. I daren't breathe until it's gone. It's terrifying, my back's giving me stick and there's something wrong with my wrist.'

I had known Roz for over a quarter of a century. We've seen tough times together, and I understood that she wouldn't complain until almost at the end of her resources, yet this all seemed over the top. I'd been riding as slowly as seemed reasonable, and apart from a truck or two every few minutes, the traffic had been almost non-existent. The road had been narrow and unusually twisting with an indifferent surface, but I had not seen any special challenge in the morning's ride. To her, it seemed to have become a nightmare of fear and danger.

‘Try to be reasonable,' I began, falling headlong into another perfect masculine blunder from sheer frustration, ‘this is like Utopia.'

I must have involuntarily raised my voice in frustration, because my wife came back at me with interest.

‘Don't you shout at me!' she said with venom. ‘You're big, you're strong and you've been riding since your voice broke. I still have to think about having the clutch on the handlebars, and every time I stop or start, I know that if I let the bike go down more than ten degrees I'm going to drop it. How can you be so bloody thoughtless!'

I shook my head in despair. It was no good arguing that I hadn't even thought about shouting at her, so there was nothing useful to add. Roz took this as dumb insolence.

‘Have you any idea what it would be like to hold on to this bike if you only weighed 125 pounds?'

With a full tank and her travelling gear, Betty Boop topped the scales at over 500.

Without another word we carried on into the township of Hardy, parked up and went looking for some lunch. We had a serious problem, and we did not walk hand in hand.

Hardy is another small town, but unlike Hoxie, the main thrust of its effort is given over to entertaining visitors and relieving them of their money.

The clapboard Hardy Café on the narrow main street was packed full of families tucking into Sunday lunch, but we found a corner table underneath a plastic flowerpot with plastic ivy. On the wall beside us was a painting of a silver catfish dressed, like the diners, in blue dungarees and a cowboy hat. Between his whiskers, this fish was smoking a corncob pipe. I ignored his unwritten promise of fresh river-food and ordered the safe bet of Sirloin Tips, this time with ocra on the side. Then we addressed the main issue.

The bottom line was that quitting was no option. So long as the traffic was thin and the roads not too demanding, Roz was going to be content to come slowly to grips with the new discipline. If ever she was obliged to park the bike on an awkward slope, she would kick down the side prop to prevent Betty Boop falling all the way and when she was ready to start up once more, I would stand by to heave the heavy bike upright until Roz was letting in the clutch. I would also help out with the back-murdering manoeuvring that came our way every night as we wrestled the bikes into precarious shelter between the stanchions of motel half-roofs or the tree-roots around the tent. As she said, it wasn't that she hated the motorcycle. She'd always enjoyed fast cars.

‘I'll just have to hang on through these hills,' she announced, pushing half a plate of tips to one side. ‘It's got to be easier on the plains. The weather might be harsher, but looking at the map it's straight, straight roads for a thousand miles. By the time we reach the Rockies, riding Betty'll be a piece of cake.'

I kept on chewing my sirloin. If she'd made her mind up, life was going to be easier by far.

‘I know you'll do what you can to help,' she added unexpectedly, ‘it'll get better. You'll see.'

And it did, for a while at least.

Out in the street, we walked straight into a yard sale. The proprietor, a huge man dressed exactly like the catfish, right down to the corncob pipe, was divesting himself of the family tools.

Among the usual selection of chipped chisels and beaten-up screwdrivers, was a complete set of caulker's equipment and a weird, three-pronged iron device on a stout broom handle. At a thousand miles from the sea, it was more than odd that a caulker had passed this way and left his tools behind. Caulking mallets could once be bought in any respectable chandlery, but the irons were, and still are, the sort of personal items a tradesman grows used to. They pass down through families and are rarely seen second-hand, even on the coast where this outfit must have originated. I asked the giant what boats he had caulked, and he did not know what I was talking about. I told him. He shoved his hat back on his head, rubbing his hand back and forth in the sweat standing on his broad brow.

‘That so? Well, hot-dawg!' He perked up when I picked up the item on the stick.

‘That's for diggin' out frogs,' he said broadly. ‘Kinda useful for a frog dinner. But y'all know that. Bein' as you're from outta town, you can have her for twenty-five dollars.'

I backed off fast.

‘Well, how 'bout ten bucks then. You won't find a better one,' he paused, realising he was missing the mark, ‘but I guess you folks'll have one already back home?'

‘That's right,' interjected Roz. ‘Like you say, it's not as good as yours but it'll do us for a while. Besides,' she added archly, ‘frogs aren't as big as they used to be.'

I knew she'd based this statement on the fact that up in Nova Scotia, where I had worked on an inshore long-liner, the fish were now far from what they had once been. A quarter of a century earlier, the boys and I had cruised into port in the evenings with a catch that started at 18 inches and went up to 3 or even 4 feet in length. On a recent visit, our skipper, now long retired, told us there was a moratorium on line fishing because in the wake of the foreign ‘vacuum' trawlers, people were taking cod hardly mature enough to breed. Mention the size of fish up there and you're one of the crew. Why not frogs too? Maybe the backwoods were frogged out.

Roz must have got it right, because the would-be salesman shook our hands like good buddies as we left, even though we hadn't bought a thing. It was good to see Roz back on top of the game.