CHAPTER XII

RAILROADS AND A NEW WONDER OF THE WORLD

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the automobile, as it is being perfected now, would make over the whole world’s railway systems into something very different from what they are today. Already the railways are complaining that the automobile is seriously injuring business, and this is not difficult to understand. It ought to be so. At best the railways have become huge, clumsy, unwieldy affairs little suited to the temperamental needs and moods of the average human being. They are mass carriers, freight handlers, great hurry conveniences for overburdened commercial minds, but little more. After all, travel, however much it may be a matter of necessity, is in most instances, or should be, a matter of pleasure. If not, why go forth to roam the world so wide? Are not trees, flowers, attractive scenes, great mountains, interesting cities, and streets and terminals the objective? If not, why not? Should the discomforts become too great, as in the case of the majority of railroads, and any reasonable substitute offer itself, as the automobile, the old form of conveyance will assuredly have to give way.

Think what you have to endure on the ordinary railroad—and what other kind is there—smoke, dust, cinders, noise, the hurrying of masses of people, the ringing of bells, the tooting of whistles, the brashness and discourtesy of employes, cattle trains, coal trains, fruit trains, milk trains in endless procession—and then they tell you that these are necessary in order to give you the service you get. Actually our huge railways are becoming so freight logged and trainyard and train terminal infested, and four tracked and cinder blown, that they are a nuisance.

Contrast travel by railroad with the charm of such a trip as we were now making. Before the automobile, this trip, if it had been made at all, would have had to be made by train—in part at least. I would not have ridden a horse or in any carriage to Indiana—whatever I might have done after I reached there. Instead of green fields and pleasant ways, with the pleasure of stopping anywhere and proceeding at our leisure, substitute the necessity of riding over a fixed route, which once or twice seen, or ten times, as in my case, had already become an old story. For this is one of the drawbacks to modern railroading, in addition to all its other defects—it is so fixed; it has no latitude, no elasticity. Who wants to see the same old scenes over and over and over? One can go up the Hudson or over the Alleghanies or through the Grand Canyon of the Arizona once or twice, but if you have to go that way always, if you go at all—— But the prospect of new and varied roads, and of that intimate contact with woodland silences, grassy slopes, sudden and sheer vistas at sharp turns, streams not followed by endless lines of cars—of being able to change your mind and go by this route or that according to your mood—what a difference! These constitute a measureless superiority. And the cost per mile is not so vastly much more by automobile. Today it is actually making travel cheaper and quicker. Whether for a long tour or a short one, it appears to make man independent and give him a choice of life, which he must naturally prefer. Only the dull can love sameness.

North of Factoryville a little way—perhaps a score of miles—we encountered one of these amazing works of man which, if they become numerous enough, eventually make a country a great memory. They are the bones or articulatory ligaments of the body politic which, like the roads and viaducts and baths of ancient Rome, testify to the prime of its physical strength and after its death lie like whitening bones about the fields of the world which once it occupied.

We were coming around a curve near Nicholsen, Pennsylvania, approaching a stream which traversed this great valley, when across it from ridge’s edge to ridge’s edge suddenly appeared a great white stone or concrete viaduct or bridge—we could not tell at once which—a thing so colossal and impressive that we instantly had Speed stop the car so that we might remain and gaze at it. Ten huge arches—each say two hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high—were topped by eleven other arches say fifteen feet wide and forty feet high, and this whole surmounted by a great roadbed carrying several railway tracks, we assumed. The builders were still at work on it. As before the great Cathedral at Rouen or Amiens or Canterbury, or those giant baths in Rome which so gratify the imagination, so here, at Nicholsen, in a valley celebrated for nothing in particular and at the edge of a town of no size, we stood before this vast structure, gazing in a kind of awe. These arches! How really beautiful they were, how wide, how high, how noble, how symmetrically planned! And the smaller arches above, for all the actually huge size, how delicate and lightsomely graceful! How could they carry a heavy train so high in the air? But there they were, nearly two hundred and forty feet above us from the stream’s surface, as we discovered afterwards, and the whole structure nearly twentyfour hundred feet long. We learned that it was the work of a great railroad corporation—a part of a scheme for straightening and shortening its line about three miles!—which incidentally was leaving a monument to the American of this day which would be stared at in centuries to come as evidencing the courage, the resourcefulness, the taste, the wealth, the commerce and the force of the time in which we are living—now.

[Illustration: THE GREAT BRIDGE AT NICHOLSEN]

It is rather odd to stand in the presence of so great a thing in the making and realize that you are looking at one of the true wonders of the world. As I did so I could not help thinking of all the great wonders America has already produced—capitals, halls, universities, bridges, monuments, water flumes, sea walls, dams, towering structures—yet the thought came to me how little of all that will yet _be_ accomplished have _we_ seen. What towers, what bridges, what palaces, what roads will not yet come! Numerous as these great things already are—a statue of Lincoln in Chicago, a building by Woolworth in New York, a sea wall at Galveston, an Ashokan dam in the Catskills, this bridge at Nicholsen—yet in times to come there will be thousands of these wonders—possibly hundreds of thousands where now there are hundreds. A great free people is hard at work day after day building, building, building—and for what? Sometimes I think, like the forces and processes which produce embryonic life here or the coral islands in the Pacific, vast intelligences and personalities are at work, producing worlds and nations. As a child is builded in the womb, so is a star. We socalled individuals are probably no more than mere cell forms constructing something in whose subsequent movements, passions, powers we shall have no share whatsoever. Does the momentary cell life in the womb show in the subsequent powers of the man? Will we show in the subsequent life of the nation that we have helped build? When one thinks of how little of all that is or will be one has any part in—are we not such stuff as dreams are made of, and can we feel anything but a slave’s resignation?

While we were sightseeing, Speed was conducting a social conference of his own in the shade of some trees in one of the quiet streets of Nicholsen. I think I have never seen anyone with a greater innate attraction for boys. Speed was only twentyfive himself. Boys seemed to understand Speed and to be hail-fellow-well-met with him, wherever he was. In Dover, at the Water Gap, in Wilkes-Barré, Scranton—wherever we chanced to stop, there was a boy or boys. He or they drew near and a general conversation ensued. In so far as I could see, the mystery consisted of nothing more than a natural ability on Speed’s part to take them at their own value and on their own terms. He was just like any other boy among them, questioning and answering quite as if he and they were all grownups and very serious. Here in Nicholsen, as we came back, no less than five youngsters were explaining to him all the facts and wonders of the great bridge.

“Yes, and one man fell from the top of them there little arches way up there last winter down to the back of the big arch and he almost died.”

“Those little arches are forty feet above the big ones,” another went on.

“Yes, but he didn’t die,” put in another informatively. “He just, now, broke his back. But he almost died, though. He can’t do any more work.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, “and how does he manage to live now?”

“Well, his wife supports him, I believe,” put in one quietly.

“He’s goin' to get a pension, though,” said another.

“There’s a law now or something,” volunteered a fourth. “They have to give him money.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “That’s fine. Can any of you tell me how wide those arches are—those big arches?”

“One hundred and eighty feet wide and two hundred feet high,” volunteered one boy.

“And the little arches are sixteen feet and three inches wide and forty feet high,” put in another.

“And how long is it?”

“Two thousand, three hundred and ninetyfive feet from ridge to ridge,” came with schoolboy promptness from three at once.

I was flabbergasted.

“How do you know all this?” I inquired.

“We learned it at school,” said two. “Our teacher knows.”

I was so entertained by the general spirit of this group that I wanted to stay awhile and listen to them. American boys—I know nothing of foreign ones—are so frank, free and generally intelligent. There was not the slightest air of sycophancy about this group. They were not seeking anything save temporary entertainment. Some of them wanted to ride a little way,—perhaps to the nearest store—but only a little way and then only when invited. They all looked so bright, and yet in this group you could easily detect the varying characteristics which, other things being equal, would make some successes materially and others failures, possibly. Here was the comparatively dull boy, the bashful boy, the shrewd boy, the easy going, pleasure loving boy. You could see it in their eyes. One of them, a tallish, leanish youth, had instantly on the appearance of Franklin and myself crowded the others back and stood closest, his shrewd, examining eyes taking in all our characteristics. By looking into his eyes I could see how shrewd, independent, and selfprotective he was. He was not in the least overawed like some of the others, but rather superior, like one who would have driven a clever bargain with us, if he might have, and worsted us at it.

Except for this bridge and these children, Nicholsen held nothing, at least nothing obvious. It was just a small town with retail stores, at one of which, a druggist’s, we stopped for picture cards. One would have supposed, with so vast a thing as this bridge, there would have been excellent photographs of it; but no, there was none that was really good. The main street, some country roads, a wheat field which some rural poet had snapped—that was all. This country druggist’s store was very flyspecked. I wished for Nicholsen’s sake, as well as for my own, that something worthy had been prepared, which the sightseeing public might take away as a memento.