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Just as Amtrak begins to get comfortable in it’s own tin, the tides of change arrive and assure us that things will never be the same. Journalist Griffin Goins leans in to investigate what will be lost and whether or not mourning is in order.
That was the year we got sold “Change”. In 2008 everyone wanted “Change”, me included. Change what? Everything! Change it, dag nubbit! Shoes? Change ‘em! Underwear? Change it! To hell with it all. Scrap it and start over.
Something terribly wrong had taken place but we didn’t know what. Some people called it Bush, some people called it Greed, some people called it Capitalism, some people called it Paris Hilton. We couldn’t put our finger on it, but God knows we tried.
We put Obama in office and sat back with popcorn. Change it! Change it! But the sweep of change crossing our land affects more than Big Oil, Wall Street and the
Federal Government.
It changes other, less popular things too, like Amtrak. Things that maybe didn’t want to change. Things that were maybe OK just the way they were. And while you can’t stop the hands of time, you can take a moment to smell the dilapidated rail cars and microwaved cheeseburgers on the Empire Builder as it tears across this great country.
In the late 1960s, The Association of American Railroads requested the equivalent of a government bailout: subsidies for its fledgling passenger train services. Shortly thereafter, The Interstate Commerce Commission made its own such request. There was no money! Everyone preferred driving their own cars to taking a train.
The Department of Transportation decided that such requests were symptomatic of the failed character of privately owned and operated passenger train travel, which had basically been a money pit since the Great Depression. And so, rather than perennially subsidize private companies that would never themselves begin to turn a profit, or allow passenger train travel to die outright, the federal government stepped in and bought everything they could off the hands of the privately owned passenger train companies, which wasn't much, it turned out. Thus, in 1971, Amtrak was born.
Back in the winter of 2008, I heard a news update harked over the radio: Amtrak is considering a major expansion. A what? A major expansion. A what? A major—I heard you! But Amtrak can’t do that! Amtrak can’t change! It’s already perfect. Don’t change Amtrak. Change anything else, but Amtrak is all I’ve got left. It’s the only thing America ever did right! I thought to myself, sitting in my underwear amongst filth in the living room of an elaborately decorated college bungalow my dad was paying for at the time.
Back in 1971, when Amtrak began, nobody knew what the government intended to do with its recent purchase. There was rampant, wild speculation. The government will run it to the ground! They’ll beuroctratize the whole Goddamn thing! They’ll loaf and watch it sink!
What the government ended up doing, however, was basically nothing. Scratch that. Absolutely nothing. A couple of new trains here or there? Sure. Maybe a new station somewhere in South Dakota? I don't actually know. A more efficient ticketing service? Arguable. Definitely nothing that would be universally or even marginally recognized as improvement, and definitely nothing on the scale of the just announced plans of expansion.
Every time I'd chanced to ride Amtrak over the years, I'd gotten off sure that whenever I eventually returned, it would still be there, still be the same, still be what it was, which I thought was something pretty great. Not great in a theme park way, but great in a visiting your grandpa way. The type of great that isn’t really great until you step away, look back and say, Hey, that was pretty great.
Thus, when I heard about Amtrak's planned major expansion, I bought a ticket to ride. I was to ride the unironically named "Empire Builder," from Portland, Oregon, to Cincinnati, Ohio, under the auspices of visiting my brother. The real reason I bought my ticket was to see something great, perhaps for the last time.
Tuesday
I boarded the Empire Builder at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, May 6th, 2008, out of Portland Union Station. Portland Union Station was built in 1896, just before the peak of the Industrial Revolution. The train stations built around the turn of the 20th century were all built as temples of modernity, of progress, and of promise. Portland's Union Station now sits in Portland as a reminder of a forgotten project, like a tree house that, while still magnificent, never really got much use because the kids were already a little too old.
The conductor held his arm in the air and yelled “All aboard!” with long, booming vowels. The last of us to load tossed our cigarettes aside and stepped into our respective cars. The Builder loads its passengers into their cars through doors in the basement level of the train, where the bathrooms, changing rooms and luggage are kept. Some basements offer alternative seating with extra sitting-room, intended for handicapped passengers and those looking for extra space. This all took place in the basement—Ladies and Gentlemen—the basement of the train.
The business of boarding and luggage is simple on Amtrak. There is no security and there are no lines, at any point. If you want your luggage to make it to your destination, just set it down amidst all the other luggage. If you want to make it to your destination, just board the train. Such simplicity is the norm on Amtrak, and it always makes me suspicious that somebody somewhere must be on the verge of hassling me for something. We travelers have become so used to being hassled, but there's just no hassle on Amtrak.
Case in point: when the train begins moving, I realize that nobody has checked my ticket. Eventually, an older woman wearing a navy blue vest, tie, white button-up shirt, and matching navy blue pants, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail asks me for my ticket. When she takes it, she rips the stub off, hands it back to me and slides a card into a notch overhead that reads “CHI 1”; it means one passenger to Chicago. She hands me my pillow and smiles at me with broad, soft, cheeks. Before I can thank her for doing her job with so gracefully, the conductor’s voice begins telling stories over the PA—history, people, places, love, adventure—and I fall asleep sitting upright in my spacious recliner.
Although everyone in my car is headed for Chicago, nobody talks to anyone else, not for the first few hours of the trip. Immediately after boarding, people stare out their windows and ignore each other. Everyone knows that they will be seeing the same people for at least two days, and knowing that removes all that pressure one usually feels, say, on a plane. Starting conversations on Amtrak is too easy to stress over, so nobody bothers.
I woke from my nap, rejuvenated, when the conductor announced the upcoming “fresh air break." The conductor never forgets to add, when making such an announcement, “Take a break, smoke a cigarette, or, if you don’t smoke, just get some fresh air.” All the smokers immediately start going through their belongings, taking care of everything they need to in order to ensure the perfect cigarette: they clean up their areas, wipe the crumbs of their shirts, fold their blankets, ear-mark the pages of their books, fill their water bottles, locate their cigarettes and their matches or lighters, and wait the remaining seven minutes until the train comes to a halt.
After the fresh air break I went up to the "Observation Room," above the lounge. The observation room is the hangout, the place where people play cards, drink coffee or beer, and get to know each other on the train, or, A place to hang, eat and observe. In the observation room, some people sit in chairs facing the windows, watching the country pass by. A mother of five up in the observation is the only passenger with any responsibility to speak of. The rest of the passengers keep away from her and her kids because nobody wants to get roped into sharing the burden of her job. For me, being around the bustling children and the frantic, pale, sweating mother always made me nervous: would she recognize my leisure and ask me for a favor I wasn't offering? She never did.
Once, a young father in the O.R. called a pizza restaurant in the upcoming town and got a pizza delivered during the stop; everybody in the O.R. got a slice just for being alive. Usually people eat sandwiches from the lounge car, or munch snacks of their own, which resemble road-trip snacks, only in greater abundance (lots of Tupperware containers and Ziploc sacks). People are always drinking beer in the observation room. Not everyone, mind you, but always someone. A lady, sitting alone on one of the chairs, stares out the window, drinking a Budweiser.
In the lounge car, while eating a tuna fish sandwich, I spotted the conductor, hat in hand, sitting in the back corner with some other employees, having a conversation about the geography of the region. When he spoke his head tended to tilt back and reveal his nostrils like another settle of eyeballs; his moustache became a set of authentic, pearly bullhorns that belonged on the bumper of a chop-top Ford Bronco in a driveway somewhere in Wyoming. The conversation revolved around him, even when he wasn’t paying attention.
I thought he was mid conversation when he leaned into my personal space and asked, “Workin’ on a book report?” My neck snapped and my eyes bulged. The page I was writing on had “Conductor” written all over it, replete with side notes, little pictures, moustaches. My table had my notebook and the leisure book I was reading open, laid out for all to see.
“No,” I laughed, “Not a book report. It’s a self help book. Feels weird reading it on the train,” I said, for some reason still not known to me. He didn’t seem to mind my discomfort and we started talking about his job as a conductor.
“Twelve hours on, twenty four off. That’s federal law,” he explained. At midnight he would check into a hotel in Spokane, only to get picked up by another Empire Builder the following midnight. He spent his day off at the library. “If it’s a nice day, I’ll rent a bike and ride around town,” he told me. Before becoming a conductor, he had spent time fighting in what the Vietnamese call “The American War.” Now, he and his wife lived just south of Portland, on the waterfront.
“We’re about five minutes from the next stop. You’d better get ready if you want to smoke a cigarette, or just get some fresh air. If not, you can just stay put,” he picked up up a phone from the wall and told the rest of the passengers the same thing.
Around 10 p.m., I gathered the nerve to ask a girl--I was still a boy, and girls were still girls, at 22--she wanted to talk. She boarded with me in Portland, and I'd yet to see her leave her seat in our car. She looked nice, nervous. I asked her, very calmly, and as unobtrusively as possible, if she wanted to go to the observation room and chat, seing as we were both headed to Chicago from Portland. She put down her book and said, “Sure.”
I lead the two of us through our dark, still, car, stepping over the feet that crossed our path like fallen trees. We pressed the button to open the sliding steel doors that separate the cars, and for a moment we could hear the wind and feel the chill of the evening. Neither of us spoke as we crossed through the final car into the observation room. At the first vacant table I turned around to see if she was still with me, half suspecting her to have dropped out. We sat across from each other, smiled politely. She looked a little bit scared of me, or of the situation she was now in (sitting across from a total stranger in a small booth on the Empire Builder somewhere in ?), or both. Her name was Lauren.
We exhausted topics quickly, getting to know each other fast. Since it was so late, I figured that if we exhausted our topics and nothing clicked, we could go to bed early and that would be that. But, if we liked each other’s company, well, one never knows, now does one.
Lauren had arrived in Portland a week earlier, on a plane from Detroit. Her plan had been to move in with her sister and start a new life in the Portland Metro Area. Less than a week later, Lauren was riding a one-way train back to Detroit, with all the baggage she'd left with a week earlier.
Lauren's sister was too selfish to live with, she'd said. Lauren's sister hadn’t appreciated her arrival from Detroit, she'd said. Lauren's sister spent way too much time with her boyfriend, she'd said. And she drank too much, just didn’t even care that her little sister'd come halfway across the country just to be with her.
“She told me to move my bags out of the living room, but there was no place to move them to because the house was a mess, so then she screamed at me for not moving my bags and I was just like, ‘There’s nowhere for me to put them!’”
Lauren looked to me for agreement, so I nodded and she continued, “It isn’t just me, either. Her roommates think she is being crazy, also. She is just impossible to live with until she figures out her own shit." I couldn’t give Lauren good advice because I thought she should've just sat with her sister and had a heart-to-heart, rather than run back to Detroit after only a week. Lauren didn’t want to hear that. It was too late, now.
Lauren's hair was long, dark and wavy with caramel streaks through it. She rarely focused her attention, always glancing around furtively. Although it was her first time on a train, Lauren didn’t seem to be finding anything particularly interesting about the whole experience. She didn’t seem curious at all. And yet, if I said something interesting, her eyes would snap back at me, and after briefly connecting with mine, they'd immediately go back to being skittish. Lauren was my age and happened to resemble an ex-girlfriend of mine.
Eventually, we became more comfortable with each other, so I asked her if she wanted a drink. She agreed and, since the lounge was closed, I told her to follow me. We crossed back through the cars to our car. I led her down the stairs into the basement, where I kept my bag, which I unzipped, whipping out some whiskey and Coke. I looked up at her and she was twitching her head back and forth, on lookout.
“They really don’t care,” I told her. We walked down to the changing room at the end of the hallway, where there was a small, plastic, bench fit for 1.5 people. There was also a stool opposite the bench; that’s where I sat. I opened my laptop and began playing some music, pulled out two of the wax-paper water cups from the wall, and began intently concocting cocktails. After a few moments of focused amateur cosmology, I looked up at her and saw that she was looking at me like I was a maniac.
I realized then that I usually rode the train with friends, and that to the untrained eye this mini-bar setup of mine seemed far too well planned out to be well-intentioned. So, I got self conscious, and she got nervous, again, and we began prattling on about Detroit and the service industry. She told me that she lived in a downtown loft with her friends and pays next to nothing for rent. Then the computer died and the only background noise was the rumble of the train. And the room shrank and our conversation became dangerously quick. My plan to hang in the changing room was premature, ill-conceived, and poorly executed. She and I both knew it.
“I kind of have a boyfriend,” she proceeded to tell me. I hadn’t asked, so I knew what she was saying. At that moment all I wanted was to get off my stool, out of the changing room, and save what little pride I had left, so we wrapped things up hastily, went upstairs, and headed our separate ways.
Wednesday
Wednesday began around noon, after a good sleep. I awoke dehydrated, having had failed to drink any water the night before. The water on Amtrak is--I'm going to tell you how I really feel--some of the worst water in the world: creamy, lukewarm, dispensed from wall-spickets and mysteriously carbonated. Not wanting to rehydrate myself with something that could possibly do more harm than good, I went to the lounge and bought a bottle of water and some coffee.
The observation room was more comfortable than the day before. In place of the mother with five kids, a group of elders had taken up residence, openly sharing their views about the typical problems of today’s youth (video games, etc) and the undesirable effects of old age--blind, deaf, losing your teeth, bushels of hair erupting from ears, bald, sore, forgetful.
“What are you talking about, losing your teeth?” one woman interrupted her husband.
“Forget it,” he told her.
One girl sat alone, reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, a non-fiction a about Steinbeck and his extra-large poodle, Charlie. She took notes as things around her happened, the same way I did. As it turns out, she was a college student in Portland headed to New York to visit a friend. She'd spent the last two years studying journalism at American University, in Washington D.C., but she knew it wasn’t for her. Her new lifestyle in Portland had made her think that maybe working on bicycles was all she ever wanted to do, but she wasn’t ready to tell her parents in California about her plans. They won’t think it’s good enough for their college-educated daughter, she says.
She lifted her camera and snapped a picture of the vacant Montana plains.
People along the observation car sifted through local Montana newspapers. The stories told of politics and economic problems in towns I'd never heard of nor cared about. People looked down the end of their noses and read the stories, like the stories mattered. At the time, I thought another town’s newspaper kind of read like fiction: everyone and everything might just as well be make-believe. The abundance of small-town papers on the train, however, suggested that reading them was perhaps a normal if not charished pastime on the Empire Builder.
I picked up a paper and flipped to a section I wouldn’t usually read in my own city’s papers: the legal announcements. Name changes, estate rights, upcoming lawsuits, property management, civil infractions. That's what one finds when they flip to the legal announcements section of a paper. It was strange, but something about all the little details contained in small town papers seems like proof that the world doesn't end at your own personal shores.
There are only a few power outlets on any given Amtrak train. Most of the train cars were designed and built before anybody expected personal electronics to becomes so, well, personal. The original trains running the Empire Builder route were designed in 1947. Now, the Empire Builder route runs Superline-model trains designed in 1979. In 2005, the Empire Builder's Superline-models were refurbished, and yet...
The few power outlets that do exist are stuck in peculiar places. One, in the lounge car, is on the ceiling: from it, a cell phone and cell phone charger dangle, just inches above an open trashcan. A girl sitting next to the trashcan looked up at me as I observed the precarious existence of the cellphone, “He plugged it in a while ago; I don’t know when he’s coming back. I sure wouldn’t plug my phone in there,” she said. I agreed. Now, there are indeed power outlets in every bathroom, but they are 120-volt outlets designed specifically for electric razors.
Looking doggedly for a cell phone charger made me feel guilty. The employees saw my disappointment and couldn’t help; there was nothing they could do about it. As much as they wanted to deliver the best, most comfortable service possible, they would have to look customers in the eyes every day and tell them that, unless they earned the spot in the ceiling, their cell phone batteries would surely die. That’s a tough line in 2008, especially because most of the Empire Builder's route does get service.
One lady, a black mother who boarded with me in Portland, saw my concern over the power outlets and offered me her outlet which lay hidden from the general public’s view behind the permanent espresso machine in the corner upstairs bar in the O.R. It seemed she had made a treaty with the shift watchman to allow its use.
“Oh no,” I told her, trying to be polite. She unplugged her charger and insisted that I charge my phone for a bit. I thanked her and accepted her offer as graciously as I could. The bartering of black market electricity on the Empire Builder was significant enough to justify somebody making a permanent racket out of it.
I signed up for a 7:30 dinner appointment. That's right, if you want to eat something more serious than what they packed in Tupperware, you've got to make an appointment. Mine got me seated with two men, both coming from Montana. One man, a larger business man staying in the sleeper-car, ordered a half-bottle of wine and avowed his similarity to James Bond: both traveled in sleeper cars. He was going to Wisconsin to pick up his daughter and drive her back to Montana for his son’s graduation. The other man, younger, with hard-worked hands and an Indiana Jones-type outfit, sat quietly. He spoke very properly, and in short sentences, and rested his eyes on the table for most of dinner. He was headed to West Pennsylvania to try his luck in the lumber industry. Both men knew about lumber, horses and Montana. Bond knew about energy and praised what he hailed as Amtrak’s efficiency. The younger woodsman and I each ordered cheeseburgers. Bond ordered a medium-rare steak, telling us that his sleeping-car ticket got all of his meals comp'd. My burger tasted fine by me, although all of the textures seemed to melt into each other, which made me suspect the influence of a microwave. Everyone satisfied, appointment met and completed, we parted ways.
During twilight, I went to the observation car, looking to make some new friends. I hadn’t seen Lauren all afternoon. Earlier in the day we'd eaten snacks together, but both of us had acted stuffy, and so no future plans had been proposed. I stayed in the observation room reading the local newspaper until it eventually emptied out around ten thirty. I went to bed disappointed.
Thursday
Thursday started late and went fast. We arrived in Chicago at exactly 3:55, right on time. Lauren and I managed to get off the train together. Each of us had two hours in Chicago before our next departures: her to Detroit, me to Ohio. Without discussing it, we started to wander the city. We spent our two hours walking the streets, eating sandwiches, and people-watching, all without worries or destinations or discomfort.
Because both of us had a safety net—boarding separate trains in two hours—neither of us really cared anymore, so we just had fun, legitimate fun, filled with jokes and laughs and smiles and all that other fun stuff. She didn’t talk about her boyfriend, or her tragedy in Portland, and I didn't bring them up. Me, I didn’t creep her out with any more trips basements filled with the sultry sounds of Rod Stewart or surprise whiskey drinks.
When our galavanting time was up, I found myself trying to hold on as long as possible. I helped her move her luggage to her new train. She had six bags—her life. When the time for separation came, she gave me a hug and asked me for my phone number. Both of us laughed and swapped numbers. I wished her good luck and she did the same. “You have a place to stay if you ever come through Detroit,” she said. That just about made my day.
I walked through the tunnel under Chicago Union Station toward my train. Train engines boomed. I walked up to each employee I saw and asked which train was mine. I couldn’t hear them over the engines and they couldn't hear me, so each one took my ticket, read it, and pointed further down the tunnel. Then again, he grabbed the ticket and waved me onto the next train. This was building up to something.
Finally, one wispy old man in a rusty blue suit and a soot singed red bowtie welcomed me into his car.
My train—Train 50—was only a one-story train, which meant no secret basements. My car was packed, "No more seats available," and before I could search the aisle for a makeshift seat I was herded into a bathroom alongside an elderly lady named Gloria. We introduced ourselves and waited for an opening to make a break for a seat.
“This is terrible,” Gloria said.
Despite being told that there were no seats left, I told Gloria that I would go and double-check, promising to return. She looked to me with trusting, Midwestern eyes, and wished me luck. Dodging through the aisle, I recognized the attendant approaching from the other end of the train. We collided near the middle and she said, “These are the last two seats left,” she patted her hand first onto a headrest on her right, then a headrest on her left. A lady dodged into the chair on her left and I threw my bag into the chair on her right. Before getting comfortable I headed off the attendant, who was a thin, throaty middle-aged woman with blonde hair pulled back into an efficient ponytail.
“There’s a lady stuck in that bathroom without a seat,” I began.
“Who? Where?” she interrupted.
“Gloria. In that bathroom back there,” I pointed. “She doesn’t have a seat.”
“I’ll take care of it. You take a seat.”
Worried about Gloria and feeling guilty about the self-serving prosperity of mission, I weaseled back through the car to the bathroom to find Gloria leaning comfortably--I told myself--against the wall. I told her the news, that the attendant was working on her situation, not mentioning my own success, and she seemed pleased. We parted ways.
The air conditioning on our car was broken. So I channeled a little William F. Buckley Jr. and went to investigate, not necessarily to complain. As it turns out, Amtrak doesn’t have its own maintenance staff, so they rely on private companies to take care of the cars. I learned this from the attendant whom I'd sent to save Gloria.
I found her in the dining car, telling her fellow employees the story about the maintenance guy who'd supposedly fixed our car's a.c., "I told him that it wasn’t working, so he got up there with his screwdriver and told me he fixed it. I knew better and I told him that he hadn’t; they hate me because I know better and I’ll tell ‘em so. He got back in there and turned some switch that he told me was turned off before. Well Apparently he turned it the wrong way because that car doesn’t have air condition and I’ve got everyone hassling me about it."
Just then, a lady announced over the P.A., “Leave your shoes on. We don’t mind if you bring your food aboard, but it will be better for everyone if we keep our shoes on. No flushing paper towels in the toilet because they will clog the toilet bowls and cause an unpleasant odor that nobody wants to deal with.”
I had a seat next to a girl my age headed to South Carolina. She wore a spandex jumpsuit and wiped her forehead every few moments to get the sweat off. I couldn’t tell if she stank or not, but I imagined that she would if I got close enough, so I tried to keep my distance. We all probably stank a little bit at that point.
In the middle of the night the conductor called for a cigarette break, but only one car would be unloading and reloading, so all the interested passengers gathered in that car before the break and waited. The line of would-be smokers stretched through the aisle, cigarettes dangling from their lips. We waited impatiently alongside all the healthy, sleeping passengers for something that wouldn’t do us any real good, and knew it.
When the train eventually stopped and the door opened, we poured out. Immediately, an attendant yelled, “Minute and a half.” We became frantic, pulling in our cigarettes a third at a time. Right after the first warning, the attendant yelled, “Thirty seconds!” One lady frantically bummed a second cigarette and lit it. The attendant started telling people to load, and everyone shifted around, trying to be the last one on.
“I know everyone wants to be last in,” she told us, “but that’s where I have to be.”
As the last people stepped aboard one lady next to me nearly fell into another passenger's lap and blamed it on the quick cigarette, “Made me feel drunk,” she explained.
At 3:30 a.m., we arrived in Cincinnati. Things had cooled down as the night had progressed; most of my train was asleep. When I stepped off I could see my brother, dog tired, pissy, waiting anxiously. We hugged and walked through the train station towards his car.
“I never noticed before how big this train station was,” he said, staring up at the ceiling as we exited. I looked around the enormous ceilings, through the corridors, all of the fine wood, expansive, luxurious space, and agreed. That was really pretty great I thought to myself.
“How was the trip?” my brother asked.
“I’m really thirsty.”
Amtrak didn’t change. Not yet at least. The Great Western Expansion that was harked over the radio in 2008 never took place. 2008 turned out to be the most successful year in Amtrak history, which is why they forecasted a highly prosperous future. The following years, however, have been sobering, as they have been for us all. Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act allotted $1.3 billion dollars to Amtrak and Amtrak has submitted their proposed avenues for the investment and it looks more like a facelift than any sort of change. We’ll get some new trains, probably a power outlet here and there, some clear water in the more bourgeois lines, but nothing spectacular.
In 1961 a railroad executive was quoted saying, “We’re still listed as running passenger service . . . , but we try not to do it. God damn all passengers on a short haul, anyway . . . If . . . I have to carry passengers I’ll make it so uncomfortable, inconvenient and disagreeable for them that they’d wish they never bought a two-bit ticket”.
The fact is that passenger train travel hasn’t been profitable in America for four scores now. The US government has preserved this strange gem, Amtrak, for forty long years and finally the time is upon us when efficient mass transit is starting to make sense and it’s time to dust off Ol’ Amtrak and see what’s left. What is left?
Not much if you want to talk technology. Compared to IPhones, Amtrak is shockingly geriatric. But America does have well-kept rail tracks and hauntingly gothic stations in and around every metropolitan area in the country. Now it is time for the government to take another look at Amtrak.
Bill Edlebeck, a 20-year Amtrak employee, thinks that America is going to need train travel, and when they do, Amtrak won’t be ready to support the traffic. “I liken it to the life vessels on the Titanic. We’re not going to use them until we need them and then we are going to see that there aren’t enough and it’s too late,” he said.
The groundwork is laid for change, but are we ready?
The saga of mistaken history and how California stole Oregon's glory, and kept it. Part 1 of 4.
Two years ago on a gray day in the beginning of summer I found myself in a petite bookstore on the Oregon coast looking for a cheap guide to finding Oregon's infamous Neahkahnie Mountain Treasure. I only had a few hours but I felt pretty sure that it was my lucky day. I needed a new shovel, too.
I asked the gentleman working behind the counter if he had any suggestions. He told me that he didn't believe in the treasure. I asked him Why? He told me that he'd spent many years studying under local-legend-treasure-hunter Wayne Jensen. When Jensen died, he left his library to the lean historian behind the counter.
("LLOYD GRIMES TREASURE HUNTER" Neahkahnie Mountain, Oregon Coast-1975 portrait captured in the midst of an authentic treasure hunt, high on the slopes of Neahkahnie Mountain overlooking the hamlet of Manzanita on the North Oregon Coast)
There was no Spanish Galleon; there was no treasure. He proposed that what history had decided to be a Spanish Galleon, was in fact an English Galleon, and that the foreign men that Native Americans saw on the shore hadn't been burying treasure, but rather, surveying the land!
Surveying the land? How boring.
The silver-goateed, sleek man behind the counter directed my attention to a different book titled, "Francis Drank in Nehalem Bay 1579". No treasure, no shovels, just history.
That, too, seemed really boring. But the man behind the counter launched into a polished speech to convince me otherwise. He proposed the following.
Men have been digging holes in Manzanita, OR., for time eternal in search of the mysterious treasure fabled in the Native American tales of explorers and chests. It was presumed to have been a Spanish Gelleon on the run from pirates in the 1700's.
This mystery captured the attention of a strange man named Wayne Jensen, who spent most of his life exploring the history of the Oregon Coast and digging holes wherever he could in search of that treasure. In his studies and searches, Jensen happened upon various "marked stones", which he took to be some form of treasure map--the digging continued.
Down the line, Jensen realized that the markings on the stones were commonplace surveying symbols, which means that people weren't marking the mountain to remember where they had burried the treasure, but they marked the mountain so that they could document their explorations and return home with facts about the New World.
Well, this created a problem because there was no historical account of anybody "Discovering" Oregon before Lewis and Clark treaded the Oregon Trail hundreds of years later. The only explorer known for traversing America's Pacific Coast was Sir Francis Drake, who had never gone north of California--or had he!
Looking further into the situation, Jensen discovered that there is a section in Drake's journal "The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake," written by Francis Fletcher, that supports his theory that Drake had come far enough north to discover Oregon.
But there was a problem: What Jensen proposed was Oregon, history had decided was California, San Francisco, to be exact. It's common knowledge and a crucial--and sexy--part of Californian history that Drake had arrived in San Francisco in the late 1500's during his circumnavigation of the globe.
Jensen thought otherwise.
"So that's what the book is about. Oregon was actually discovered by Drake and his famous landing in San Francisco never took plce," the man said academically from behind the counter.
"Who wrote the book?" I asked.
"I did," he said.
And that's how I first met revolutionary historian Garry Gitzen.
I bought a signed copy of the book, went up to the hardware store, bought a shovel and then went back down to the beach where I dug and moved stones for the remainder of the day. I concluded the day at the bar, sitting over a chili-blue-cheese burger, wondering if Gitzen was correct.
Could history be wrong, and an eccentric self-proclaimed historian on the Oregon Coast be right about the discovery of America's greatest state, Oregon?
And so the story began. A hero arose from Oregon's stormy coast and a villain arose from the California sunshine. (to be continued)
A retrospective of a strange decade and a welcoming to the new year.
I was there in 2010, sitting crosslegged beneath a concrete awning on a bus bench. You've probably read about those times. They called them The End Times.
The banks stole our houses. Wall Street stole our savings. The pubs stole our paychecks. Families ran thin; hope disparaged. Everybody was educated and uneducated at once. China played puppetmaster and requested a slow dance. We danced. Our debts outlived our children and our government sat back in an armchair and eavesdropped while we cried the blues.
The corporations shifted shapes and disappeared in the shadows. They existed one minute and were gone another. There's one! No, wait . . . There's one! I swear, it was just there, behind the shadow!
We gave the Other Guy a voice. Flip on the TV and there's a dark man in a turban; flip on the radio and there's a lesbian in eyeglasses; flip open the newspaper and there's Charley the Chimney Sweep and his two children, Milo and Millie. He used to afford himself a shave, but not any more. Not in The End Times.
We had hippies, conservatives, gays, immigrants, rich, poor, fat and ugly in the same soup bowl. The good guys and the bad guys held hands around the fire and listened to the wind.
There was coffee in every corner of this tired country. If not coffee, then tea, and lots of it. Flannel roamed the streets but nobody chopped our trees.
People stood scared. End times felt nigh and you could smell it in the air. Whispers roared across the internet like the midnight screech of a banshee. Our government had turned on us. The new president seemed a phony and Americans talked stupid. Each and all of them. Education became wrong. Finances became wrong and polka dots became wrong in the same twist, and nobody knew how to dance. Except the Latinos. And the Latinos were as wrong as the wrongest.
Hard work died with the Great Generation. It died on the bottom of the boots that stomped across Europe during the second Great War. Jaw lines gave way to softer silhouettes and baseball players quit smoking in the dugout. Children wondered why their fathes took them to ball games; fathers wondered, too. You could taste the difference in the bun of the hot dog.
The road trip died with the gasoline and that small town between Sesquallah and Mackinaw filled up with meaty cheeseburgers before disappearing into the potbelly sunset behind a fleet of warm rubber. Nobody stopped the change; nobody knew how or if.
Antique collectors died beneath the war boot and left vast collections of soiled memories in worthless commercial dens.
New shiny things sprang from our pockets and rested upon bald foreheads. You couldn't fill a dusty garage with products built in the End Times. It showed on the streets and in the mirrors. Cheap. Dirty.
Art jogged in a cloud of confusion and died bedside during deep sleep. Nobody knew; nobody remembered. We stood immovable. Please me, don't push me.
And yet some things stayed the same. Nobody stopped celebrating, building, talking or using the bathroom and locking the door on the way in. Babies birthed, fats skinnied, skinnies fatted and strong vision blurred. Chefs cooked. Locksmiths made copper keys and Americans released the clutch and nodded into the rearview.
Rich people in suits sold money and poor people in jumpsuits sold electricity. The Grand Canyon became an inch deeper and a foot longer. Coffee stayed hot and liquor strong. Fresh girls flirted, charmers charmed and angry lovers cropped scandals in the doorway of a frosty motel off the main strip.
Men sported, women gossiped and doctors spoke the nutritional benefits of low cholesterol and seafood. The air improved and the government worked slowly on forgotten highways and promised promises. Small businesses grew up to become international cyclones and big businesses grew stale and old in a musty cupboard. Thanksgiving brought turkey, the holidays brought ham and vegetarians ate neither. In the cold, we wore gloves and scarves; in the country, we wore cowboy hats and in the summer we wore bathing suits and sunglasses.
Good people did good and good people did bad. Bad people did good and bad people did bad. Politics remained politics and voters voted. The distrustful didn't trust and the spinsters spun.
Trees grew, the sun rose, flowers bloomed and we fell humbled by sunset to ensure the stars got a chance, too.
The strong continued to fight and the weak were pulled tirelessly through history, into the future. And through pungent trials, we became reminded, after a long forgotten spell, that life lived, and with it came unequaled opportunity, and that love and hope could break the dreary spell of anguish that shadowed our sights.
And at the end of the hollowest night, amidst the darkest length of the western horizon, beneath a thick winter's mist, a warm glimpse of silver sun rose, casting a long light through the oceans and over the mountains, and we could say that the past finally lay ahead of us. Take a quick step without notice. Quickly now, take another.
Sage: A profoundly wise person, or, a person famed for their wisdom.
Puerto Rican Sage: A profoundly wise person, or, a person famed for their wisdom born in Puerto Rico.
Phony: a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motives; bogus, fraudulent, having a misleading appearance
The Sage talks about confidence. She compares “True Confidence” with “False Confidence”, and then gives me a funny glare that makes me ask myself: Is my confidence True or False? And what’s the difference.
False confidence parades around disguised as true confidence. It tries to be as “True” as possible, always asking itself: What Would True Confidence Do (WWTCD)? Would true confidence laugh at that joke? Yes. So false confidence laughs. Would true confidence attend the Old Friend’s party? No. So false confidence stays home. It walks like true confidence; it talks like true confidence, but it’s not quite the same.
So what’s the difference? It’s like the difference between a replica and a human in Bladerunner.It’s minute (mine-oot), and it takes the right sorts of questions and situations to discern the two. You’ve probably seen it before: Somebody you thought was confident crumbles under pressure, or something just doesn’t quite add up—the whole is less than the sum of its parts. They’re the people that seem stuck.
*Harrison Ford and the replica. If you look closely, you can tell that she's being phony
The false confidence is the product of a conflict that happens within. The proprietor feels that they are insufficient and, as a response to that, they build something, a persona, an alternative reality, a sandcastle—who knows. But they build shoddy things that remind you of the last-minute products placed beside the checkout register at the 99-cent store. Like a jump rope that’s really just a shoelace with pink plastic handles.
True confidence follows no road map. It is creativity embodied.
But what’s the real tell-tale sign of false confidence? It’s Misery. Only the keeper knows the beast. It’s a terrible, agitated misery that follows false confidence around like an inbred Labrador.
You know how some of the happiest, most jovial people you know turn out to be “depressed”? That’s false confidence at its finest.
At this point, you may be wondering: Is my confidence True, or is it False?
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but, your confidence is . . . false. You’re a phony. I already said I’m sorry. Enjoy the rest of your night and tune in next time for: Life is a Sad Place.
Signing off.
Kakakaka! Here’s the truth: The most confident people I have ever met still embody false confidence once in a while (except for Tyler Andre! Whoop whoop) (but seriously, Ty, it’s not fair). Everybody houses a mix of both.
So, how can you tell? You must focus on what makes you miserable. What sucks the satisfaction out of your life? Which interactions, events, people, environments, situations, make you absolutely miserable? Wherever that misery lies, you have a source of your Confidence Crisis—the devil’s playground!
When you have a confidence crisis, you overcompensate by adopting false confidence, and, so on and so forth until you suffer the crisis of the 21st century: Phoniness. And a phony life is sincerely the biggest waste of the most splendid Grand Prize you’ve ever won; it's called LIFE. (you, by the way, were the fastest sperm in a herd of a billion—think about that . . .)
What’s fantastic about all of this is that there’s a bona fide solution to it all. And it’s fairly simple. It’s modeled after the Third Law of Physics; it's been tried, tested and proved. The Puerto Rican Sage discovered it one night while drinking wine and reading Vanity Fair.
*The Sage doth come forth to profess
That’s not true, she actually discovered it three years ago when she had an encounter with her oldest friend in Mexico. The friend had a laundry list of problems—alcoholism, divorce, kids-on-drugs, too much money, etc.—and it made The Sage miserable. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t the booze, or the kids or the money, but something else. It was something within her that was going unmet in the relationship with her problematic friend—a need, unmet.
So The Sage began to explore human needs and discovered something that nobody had ever realized before. Something that would change the world forever. Something that she would eventually unveil on a hideous blog to people she doesn’t know . . . stay tuned!
Yours Sincerely,
The Messenger’s Messenger
Bernadette Messenger was born on a ranch in Bornsworth, TN to Alicia and Bruce Messenger. After graduating from Fort Milworth College in Dunesport, New Hapshire with a degree in Pediphorical Maltransportation, she moved to a small village in Fanley, where she met her husband, and the love of her life, Phil. Today, her and Phil live together happily in Mondo Canyon, where she studies Puerto Rican anthropology and raises their two children, Willard and Malia. Phil is currently unemployed.
