-
2 | Steaming into Life - 1928
- University of New Hampshire Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Steaming into Life • 1928 On a quiet Sunday, the platform of Laconia’s modest railroad station was suddenly transformed by the steam braggadocio of an arriving southbound train. It rested impatiently to collect one passenger: me. I was eighteen. I hugged my parents, sisters, and brother. They were worried for me but confident of my moral toughness and therefore of my future; we were masters of our own destinies back then. My stout father, his bowler hat thumping in his fingers behind his back, made a quick inspection of the hunched locomotive. He was small against the high wall of black tubes and muscular steam torpedoes clustered beneath the engine’s great riveted torso. Mushrooms of steam shot through the big-as-a-man iron-spoke wheels and across the iron knee bones connecting each wheel to the next. Father walked confidently through the coal-sweet steam, tipping his slight male salute—a nod hardly visible to females—to the engineer and the brakeman as he checked their eyes for reliability. Had he detected the red tint of rum or the glaze of exhaustion, I would have been on the next day’s train instead. This great beast was to carry his little girl away to the city, and Father was powerless to do any more than to judge if its struts and tubes and men seemed up to the high responsibility. These trains were perhaps the first big bit of technology to stand against our sense of having control over the things around us—things that increasingly held mortal sway over our families and futures. But Father was not cowed. Why is that cylinder there dripping oil?” he asked of the brakeman. “Because I just oiled it, bud,” came the curt reply. Father didn’t mind the tone; it was business, and he was satisfied. After all that, and after a third or fourth chorus of Mother reminding me of the proper conduct of young girls in big cities, I felt myself boosted up by Father’s stevedore arms to the balancing reach of a bearded conductor. In the transfer, Father’s hat went rolling along the 2 1928 7 platform, and Rex, my fourteen-year-old brother, fetched it and put it on his own small head. They all waved: Rex waved from under the hat. My three sisters waved sadly; Mother and Father waved bravely. Just inside the vestibule and holding tight to my carpetbag, I blew kisses and got teary-eyed and began my journey away from home on the very Boston & Maine train that had whistled through the air of all my growing up. It had taken my brightest high school chums, one by one, away to college and to glory the year before. What dreams lay off across the air split by this whistle? I had wished the wish that now was my reality, if I dared pinch myself. The Boston & Maine was building speed now out of the station and blasting its whistle across the town and across the lake for anyone to hear: Extry! Extry! Dottie Rollins is finally getting the hell out of Tiny Town! Laconia slid by the windows like a diorama; every important place—especially the pink granite library that had been my castle— now seemed trivial. Even the furniture warehouse where my father was the sole employee looked like any other hulking building. My father single-handedly pulled impossible loads of furniture up the building ’s high elevators by means of ropes and pulleys. A great bear he was—a bear with tools who built our little house twice himself and bellowed to keep his five children, mostly me, in line. He complained about the world as he read the morning newspaper. He was a Lincoln Republican—all for self-sufficiency in himself and others, but intensely moderate in accommodating the opinions and needs of others. There is hardly such a thing today. He had given me a fistful of pencils and a stack of paper and envelopes that I might write home every evening, which I would do for a long time—postage was two cents and delivery was twice a day, to homes, and four times a day to businesses . You might receive the reply to your morning dinner invitation by afternoon. The train slid past the last little houses. Every dark space in the landscape turned the window into a mirror, and I saw myself: bobbed brown hair, roundy face, oversized brown eyes, undersized bosom. I traveled...