Friday, October 10, 2008
Siding to Nowhere
This appears to have been one of those times that I built something up in my mind a little too grandly, but in my own defense, I think that’s what they intended. “One track” thinking does that to you sometimes.
Waa-Tee-Kaa undoubtedly once was fabulous. You can see its bygone grandeur in the wrought-iron guardrails, the leaded jewel-glass inserts over the windows, the understated opulence of the short, sharp syllables of the transliterated name which is itself evidence of manifest destiny and social superiority. Amid the plate-glass stuttering of the downtown office towers that surround the small courtyard where it stands marooned on a short length of transplanted, symbolic track, the train car promised a journey back to a gilded age’s most exclusive aerie. It was the personal passenger coach of Big Daddy Bechtel and his brood of brooding Bechtel Boys - Wassily, Chaim and Raoul. Or whoever they were.
Because it’s not the people in particular I cared about - I was motivated not by biographical interest but by curiosity blended with avarice, a shameful jealousy over things I’ll never have and don’t quite understand, an incohate desire aroused by an intentionally deindividuated foil. And thus it was with clan Bechtel - who they were, personally, made no difference to me (assuming, of course, that they weren’t closet nazis or behind that whole subprime mortgage mess or anything like that). They were just industrialists, traversing the United States in the heyday of rail, living like the kings they’d have been if Social Darwinists had had their way, and when their travails took them to isolated outposts like desert riverbeds or forested mountaintops they’d plunk down Waa-Tee-Kaa and make a little campout with their coolies and cooks. Sounded sweet. I probably spent a little too much time imagining how sweet it was, but sometimes my brain had nothing better to do - and the car was just sitting there, after all, a few blocks from my office in the middle of my quotidian peregrinations, resting on an isolated pair of rails in a plaza fronting the Bechtel Building. It had been tempting me for years with visions of imagined oligarchic excess. It was a nucleus for fantasy. I wondered what the truth would hold. Short answer: not much.
Recently, I found myself walking past the Bechtel Plaza around lunchtime and found Waa-Tee-Kaa open for tours, as apparently it is on a daily basis at about that time. The car is mounted via a ramp that weaves, ADA-compliantly, back and forth in a gentle rise to the coach’s elevation several feet above ground level - a rather pedestrian affair of steel rods and concrete pads, uninspiring but sufficiently servicable for the circumstances.
I meandered to the landing on the heels of a young woman of pronounced urban sensibilities who was wearing a black hoodie and black chucks; she walked alone with no purse or bag, her face broadcasting skeptical curiosity as we separately ascended together to the entryway. She went in first but left again fairly quickly, smirking in wry disappointment, so I had Waa-Tee-Kaa pretty much to myself. The car was laid out in a series of three rooms that opened off an aisle that ran down the left side. Each room was entered through an elegant wood-trimmed archway. In the first room was a central display plinth, exhibiting an antique surveyor’s transit from the early days of Bechtel glory. There was also a comparative display of the weird clumsy canvas-and-resin hard hats of yore, and the sleek resin-and-canvas models in use today - all naturally inscribed prominently with the Bechtel name. And let us not omit mention of the model of the Bechtel tanker ship. That would be unforgiveable.
The two other rooms followed suit, their walls lined with displays of enlarged photographs in spectacular living color, sentimental sepia, and gritty hard-hitting black and white, showing brash young men and grizzled old roughnecks forging bridges in mid-air and raising impossible edifices and otherwise wreaking civilization on the maidenhead of the wilderness. They showed off the airport they’d built in Saudi Arabia that’s twice the size of San Francisco, and a refinery construction job three days upriver in darkest Papua New Guinea. It was all very compelling, if that is the sort of thing that compels you.
And sometimes, amid these outsized pictorals of engineering audacity and nature-raping machismo, I’d see a shot of Big Papa Bechtel and/or his progeny - Adolph, Stucky and Wu-Tan. They’re invariably dressed in neckties and suits, looking terribly dour - as if their plunder of the planet might conceiveably run awry if they unclenched themselves for one instant. They glowered out of their frames at me as Hoover Dam was hewn and Yosemite was laid open in the background behind them. Surrounding them throughout the train car were more photos and models exemplifying their puissance and the instruments by which they achieved it. I felt like I was supposed to be impressed. I almost felt badly that I wasn’t.
Waa-Tee-Kaa may once have been a rolling palace redolent of rare wines, imported cigars and rich living. That is now all gone, in favor of pure corporate onanism. All that remains of what once had been, were those leaded windows, their graceful arcs of blue and amber weaving together over clear plate panes that once looked out on dominion and in on splendor. Now they gape, dazed, from a stranded antique, and the view outside is of asphalt, tour busses, and office buildings, not mountain chasms and wide-open spaces. The view looking in, by the same token, is the same as you’d see in any corporate lobby anywhere in the financial district, testifying with equal eloquence to man’s enlightening relationship to the earth, as does any old train car on a siding to nowhere.
cell phone photos:
waa-tee-kaa in situ:
visually if not thematically related: cable cars lined up at the terminus of the california street line, as seen on my walk to work from the shuttle-bus stop. These old cars are still in service, and what they lack in opulence they more than make up in authenticity.
