October 11, 2007
A Dying Language III Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon is of course quite right about the withering of Morse code; it seemed quite inevitable when I read it, but the melancholy certainty had never before occurred to me. In his response, Fred Smoler quotes me as having used the term “lightning slinger.” It’s a term the railroadmen themselves—who were never as poetic and self-consciously picturesque as the steamboat men—really did use, although the phrase may have been more regularly applied by newspapermen when writing about something admirable a railroad telegrapher had done: “ALERT LIGHTNING SLINGER SAVES MAIL TRAIN.” But even the workaday term they more often employed, “brass-pounder,” has a clink of quotidian glory to it. I got very attracted to this telegraphic world during its last hours and, guided by the photographer David Plowden, think to this day I came closest to dying in Mansonian circumstances than I ever had before or—I hope—since. David is the great recorder of the vanishing works of the nineteenth century on the American continent, especially the surviving relics of the world of steam that powered it, and when in the late 1970s he heard I was driving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my wife and young stepchildren, he said I had to stop at—what? Saunders Gap? Eely?—because there I would the see last working HORIZONTAL railroad telegraph key: just like the key you hammered up an down, but a bit easier on the hand because this one you could rattle from side to side. He gave me scrupulous instructions on how to get there, and on a hot, buzzing August morning we set out for the place. There was the depot with its bay. There was nothing else whatever for 15 miles in any direction. There were no wires, and I imagined they hadn’t recently been redirected underground for ecological purposes. The tracks were still there, simmering with black rust. Also there, slowly approaching us from the depot, were a band of people who evidently lived in it and clearly weren’t employees of the Calumet & Northern. I’ve always been too scared to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but you know what I mean. They wanted to know why we’d come down a four-mile dirt road to visit them. Hoping that truth and fatuity might prove strong allies, I told him that we heard the last horizontal sending key in North American rail service was right in that building, and we'd come to offer it our respects. I won't say that the whole atmosphere changed with my squeaky declamation, but at least one of them smiled a little, and another grunted “Shut down,” and we smiled and waved and thanked them again and again and edged back to our little rental piece of crap Dodge Aspen and were permitted to resume our lives uneaten.
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