All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Early in the twentieth century a fiery local nonconformist pastor would preach about the loose morals and evils of the district that the area round Yesler’s Yard soon became. Instead of a skid road for lumber it had become a ‘Skid Road down which souls skidded into hell.’ A twist of the tongue later and the English language had a new colourful metaphor: Skid Row. And people across the planet have been landing on it ever since.

  The past half century has seen various attempts to drag this original Skid Row back uphill. Metaphorically at least. It is only now that they are seriously beginning to show signs of potential success. The Central, opened in 1892, is Seattle’s oldest pub, and still going strong. But it, like so many of its neighbours, has fallen into the modern trap of age exclusivity. Anyone is welcome but if you’re much over 30, you’ll soon start to feel your age.

  Once upon a time the American Cowgirl must have had a different name. Whatever it was, that incarnation has long been forgotten in the metamorphosis into a raucous bar that anywhere in Europe you would describe as for teenagers, were it not for the fact that in the US – incredibly – the minimum drinking age is 21 (a piece of Puritan lawmaking that has made almost every teenager in America a criminal, possessed of some form of fake ID – another major own goal in the ‘war against terror’).

  The American Cowgirl is what old farts like myself call a ‘meat market’. And the meat is queuing up at the door: a group of six girls, just piled out of their car – who I can’t help wonder is the ‘designated driver’? – all shedding their thick outer jackets in the process to reveal virtually identical black sleeveless, bare-shouldered spangly tops. In a flash their naked flesh erupts in a pimply ocean of goose pimples. This is still Seattle. They didn’t invent grunge here for nothing, girls!

  On the advice of a taxi driver – yes, in a district given over to late night bars, you can actually find them on the street – I head for somewhere more convivial for someone not shopping for rare veal. The driver deposits me outside The Hop Vine in a university and residential district. This is a man who knows his mark: inside I find a reassuringly heterogeneous crowd of local regulars, couples popped in for a pint and maybe a bite to eat, students merrily arguing away the troubles of the world over jugs of flavoursome ales.

  When I finally stagger out into the night I find additional reassurance in the fact that my own innate fashion sense owes more to Seattle grunge than sparkly tops: typical Northwest weather – drizzly, cold and blustery.

  But walking into the night through the streets of an American city on a more human scale – or was it just with a more humane face? – than any I have yet encountered, I head happily for bed. Sleepless in Seattle? Not me.

  SEATTLE TO SACRAMENTO

  TRAIN: Coast Starlight

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: 9:45 a.m. (Pacific Time)

  via

  Tacoma, WA

  Olympia-Lacey, WA

  Centralia, WA

  Kelso-Longview, WA

  Vancouver, WA

  Portland, Oregon

  Salem, OR

  Albany, OR

  Eugene-Springfield, OR

  Chemult, OR

  Klamath Falls, OR

  Dunsmuir, California

  Redding, CA

  Chico, CA

  ARRIVE SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA: 6:35 a.m. (Pacific Time)

  DURATION: approx 20 hours, 50 minutes

  DISTANCE: 824 miles

  12

  Terminates Here!

  OF ALL THE EXOTIC NAMES Amtrak gives to the routes plied by its otherwise identical trains, the Coast Starlight has to be one of the most deliberately romantic. Rattling down almost the entire length of the western American seaboard, if you board it mid-morning in Seattle you can, if you choose, still be on board 35 hours later as it pulls into Los Angeles.

  I had a somewhat different route in mind. But as we rolled out of the mock-Venetian folly on King Street, along the rugged Pacific coastline until veering inland, into the depths of the great forests of Oregon it came home to me that I was at last California-bound.

  For a start the dining-car attendant was called José and was the first Amtrak employee I’d come across who very definitely preferred speaking Spanish to English. And then there was the sign at the end of each coach: ‘Smoke-free zone: including the restrooms and the spaces between cars. Anyone who is caught smoking will be removed by law enforcement at the next station stop.’

  Britain is just as bad – or good, depending on your viewpoint – these days, but the first stone in the war against smokers was definitely thrown in California, which is a bit of an irony given the attitude of its governor, as I am to discover. But then this is the state that gave the world hippies and health farms, as well as not just ‘nuclear-free zones’ but also – in Sausalito, north of San Francisco – a ‘cholesterol-free zone’.

  The California clichés slowly start to multiply after I ‘detrain’ in bright sunshine early the following morning at Sacramento’s lovingly restored old station. The rubbish bins are labelled ‘Recycling Facility: Please separate trash accordingly’. Then I walk out of the station and catch sight of the tall palm trees swaying gently in the balmy breeze, so implausible given that it’s not a week since I was shivering in below freezing temperatures in Montana. Shades of the Mamas and the Papas roll out California Dreamin’ on a Winter’s Day.

  And then I spot a flotilla of traffic wardens rolling along silently in three-wheeled electric cars. Wearing plastic cycle helmets. Yep, this has to be Sacramento! The capital city, no less, of the Golden State.

  Sacramento may get sniffed at – and it does – by the metropolitan, metrosexual elites down in the much more famous cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, as a northern provincial town where out-of-touch state legislators meet to further loosen their grip on reality. Which is perhaps why in 2003 they turned out a relatively sensible if conventional politician as governor and instead sent them an Austrian body-builder turned movie star best known for playing a killer robot. And this is the seat of his government. Arnold Schwarzenegger, nicknamed ‘The Governator’ on black T-shirts they try to sell to the tourists (successfully in my case) has his HQ in Sacramento. How fitting then, that the world’s first transcontinental railroad terminated here!

  You could, of course, also say it began here. It was from the spot where I am standing, just a few yards from the existing Amtrak station, in front of a line of buildings now restored to their mid nineteenth-century appearance at the junction of Front and ‘K’ streets that the Chinese coolies broke the ground on 8 January 1863, to begin the western section of what would be the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Not the line I came in on, but the line I intend to leave by, up and over the spine of the Rocky Mountains, a route that cost a fortune to build, claimed thousands of lives, and created a superpower.

  It is to Sacramento that California owes its statehood, and therefore arguably that the United States as we know it owes its existence. This is where the gold rush started, back in 1849, a year after the first flakes were found at the sawmill owned by a Swiss emigré called Johann, later John, Sutter, a short, tubby businessman of dubious character from Burgdorf in Switzerland, whose route to California had been anything but straightforward.

  After doing a runner from his native Switzerland to escape debt in 1834, Sutter made his way via New York to St Louis, still very much a frontier settlement, to deal in trade from Santa Fe, but when that didn’t work he once again fled his creditors, this time out along the Oregon Trail to the Pacific coast. In case that wasn’t far enough he then took ship for Hawaii where he made such an impression on King Kamehameha of the Kanaka tribe that he gave him eight of his men. Sutter then headed back to the North American mainland ending up in the town of Sitka, in the still Russian territory of Alaska, before drifting down the coast to the warmer climes of Mexican-owned California.

  Intent on establishing himself as a merchant he persuaded Governor Alvorado to gi
ve him a generous land grant. Hoping to rely on cheap native labour he took out a loan and built himself a baronial estate at the confluence of two rivers, the American and the Sacramento, which had been named by Spanish explorers after the Holy Sacrament. Sutter called his estate New Helvetia in honour of his homeland. He set to work building up a farm, fort and various trading companies, but his incompetence was such that the local Indians he had hoped to exploit ended up stealing from him. His agricultural skills were nil and his crops failed. Then to cap it all his fur trading business fell apart when he discovered his own employees had been selling off valuable beaver pelts to the rival, British-owned Hudson Bay Company.

  When the territory was ceded to the United States he briefly considered flying the French flag, but was persuaded otherwise by the arrival of a battalion of US troops. To keep his head afloat Sutter went into partnership to build a sawmill in the lowest foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It turned out to be the most significant thing he ever did, albeit purely by accident, because one morning in January 1848 his partner James Marshall discovered some sparkly flecks in the mill water which turned out to be gold. It says much of Sutter’s naivety that he initially hoped their discovery could be kept a secret. Within months the gold rush had begun and Sutter found his land overrun by squatters, miners and would-be settlers who considered his property as much up for grabs as anything they might find in the streams or mountains.

  Under pressure, Sutter did what he always did: tried to pretend it wasn’t happening and shift the problem elsewhere, in this case onto the shoulders of his son, and retreated to a modest farmhouse. His son, meanwhile, had seen that despite the fact that the land around the Sacramento and American riverbanks was a muddy quagmire in winter and a dusty plain in summer, and the fact that the water was undrinkable, that was where the influx of fortune hunters continued to arrive.

  He teamed up with a couple of builders, apportioned a chunk of land facing the Sacramento River into 10 lots and auctioned them off for more than enough money to settle his father’s remaining debts. On the banks of a river named for the Holy Sacrament, Sutter Jr gave the influx of miners everything they desired; buckets and spades, beer and bordellos. His motto was to drive an expansion without precedent: ‘Build it and they will come.’ And come they did! Almost without noticing it, Sutter Jr had founded the city that was to become the capital of California.

  Sutter’s town was laid out on a perfect grid pattern, which the oldest parts of the modern city still adhere to. Before long it had become a riotous river port of miners, traders and whores. But it was also by far the most important place in California and in 1854 was designated the new state’s capital, which to the bemusement of San Franciscans and Los Angelinos it remains today. It is also the reason I shan’t be getting to San Francisco itself on this journey: the trains don’t go there. The closest you can get, on the magnificently-entitled California Zephyr which runs along much of this historic route each day from Chicago, is the less-magnificently named Emeryville, a rather dull industrial city town on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay.

  I might, however, have been able to get that far, had my accommodation for tonight still been fulfilling its original role. The Delta King riverboat, a beautifully restored old paddle steamer now permanently moored by the riverside in ‘Old Sacramento’, in its heyday back in the 1930s used to ply the river from here down to San Francisco every evening, a 10-hour trip which cost $3.50 – or just a buck if you brought your own blanket and opted to sleep on deck. Its popularity was unsurprising: in the days of Prohibition it was one of the few places where you could not only gamble but get a drink! Out of service since the Second World War, during which it served as a floating hospital in San Francisco Bay, the thing actually sank in 1981 and lay on the bottom before being salvaged and undergoing a five-year restoration. I went out onto the aft deck and drank a late morning beer in the old girl’s honour as I surveyed the picture-postcard ‘Olde West’ townscape laid out in front of me: Old Sacramento in all its glory.

  Unfortunately ‘Old Sacramento’ is probably the newest part of town. At least the most perfectly polished. The shops and stores have signs painted on them that say things like ‘Saddlery and Ironmongery’, or ‘Mining Supplies, Dynamite,’ when actually what they sell is scented candles and designer humbugs. They all sparkle pristinely with fresh bright paint, as they might have done on some mythical day back in the 1840s in the midst of the gold rush when they had all just been newly erected. Except, of course, that the gold rush was a rush and the river shores would have been heaving with people and dirt and horses and carts and oil and grease and sweat. And some buildings would have been going up while others would have been falling down.

  A good proportion of them indeed did subsequently fall down or get torn down, and although some of those that make up Old Sacramento today have indeed been lovingly preserved – or more accurately heavily restored – a fair proportion have also been completely reconstructed ‘true to the original’. Old Sacramento is pretty, but it’s picture-postcard pretty and about as authentic as Disney’s Magic Kingdom. There is an ‘authentic replica’ – completely reconstructed – of the 1876 Central Pacific Depot and on weekends in summer you can catch a steam train from it for a six-mile jaunt along Feather River Canyon.

  The real city of Sacramento is separated from the Disneyfied waterfront by the inevitable freeway, which has to be crossed by the inevitable concrete pedestrian underpass. Even here, in sedate Sacramento, I’m prepared for the worst: the usual gaggle of drunks and beggars. But no. Hey, maybe California is different. The underpass certainly is. For one thing it’s painted in bright – if this were still the sixties I’d call them ‘psychedelic’ – colours. For another there was piped music playing. Not supermarket muzak, but syncopated jazz. Only in California?

  I’m headed for the governor’s mansion, helpfully marked on a tourist map picked up on the paddle steamer. It’s a bit of a tramp away towards the edge of the grid that marks the older bit of the real, as opposed to the waterfront, city. But with the tall palms swaying and the sunshine beaming down with Mediterranean warmth, for once a ‘bit of a hike’, as I’m learning Americans refer to anything more than a stroll round the garden, is a not unappealing prospect.

  A few streets in from the tourist trap, however, and Sacramento is beginning to look depressingly less unique: a concrete ‘Downtown Plaza’ area filled with the usual fast-food joints and chain stores. Then, a couple of blocks further I come across a delightful open green area that proclaims itself Cesar Chavez Park. This is where I embarrass myself. Okay, American readers laugh now: this is your chance to get one back on all that supposedly sophisticated Worldly knowledge Europeans have tried to patronise you with over the years. The name of the park has got me wondering what sort of political revolution is going on in northern California. How can it be that the nicest park in the state capital is named after George W. Bush’s bitterest enemy, the crypto-communist anti-American president of Venezuela?! Yes, I can hear you chortling already. It gets worse. In my blissful naivety I actually go up and ask the question – as delicately as I can – of one of the nice girls in bright yellow suits wearing badges that proclaim them willing to offer information to visitors.

  They smile, look at each other, look at me – they may be checking here to see if I am mad or just a leg-puller – and then one of them says, calmly, politely, as if talking to a small child: ‘It’s Cesar Chavez. Right?’ And they walk away, not exactly quickly but quite clearly not wanting to hang around someone so obviously off his trolley. For a second I’m left standing there, wondering what’s up and then it dawns on me that the president of Venezuela – much as he might like to have been named after Julius Caesar – actually labours under the first name of Hugo. It’s only later – quite some time later and thanks to Wikipedia – that I learn who Cesar Chavez was: one of the most widely revered Mexican-Americans who founded a farm workers’ union and whose birthday is a holiday in eight Americ
an states. For British readers, just in case there are any out there as ignorant as I am, a comparison might be if I had gone up to Tony Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell and asked if he wasn’t still a bit embarrassed about that ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

  I’m still unaware of the extent of my gaffe, however, as I plod onwards in search of Arnie’s pad. It’s only by the time I get there – or where the map says it ought to be – that I really notice how the streets en route have got just that little bit dingier and neglected – this is California dingy, mind, not Buffalo dingy, dingy with sunshine and palm trees – but no longer quite the chocolate-box Sacramento of the riverside.

  When finally I do turn a corner and find myself right next to the governor’s mansion it’s something of a shock. For a start it’s wrapped in what looks like grey cloth. For half a second it crosses my mind that I’ve come upon an unheralded installation by Christo (the celebrity artist who has a thing about wrapping up famous buildings like brown paper parcels). The explanation was far more mundane: a sign that said ‘Under Restoration’, which had to explain why on closer examination – poking my head under the sheeting – I could see that the elegant external carved woodwork was in the process of being substantially dismantled. Arnie is obviously not at home. In fact it doesn’t look as if there’s been anyone at home for quite some time. Is this the right place, I ask myself once again rather stupidly and naively as it turns out, is this the residence, even notionally, of former indestructible twenty-third-century robotic terminator and now California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger?