The Empire Builder, by Ann Hedreen

We were about to stake our claim to a future empire called marriage. What better way to start out than to travel to this unexplored land via a train called The Empire Builder? Especially when, for the price of our one-way tickets from Chicago to Seattle, we could load half a dozen boxes of books, two oversized suitcases, and our old-school aluminum-frame backpacks into the luggage car?

We splurged on a tiny compartment: two seats, knee-to-knee, that slid into one slim bunk. The other bunk pulled down from the ceiling. When we needed to stretch our legs, we could go to the Dome Car for the view or to the dining car or the bar car.

At least I think all that is true.

I have been married for thirty-five years, but not to the man with whom I made that trip on the Empire Builder. I don’t often dwell on that journey. And because the details slid right out of my memory, that’s where they are: gone.

“I wanted to see what the continent looked like between
one coast and the other. To revel in place names
like Medicine Hat and Thunder Bay.“

The man with whom I made that trip. I look back and I see a beautiful boy, a skinny blonde Carolina surfer turned English lit grad student, a boy who was barely acquainted with the basics of housekeeping. I look back and see myself: a girl, round-cheeked but intrepid, a daydreamer masquerading as a plucky rookie reporter. If you’d met us on the Empire Builder, you might have found us delightful: his laconic accent, my tales of calling in stories from police desks and hotel payphones.

I remember our compartment had that new car smell. Was it factory-fresh? Were we, a young couple on our way to the altar, baptizing this little Amtrak pod?

I remember too the shocking hugeness of the Great Plains. The memory is woven in my mind with an even earlier transcontinental train trip, my first, the one I took across Canada at 18, looking for a frugal but adventurous way to get from my childhood home in Seattle to my sophomore year of college in New England. I wanted to see what the continent looked like between one coast and the other. To revel in place names like Medicine Hat and Thunder Bay. To arrive in a city where the signs were in two languages. I don’t remember the Canadian train having a special name. Maybe that was because Canada became a country by finally uncoupling from an empire, instead of building one.
~

New York is known as the Empire State: hence, the Empire State Building. But the train christened the Empire Builder originates in Chicago, and ends in Seattle (or Portland, if you opt for the branch line from Spokane). The name of the train is an homage to James J. Hill, known as The Empire Builder, a man as rich and powerful in his day as our current princes of technology. Hill was the self-made emperor of the Western railroads, huckster to the world of the dryland prairies, a landscape so wildly hostile to the rigors of farming that a scientific theory—“rain follows the plow”—was promoted by Hill’s PR geniuses to lure immigrants, my forebears among them, to stake a homestead claim: each would become small-e emperors of 320 dryland acres, thereby helping Hill color in the map, square by square, of his large-E Empire, stitched together by the iron tracks of his own Great Northern railway. Hill’s network of railroad right-of-ways through tribal lands was barely legalized, its legislation so brazenly one-sided that President Grover Cleveland vetoed it, though in the end relented.

In Hill’s day, people knew his name so well they didn’t need to hear it. “The Empire Builder” sufficed.

As the Plains homesteaders began to realize what they’d gotten themselves into, a playground ditty started making the rounds: 

Twixt Hill and Hell, there is just one letter.

Were Hill in Hell, we’d feel much better.

None of this was on my mind in August of 1982 when my boyfriend—my fiancé—and I boarded the train.

I only wish I could remember what was on my mind. Or his.
~

When I went back to my journal from that year, not only was there not a single word about the two days and two nights we spent crossing the West, there were no entries at all for more than a month. Pre-wedding, the last entry I wrote, on August 4, was several mortifying pages about the two nights I had been unfaithful to my boyfriend in our five years of being a very young but seriously committed couple.

My journal had the travel disadvantage of being conspicuously huge. It was a big maroon tome that resembled a law book, and bore the words Yet Unpublished and By Ann Hedreen and Volume I, stamped in gold on the spine. It had been a gift from my boyfriend’s mother, and though I had been writing in it for almost a year, I still had hundreds of blank pages to fill.

Maybe, after those errant nights, I was afraid to write in my journal. Maybe I deliberately packed it in one of the taped and string-wrapped boxes that would travel deep in the Amtrak baggage car.

So it could be that I just put a spiral reporter’s notebook in my daypack, for jottings on the train, and now that little notebook is lost to history.

Or maybe, in that knee-to-knee compartment, I didn’t have the privacy that was essential to journal writing.

During that journal-silent month, we moved out of our Chicago apartment, took the Empire Builder to Seattle, were married on August 21 in the presence of family and friends, and started a new job (me) and job-hunting (fiancé-turned-husband).

“My journal had the travel disadvantage of being conspicuously huge. It was a big maroon tome that resembled a law book,
and bore the words Yet Unpublished…”

The first entry, post-wedding, was on September 6, was mostly focused on my fear of screwing up in my new job as a news writer at a Seattle TV station—and how I hoped we’d find an apartment soon so we could move out of my mom’s house.

There was nothing at all about our wedding or the Empire Builder.

I was 25. My husband had just turned 27. We were as unprepared to build the empire of our marriage as my great-grandparents had been ill-equipped to stake a homestead claim in one of the driest, coldest, most northerly quadrants you could reach via James J. Hill’s cavalry of mighty iron horses. We had zipped right through the town nearest their claim: Chinook, Montana, out on what Montanans call the High Line, just a gust of wind away from the Canadian border. But I did not know that part of my history because my grandmother never spoke of it. In fact, she did not acknowledge her family at all. She said she was an orphan, and claimed she knew nothing about them.
~

Since its construction ninety years ago, more than thirty people have jumped from the Empire State Building. Like the Golden Gate Bridge, does its name invite despair? The disillusionment of failing to find your place in the empire, your passage through the glittering gate?

In the fifty years of the Amtrak era, the Empire Builder has reported at least five serious accidents, including one fatality in 1986. Whether or not it has borne its share of the well over 200 suicides by rail reported each year in the U.S. (likely a very low estimate, according to the Department of Transportation, because many are reported as “trespass deaths”) is harder to determine.
~

In 1916, my great-grandfather Martin Anderson had already suffered the losses of two sons when his wife suddenly died, leaving him alone just a few years into their Montana homestead venture, twenty-five miles from town with five living children: the youngest, an infant son; my grandma, then 4; and her three older sisters. This was Martin’s second try at homestead farming: he’d already given up on his first claim in North Dakota. By 1919, he was done. The family boarded James J. Hill’s westbound Great Northern—not yet officially known as the Empire Builder—bound for Seattle.

A year later, his oldest daughter returned to Chinook. She married a neighboring homesteader, and they made a go of it. The summer my husband-to-be and I roared across the High Line was the last summer of her life. If I’d only known, we could’ve gone to her funeral. But my grandma had long ago cut all ties. In 1982, I didn’t know I had three great-aunts and a great-uncle and all kinds of cousins.
~

Was there some epigenetic homing device that made me yearn to cross the northern tier of the West by train like my ancestors had? Because here’s something I’d quite forgotten, until I stumbled across a journal entry from September 1980: when I first moved to Chicago, the train I took was the eastbound Empire Builder from Seattle.

Off we go, I wrote, after a stop in Minot, North Dakota, whistling through the still black prairie night in our own snake-shaped world, ruthlessly ignorant of whatever might be out there watching us speed past, leaving behind a momentary glitter, a tiny sip of city glamour—a child sits up in bed and then dreams of someday adventures, an old man peers out from his crumbling hand-built home and remembers when many trains passed and perhaps his little ghost town was prosperous and modern and freshly painted, when it was more than a graveyard for rusty trucks and scraps of farm machinery. So many scrap graveyards. There’s no place to hide it out here—you can read the family history by the collection of trucks and cars and tractors parked in the yard, each sunk a little deeper than the one next to it.

“Was there some epigenetic homing device that
made me yearn to cross the northern tier
of the West by train like my ancestors had?”

In Seattle, I spent two months catching up with family after a year in England. I was trying to save money for the move to Chicago by temping. (Remember “temping?” I worked for Kelly Girl. My favorite gig that summer was seven days of typing and answering the phone at a company called “Efficiency Incorporated.”) On the eastbound Empire Builder, it felt heavenly to do nothing but read and look out the window. I wrote that I’d just finished The Thin Man. Perhaps I was trying to sound like Dashiell Hammett.

On that eastbound trip, the empire that obsessed me was the empire called Career. After a year of waitressing in England, my vow to myself and others was that in Chicago, I would get a real job. I’d briefly had one, before England, at a publishing company in Boston, but my goal this time was to be a cub reporter. I knew the odds were long, but I was twenty-three: young enough to be a cub, right? Fallback options included any type of writing. The key word was “writing.” Working as an editor’s assistant and working as a temp typist had shown me I didn’t want to devote the rest of my life to polishing other people’s words. I wanted the words to be mine.

You can understand something of a town’s history by the ratio of pink and yellow and blue houses with metal siding to gray board houses, dying with dignity next door or down the road. Kremlin. Culbertson. Cutbank. Browning. And so many whose names were lost to memory five minutes after the single signpost on the old station flashed by.

It makes me happy to look back at my young self, the writer trying to warm up her writing muscles on the Empire Builder.

Just as it makes me sigh to find nothing at all about that life-changing westbound trip, two years later, after I had persuaded my Carolina fiancé to give Seattle and marriage a try. The whole caper was definitely more my idea than his.
~

For four years, my Carolina fiance and I gave marriage a try. Our roomy second-floor apartment was on the western slope of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, in an early-twentieth-century foursquare frame house. We had a fireplace. We had good light. If we opened the dining room window and climbed out onto the roof, we had a sunset view of the Olympic Mountains. We had jobs. Budding careers, even! I worked as a news writer for a TV station. My now-husband taught English. It was the marriage part we couldn’t seem to get right. We pouted (me) and brooded (him) and fought like never before.

Later, this was how I summed it all up: We did pretty well together, until we got married.
~     

James J. Hill married at 29 and remained married until his death, nearly fifty years later. As his railroad empire grew, so did his family. He and his wife Mary had ten children, nine of whom lived to adulthood.
~

The home in southeast Seattle where I now live with my second husband—the one I’ve been married to for thirty-six years—is one block west of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way., a long north-south thoroughfare that is more than a century old. Before it was renamed for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1984, it was called Empire Way, in honor of, you guessed it, James J. Hill. Who could’ve imagined, a hundred years ago, that a day would come when Hill’s sobriquet would be supplanted by the name of a leader known for such a profoundly different dream? The name change took a citizens’ petition and a vote by the city council. The main argument against it was the cost to all the store owners along such a busy arterial, because they would have to change their stationery and signs. Letting go of the homage paid to Hill’s mighty empire was beside the point.  

In the early twentieth century, Seattle fancied itself a frontier city on its way to becoming a sophisticated metropolis. A street named “Empire Way” sounded fine and fitting, but by the early 1980s, the city was older and wiser and in search of new heroes. The children of the booster class were now veterans of the Vietnam War, or of the protests against the war, and for civil rights. To openly revere the notion of empire building had become as old-fashioned as the statue chosen to represent our state in the nation’s capital. Marcus Whitman was an early missionary who was killed, along with his family, after choosing to establish himself on land of the tribes of eastern Washington, and made himself a magnet for their mistrust. In 2021, the statue of Whitman was finally replaced by one of Billy Frank Jr., a beloved Native American leader and lifelong defender of tribal fishing rights.

Now, driving Martin Luther King Jr. Way is like reliving Seattle’s history of immigration: from the mostly white neighborhoods at its north end, through historically African-American (and now gentrifying) neighborhoods, over the I-90 tunnel that cuts through the area once known as Garlic Gulch, and on to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Latin American, Sudanese, and Somali businesses and homes that crowd the arterial’s southern reaches.  

The neighborhood we live in is a blend of all of the above, as are many pockets along MLK Way. It is the part of Seattle least likely to evoke the word “empire,” in the James J. Hill sense of the word, although it was the first part of the city to be served by the new light rail system, which opened to riders in 2009. It is also the part of Seattle where the most peaceful marches of June 2020 took place—one alive with chanting and drumming on a day of full sun; the other in the rain, completely silent.
~

The Empire Builder was named in 1929, thirteen years after Hill’s death. It might have been named something more poetic, along the lines of the Coast Starlight (Seattle to Los Angeles) or the California Zephyr (Chicago to Oakland) or the Sunset Limited (New Orleans to Los Angeles). But no: it was named for a tycoon, and for an ideal: the building of empire. Not a Napoleonic empire, but a business empire, that greatest of all American achievements. Wealth. Power. Ambition. That final word is one we approve of so deeply we rarely stop to think of the cost of it.

In 1982, I would have told you I was marrying for love. Which was true, but I was also marrying because I believed it was the right step for our relationship—a way for us to find our niche in the grand scheme of American empire. Turns out it was not the right step, and I’m glad it only took four years to learn that.

My second marriage—my current marriage—is a different story. We started off with an anti-imperial flourish. We quit our jobs, bought backpacks and round-the-world plane tickets, and traveled until our modest savings ran out. We came home broke and started fresh, our minds full of the beautiful ruins of so many empires.
~~~

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