“In 1917,” Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams begins,
Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.
A man orphaned early and raised by relatives he leaves at the first opportunity to work in the woods.
He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him. But according to one of the fellows, Arn Peeples, an old man now, formerly a him-crack sawyer, the trees themselves were killers, and while a good sawyer might judge ninety-nine times correctly how a fall would go, and even by remarkable cuts and wedging tell a fifty-tonner to swing around uphill and light behind him as deftly as a needle, the hundredth time might see him smacked in the face and deader than a rock just like that…It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.
The trees take the war to Grainier when a forest fire takes out his home and his wife and child along with it. He was living until then, and only existed afterward.
Sometimes he thought also of the Chinese railroad hand he’d almost helped to kill. The thought paralyzed his heart. He was certain the man had taken his revenge by calling down a curse that had incinerated Kate and Gladys. He believed the punishment was too great.
Later Grainier plunks down $4 to take a joyride on an old biplane and over his shoulder we see what he sees, the magnificent majesty of the Pacific Northwest. But he isn’t looking forward, he is looking back.
He saw the moment with his wife and child as they drank Hood’s Sarsaparilla in their little cabin on a summer’s light, then another cabin he’d never remembered before, the places of his hidden childhood, a vast golden wheat field, heat shimmering above a road, arms encircling him, and a woman’s voice crooning, and all the mysteries of this life were answered.
He lives eighty years, well into the Sixties. When his body gives out he moves from the forest to driving a two-horse wagon. He still spends his summers on the creek where he lived with his wife and daughter, and that is where he eventually dies.
I saw the Oscar-nominated film before I read the book and this is one of those rare times when the film enhanced the text, and that scene in the biplane reminded me of the last scene of An Unfinished Life, another good adaptation of book to film. Two old cowboys are sitting in front of a cabin, and a drone shot rises up and over Wyoming as Morgan Freeman’s voiceover describes his latest dream, one of flight.
I got so high, Einar, I could see where the blue turns to black. From up there you could see all there is, and it looked like there was a reason for everything.
Almost the same scene, definitely the same grail. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ And we’re lucky as hell if we get that last flight, in dream or in reality.
