Storm, Hans Otto

English

University of New Mexico

New Mexico Quarterly
Volume 27 | Issue 1 Article 22
1957
A First Trip East, 1928
Hans Otto Storm
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Recommended Citation
Storm, Hans Otto. "A First Trip East, 1928." New Mexico Quarterly 27, 1 (1957). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/vol27/iss1/
22
107
America's
changin~ face
HANs Ono STORM
A First Trip East, 1928
THE RAn.. CLICKS BEGAN TO SOUND MORE RAPIDLY AS THE TRAIN RAN
downward through the dusk into a level country of occasional wind-
mills, and with the descent there came over him a feeling of helpless
uncertainty, like the more physical misgiving that comes to the air
traveler in an unexpected dive. Here on the ground the train had
labored for two long days up the colossal western slope of the cordillera,
and somehow that had been to him more understandable. Desert, dry
pines, blockllke mountains, rivers consisting of thin trickles in a waste
of sand, alluvial effects placed in the middle distance with theatrical
effect, railways cut into canyon walls - to the perspective of these
things he was adjusted, as to sunshine that beat straight and hard upon
one's back, alternating with a night that chilled. Here ahead, in a
twilight that was of the sight only, while the heat of the day still hung
around one unremitting, there unrolled endless miles of a country that
was flat - or rather, not mountainous or hilly but simply uneventful-
differing decidedly' from the spectacular flatness sometimes encoun-
tered to the west where ancient deposits of alluvium, suddenly laid
down, have been left dessicated as museum specimens for future ages.
This present uneventful largeness was oppressing, not because it
,
Hans Otto Storm, anelectronics engineer, met death while working on
a giant transmitter in San Francisco, two days after the Pearl Harbor
attack. Also a novelist, his best known work is Pity the Tyrant.
According to his good friend and literary executor, David Greenhood,
to whom we are indebted for this piece, it is a passage from the first
draft of a short biographical novel Storm wrote in the same year
that he went East to take a job on an important engineering project
on Long Island.
/
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was largeness but because it appeared in some way muddied by domes-
ticity that had no point to it - although the land did not seem used in
any realistic sense7yet it was tamed. Occasional fences and occasional
abandoned7rusted implements gave to the empty acres a stamp that
indicated they never would be new again. Stations appeared7 station
buildings quite unrelated to a town or crossroad; they clipped past and
disappeared as if there were no thought that anything should ever stop
there.
"Where do you think we are?" asked Hermione.
"In Colorad07still.7'
He looked into a timetable in which he had marked their train by a
line raggedly drawn with a fountain pen. "It seems to be another hour
until we eat."
"To think of paying twenty cents apiece for oranges," said Hermione.
It darkened. This was totally new country to them both. The sky
was overcast; when daylight went out7 there were no lights to punc-
tuate the countryside. On curves, one could look forward past the
headlight of the engine7to where the telegraph poles swept by as sharp,
bright lines. But there was little use for curves; mostly the track rolled
straight ahead. Lights were turned on in the rather comfortable train.
One could not see anymore past the windows; one trusted mechanically
and was blind. .
Strange7and strange even fdr its being strange7this well-tamed sec-
tion of the earth they called his country7 chunky and square and rational
on the map and well filled out7he had been accustomed to consider as
a unit social and geographical and picturesque. Yet it was big enough
to seem possible for one to grow up to a sort of maturity in one small
comer. The center that was assumed the whole was copied from with
uniformity he had lived half a life without approaching. He was not
localized; he had been into Mexico and spent one summer in Alaska7
but until this journey he had not been East. He felt quite suddenly
that here ahead in a rolling repetitive monotonous land which might
be still quite alien to him had been made the history7 the literature, the
inventions of a culture that after all he had known only at its outposts.
Hereafter7he had been told by competent historians7there would be
no more outposts. The knowledge did not add to his enthusiasm for
the journey.
He was going East; he was7in the last analysis7releasing the pressure
on his life by going East7and this itself seemed an admission of defeat.
Remotely English, still more remotely Scandinavian, Polish, possiblyr
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XXVII: 1,2 A First Trip East 109
a trace of Tartar, he had been born into the grand tradition of the
\ westward march. In particular, his father had carried it along from
. Pennsylvania, somewhat behind the pioneers in time but-making in
one jump the last such move that ever could be made. He himself had
taken it as a tactic that when wide experience should call him forth he
would be going to China, or the Pacific islands. Instead of them the
East. The wave of pioneers had broken and was definitely washing
backward. He, after four thousand years of westward wanderings, was
being washed backward with them into the unutterably tamed.
At the last of the brick station restaurants they went to dinner. Sud-
denly and for no noticeable reason there appeared a town - coal chute,
water tank and sidings, railway station and a restaurant - one of those
agglutinations of the transportation system that is called a town be-
tween the looth and the l1Sth meridians. Hungry, they followed the.
quickly stepping line of people along the brick-edged platform to where
one of the magnificently timbered gongs announced refreshment. The
night was hot, promising to tum sultry. At the door h~ was told he
would have to wear his coat. He did not actively resent the insult, but
the train was long and to go back and forth would have been incon-
venient. Hermione motioned him to come away. Beyond the railroad
property, as closely as the law allowed, a man was beating a gong
slightly smaller and less resonant, and offering dinner at a slightly
lower price. They went. The food was execrable and the coffee worse.
"Wish we'd gone back," he said to Hermione.
"You didn't want to."
Laughing slightly he said, "Looks as if the country's getting us."
They went back into their train, where the berths were already being
folded down. As the new engine settled to its pull they folded them-
selves in behind the curtains and retired. He lay awake some time after
Hermione had gone to sleep. It was the first time on a fast train he had
not been gathered in immediately by the delightful relaxation of·swift
fOrward movement. He was easily affected by such trifling incidents as
had happened at the restaurant. He 'was too easily affected by the
moods of places. He had scientific training; so he could not give way
to superstition except by downright dishonesty, but he had a tendency
to see things as symbolical, as with this thing of turning Eastward to
. try out his skill.
HERMIONE WOKE HIM SOON AFTER THE FIRST LIGHT. HIS MIND SWUNG
like a compass-needle abruptly released from clamping; with successive
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Storm: A First Trip East, 1928
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no Hans Otto Storm NM.Q.
..---_.- -
and sudden oscillations he remembered where he was, what direction
he was going; finally also where and why, and then he was entirely
awake. All these instants, while deduced reminders, were making him
again a rational creature; he knew with a heavy solidity of feeling which
permeated sleep and waking that he was rolling downward into strange-
ness, that his heels had been two days up out from under him on throb-
bing cushions, and that the slow west wind which drifted after them
in their haste had been so many times polluted and refreshed that it
had quite forgotten the valiant sea in which it had its origin.
"It must have rained," he said, looking at the saturated earth. "I
didn't know it could rain like this in summer."
"Of course it rains, sillyl Or where would you think all those rivers
come from?"
He enjoyed having her chide him for being ignorant. "I don't knqw,"
he said. "I just thought maybe they had pumping pla~ts . . ." .
Kansas appeared deliquescent. Plowed fields in which the clods had
melted into muddy lumps sagged down to streams in which the willows
stood double from recent floods, brown twigs and flotsam still clinging
to their leaves where higher flood had placed them. Desultorily the land
seemed cultivated. Knee-high com rose with a sorry effort from the
mud, and drooped to leeward, tapering down to nothing in less favored
spots - it was as if someone far off, living in a city, had put down those
seeds, hoping perhaps sometime to produce a cropI' who knows? At
intervals they saw a bam, at more rare intervals a farmhouse. Both the
barns and houses seemed to have stood long, and to have stood long
since anyone had been able to afford to paint. The houses were weather-
beaten to the color of the earth; into the earth they appeared to be
sagging at the comers of the porches, and no one sufficiently interested
to prevent. It seemed incredible that this land had been cultivated less
than a hundred years, and in those hundred years had been twice fought
for.... They passed a town, wooden stores with false fronts not quite
straight; a blacksmith shop, closed, abandoned, its own peculiar char-
acteristic griminess of craft weathering slowly into the uncompli-
menting immortality the temperate zones allow the works of man.
TOWARD MIDAFTERNOON THEY APPROACHED THE FATHER OF WATERS.
Still, gray, flat; it lay under a dull, flat sleep, enclosed, yet part of the
great world, one surface stretching without break to the Gulf, to
Europe, to the Argentine.
The train rumbled over the high bridge, and for those minutes the
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XXVII: 1,2 A First Trip East 111
spell of the com country yrclS broken. They became immersed in it
again until evening; then factories, canals, smells, lurid flares, a maze
of steel tracks. Chicago. .
Even into Pennsylvania, from which his father forty years had emi-
grated. He was surprised at the apparent emptiness. Space was used up,
and yet it did not seem to be at this time used. Between the agglutina-
tions of the towns, there seemed a hopeless vacantness; slack tillage,
waste land, high and forbidding fences that shut in nothing more tan-
gible than the forbidding ghost of Property.
And those townsl They had been told the West was crass - yes, it.
was crass, but one could weep for its crassness as for that of a young
child who at last whoops loudly, unaware of life's impending frightful-
ness . . . The towns were black. Coal chutes and coal cars and coal
elevators. He and Hermione had never seen the like - people did not
use coal in the West.
In crowded cars, the Pennsylvania·Railroad separated them for the
night. He climbed into an upper berth. Under a steel canopy that re-
sounded now and then to the clattering raindrops, he tried to sleep.
Snores, rumbles of different pitches. Trestles, tunnels; creak of curves:"'t
He resented that there was no window to see out of. He got down and
went into the smoking room. No one was in there. He could press his
face against the window unobserved. These stolid people with their
hearts full of coal dust would think it queer that a man should want
to see where he was going.
Pressing his face against the black window he saw his first Bessemer
converter - a shower of white and yellow light, fresh and unsulliable. '
He would have liked Hermione to see this. The thing lived.- In it war
no defeat, no hopelessness, no age.
Their schedule so arranged itself that they passed under the metrop-
olis without once coming above ground. The Red Line, that sign of
ultimate abdication of autonomy,' guided them from .West to East.
~bove them the great personality he knew from hearsay
must exist, was dimly rumbling. "It becomes of less and less impor-
tance" - so ~id Spengler - "what one thinks away from these large
population centers."· Well, enough. The Red Line, then, was the
megalopolis. Mile upon mile of vaulted, knobby concrete, mumbling
megalopolis.
A train of coaches glided out of the station, and he knew by the pain
in his ears that they were again descending to pass underneath a river.
They were East. .
5
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Published by UNM Digital Repository, 1957


A First Trip East, 1928

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A First Trip East, 1928

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