to realize what. Streetcars. Now it was buses rank with diesel exhaust, silent on rubber. Then it was yellow streetcars with square wheels, clanking, pounding, groaning on curves, audible for blocks (and welcome, too, for their shelter in the rain, warmth in the cold). Their retracted front trolleys stuck out like unicorns’ horns, their rear ones popped blue sparks at the switches, and now and then jumped the cable and rained blobs of fire until the conductor hopped down and pulled the trolley away from the wire and set its wheel in place again. It was a favorite sport for boys to jerk the trolley and scatter, hooting derision as the conductor stormed out.
If there were a streetcar in sight now he would take it; any number, it wouldn’t matter. 5, up First South to the university, or 6, down State Street to Murray, or the one, whatever number it was, that went north around Ensign Peak to Beck’s Hot Springs. On this alien new-city sidewalk he was homesick for the smell of ozone, the slickness of a caned seat, the
dang
of the motorman’s bell, the
pink
of the stop signal, the pneumatic sigh of opening and closing doors, the familiar car cards above the windows: Arrow Collars, BVD’s, Lux, Listerine (even your best friends won’t tell you), Paris Garters, Knox Hats, Stacomb, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. And Herpicide, with its pictures of three stages of human defoliation: one of a man with thinning hair (Herpicide can save it), one of a man with only a fringe (Herpicide can still save it), and one of a man gone stony bald (too late for Herpicide.)
It would be pleasant to ride clear to the end of some line, while the car emptied by ones and twos until at the last stop the motorman would rise from behind his curtain and open his door and step out and stretch, and leisurely engage the front trolley for the reversed trip back, while the conductor came down the aisle yanking on the brass handles of seats, two at a time, facing them the other way.
Ends and beginnings, familiar and repetitive routines. Whenhe first came to Salt Lake he had never even seen a streetcar—had barely made the acquaintance of the water closet. The pure American frontier savage, with everything to learn about how people live in groups, he had ridden every line in town, just to see where it went. For a while he had believed that the conductors carried little revolvers in the holsters next to the change boxes on their belts, and he was shamed by his own ignorance when he found they were only the punches with which they punched out transfers.
Simply by its public transportation, Salt Lake had opened the door to membership just when he most needed something to belong to. It served native and stranger, young and old, Gentile and Mormon, alike. It prompted the beginning of a wary confidence. He knew where he was and how to get somewhere else, and he had a book of blue student tickets that would take him there.
But this face-lifted street bled away a confidence that he had taken for granted. He felt the absence of old friends. He failed to recognize what he saw.
The light was different, too. He remembered Main Street as white, lighted by electric signs outlined by scores of individual bulbs, some of them comfortably burned out. Now the whole of downtown, like downtown of every city in the world, was lurid with red and green and blue. He would never have noticed this anywhere else—he expected neon. But here where he remembered an earlier stage he found neon garish.
Had he expected that the city would stand still in fact as it had in his mind, a Pompeii silenced and preserved as it was before neon, diesel buses, streamlined cars, balloon tires, parking meters? Before television, before even radio in anything but its crystal-to-superheterodyne forms? Before World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the counterculture? Before the Fall? Before sin and death? Did he think he could walk down Main Street as into a black-and-white, silent,
If there were a streetcar in sight now he would take it; any number, it wouldn’t matter. 5, up First South to the university, or 6, down State Street to Murray, or the one, whatever number it was, that went north around Ensign Peak to Beck’s Hot Springs. On this alien new-city sidewalk he was homesick for the smell of ozone, the slickness of a caned seat, the
dang
of the motorman’s bell, the
pink
of the stop signal, the pneumatic sigh of opening and closing doors, the familiar car cards above the windows: Arrow Collars, BVD’s, Lux, Listerine (even your best friends won’t tell you), Paris Garters, Knox Hats, Stacomb, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. And Herpicide, with its pictures of three stages of human defoliation: one of a man with thinning hair (Herpicide can save it), one of a man with only a fringe (Herpicide can still save it), and one of a man gone stony bald (too late for Herpicide.)
It would be pleasant to ride clear to the end of some line, while the car emptied by ones and twos until at the last stop the motorman would rise from behind his curtain and open his door and step out and stretch, and leisurely engage the front trolley for the reversed trip back, while the conductor came down the aisle yanking on the brass handles of seats, two at a time, facing them the other way.
Ends and beginnings, familiar and repetitive routines. Whenhe first came to Salt Lake he had never even seen a streetcar—had barely made the acquaintance of the water closet. The pure American frontier savage, with everything to learn about how people live in groups, he had ridden every line in town, just to see where it went. For a while he had believed that the conductors carried little revolvers in the holsters next to the change boxes on their belts, and he was shamed by his own ignorance when he found they were only the punches with which they punched out transfers.
Simply by its public transportation, Salt Lake had opened the door to membership just when he most needed something to belong to. It served native and stranger, young and old, Gentile and Mormon, alike. It prompted the beginning of a wary confidence. He knew where he was and how to get somewhere else, and he had a book of blue student tickets that would take him there.
But this face-lifted street bled away a confidence that he had taken for granted. He felt the absence of old friends. He failed to recognize what he saw.
The light was different, too. He remembered Main Street as white, lighted by electric signs outlined by scores of individual bulbs, some of them comfortably burned out. Now the whole of downtown, like downtown of every city in the world, was lurid with red and green and blue. He would never have noticed this anywhere else—he expected neon. But here where he remembered an earlier stage he found neon garish.
Had he expected that the city would stand still in fact as it had in his mind, a Pompeii silenced and preserved as it was before neon, diesel buses, streamlined cars, balloon tires, parking meters? Before television, before even radio in anything but its crystal-to-superheterodyne forms? Before World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the counterculture? Before the Fall? Before sin and death? Did he think he could walk down Main Street as into a black-and-white, silent,
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