Saturday, February 17, 2007

Pg. 69: "The White Cascade"

"In February 1910 a monstrous blizzard stranded two trainloads of passengers high in the Cascade Mountains. An army of the Great Northern Railway's dedicated men worked round the clock to rescue the trains, which were perched precariously on the edge of a steep precipice near Wellington, Washington. The passengers waited for days as the drifts grew higher and food and coal dwindled. But as the storm raged on, efforts to escape proved futile. The passengers panicked. Then the unthinkable occurred: a colossal avalanche a half mile wide tumbled from the pinnacles, sweeping the trains and their sleeping passengers down the mountainside." Gary Krist's The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche "is the tale of the deadliest avalanche and one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history."

Gary put his new book to the "page 69 test" and reported the following:

Page 69 of The White Cascade is representative of at least one aspect of the book — namely, the ongoing nightmare that faces the central character of the narrative. James H. O’Neill, the Superintendent of the Great Northern Railway’s Cascade Division, was the man responsible for bringing two trains up into the Cascade Mountains on a snowy night in February 1910. His decision to do so (both trains were headed to Seattle on tight schedules and he was reluctant to slow them down) was highly problematic, given the weather outlook. And sure enough, just as the trains were reaching the summit ridge, a snowslide on the tracks forced O’Neill to close the line and stop the trains at the highest point on the Cascade crossing.

By page 69, the trains have been stranded for nearly two days while O’Neill and his men have been working around-the-clock to plow through the slide. They’ve finally succeeded, but before the trains can escape, things start to go terribly wrong. One of the snowplows breaks down, the power lines are severed, and then another snowslide closes the line once more. Within hours, an avalanche will also obliterate the station cookhouse where the trains are being held, killing two men.

The trains will end up being marooned on the mountain for four more days, at which time the most devastating avalanche of all will come down and sweep them off the side of the mountain, killing most of the 125 people aboard. It will be one of the worst debacles in the history of American railroading. And at least some people — fairly or unfairly — are going to lay the blame for those deaths on the shoulders of James H. O’Neill.

Thanks to Gary for the input.

Read an excerpt from The White Cascade and an original essay about the book.

Among the praise for The White Cascade:
"Mr. Krist does wonders.... Adopting a restrained, documentary tone, he slowly builds a picture of massing natural forces and helpless humanity, brought closer and closer to catastrophe with each tick of the clock. The pacing is expertly judged, and the potentially confusing narrative threads, involving multiple actors in scattered locations, are tied together neatly.... Dispassionately, Mr. Krist describes the frantic rescue efforts, the mounting fears of the passengers and the malevolent, unending storm. In a thrilling climactic chapter, he conjures forth the avalanche and its aftermath."
William Grimes, New York Times

"What a wild-eyed, horrific, brilliantly written story Gary Krist tells in The White Cascade. You almost feel like you're a Great Northern Railway passenger in 1909, coping with the blizzard-from-hell. Jack London would be proud of this riveting nonfiction accomplishment."
—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

"The White Cascade brilliantly recreates one of those terrifying moments when human ingenuity runs up against the fierce power of nature. Gary Krist doesn't simply describe the Great Northern Railway Disaster. He takes you up the mountainside, settles you into the trapped Pullman car, and makes you feel the fear closing in around you. That's storytelling at its finest."
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

"It is always a great gift when someone tells a long forgotten story, but it is especially so when the drama is this astonishing, and the writer this talented. Gary Krist weaves a spider web of a tale, drawing the reader in, until they feel as though they too are a passenger on Seattle 25, trapped in one of the world's most dangerous places, in one of history's most savage storms. The White Cascade will keep you up at night, and not just from its unsettling end — you won't be able to put it down."
—Susan Casey, author of The Devil's Teeth
Read a Q & A with Gary and have a look at his list of the five best books about natural disasters.

Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade, Gary wrote three novels -- Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory, and Extravagance -- and two short-story collections -- The Garden State and Bone by Bone.

Visit the official site for The White Cascade and Gary Krist's homepage.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Vicki Lane, Art's Blood
David Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire
Peggy Orenstein, Waiting for Daisy
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam
Mark Coggins, Candy from Strangers
Arthur Allen, Vaccine
Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child
Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare
Trinie Dalton, Wide Eyed
Barbara J. King, Evolving God
Patrick Anderson, The Triumph of the Thriller
Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work
Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy
Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
Dana Stabenow, A Deeper Sleep
Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space
Erin McKean, That's Amore!
Michael Lowenthal, Charity Girl
Niraj Kapur, Heaven's Delight
Keith Dixon, The Art of Losing
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old
Mary Sharratt, The Vanishing Point
David Fulmer, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization
Olen Steinhauer, Liberation Movements
Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation
Julie Kistler, Scandal
Robert Ward, Four Kinds of Rain
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue