Genius of Place by Justin Martin

Author:Justin Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Just to get to his new job was no easy task. Olmsted elected to take the Panama route, one of several options for getting to the West Coast in those days. The Panama route, established in 1855, required traveling by steamer down the Atlantic Coast, then crossing the narrowest point in Central America, the Isthmus of Panama, via a forty-eight-mile interoceanic train ride. On the Pacific Coast, travelers boarded a new steamer and sailed up the coastline. The trip covered 5,500 miles and took roughly three weeks. Cheaper choices, sailing around Cape Horn, the very tip of South America, or going overland by wagon, were more timeconsuming, requiring three months, minimum. There was also a Nicaragua route, both cheaper and potentially quicker than the Panama route, but featuring a harrowing land passage. In the years before the transcontinental railroad (1869) and the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), traveling from coast to coast was an ordeal.

Olmsted traveled without his family, planning to get settled on the Mariposa Estate before bringing them out in the spring of 1864. For the first leg of the journey, Olmsted sailed on the Champion, a rickety sidewheeler, operated by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had a reputation for stinting on safety. “The steamer on the Atlantic side was small, illsupplied, dirty and crowded,” Olmsted noted.

Before arriving in Panama, as was the practice, Olmsted started taking several grains of quinine each day, prophylactically, so as to ward off malaria. The “Chagres shakes”—named after a river that ran alongside the rail line in Panama—was a particularly virulent strain. In 1852, Ulysses Grant had lost 250 men while marching across Panama. As an old man, he’d remember the horrors of Panama more vividly than those of the Civil War.

At Aspinwall (now Colón), a Panamanian port, Olmsted made the switch from ship to rail. The train’s seats were made of cane, and it was open-air—venetian blinds were the only thing separating passengers from the elements. The forty-eight-mile trip took roughly four hours, following the Chagres through deep gorges and requiring refueling stops every few miles at wood stations along the route. Olmsted was stunned by the natural drama unfolding outside his open window. Pelicans, looking prehistoric, floated in lazy circles, with the Andes towering in the distance. The punishing noonday sun was broken by a sudden shower, then sunlight again, stretching from the heavens in luminous shafts. Nearer the ground, directly across the Chagres, the foliage was so lush that the sun could scarcely get through, providing just a dappling of light amid deep shadows.

The variety of plants and trees seemed almost infinite, Olmsted noted, and they grew so close together, their branches interlaced, that you didn’t know where one began and another ended, and through everything twined thick tropical vines. There were fat yellow breadfruits, ripening coconuts, thick clusters of bananas. As Olmsted recounted in a letter to his wife that evening, the tropical luxuriance “makes all our model scenery—so far as it depends on beauty of foliage very tame & quakerish.

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