Once Excursion, Now a Hop—One More on Travel

After we first settled in happy Hopkins, Minnesota, we soon learned that our town had once been a stop on the train route that linked Minneapolis to its chief resort, Lake Minnetonka to the west. Minnetonka is a big body of water with multiple, extended bays and a shoreline of 125 miles in length. The train once ran from the city to Excelsior, on the lake, a distance of 20 miles. Hopkins was more or less in the middle of that route, 11 miles from the Minneapolis. Trains no longer ran to Excelsior from Hopkins in our day, but the rails were still on the ground when we arrived; they’d been removed by the time we left.

We soon found Lake Minnetonka, just a brief drive away. In later times our treasure, a modest blue-white yacht we’d named Serendipity, lay anchored in one of Minnetonka’s bays. For some years we threw money into a hole in the water (as the saying has it), but it was money well spent: the memories of that time still gleam; they remain while money still keeps flowing out.

Palics Water Tower

But no sooner had I learned of this relationship—town and lake resort—than I remembered Lake Palics in what was then Hungary. Palics (now Palić in Serbia) was a mere 5 miles from the big city where we lived, Szabadka (Subotica now). The emblem of Palics, still there today, is its water tower. Five miles is no distance in this day and age, but in the wonderfully sunny times that memory preserves, going to Palics was a genuine excursion. Nobody owned cars. We went by streetcar. And, indeed, the two concepts were preserved in verse by one of Hungary’s poets, Izidór Milkó (1855-1932) in this fragment:

Uncle Dóri looks towards Palics
And wonders if the streetcar’s on its way.

The same in the original (to please the Hungarian reader, if there ever happens to be one):

Dóri bácsi Palics felé tekint,
hogy jön-e már a villamos.

The idyllic, sunny, and magical sometimes combine with the shocking, painful, and dark. It was in Palics, where mother and her children were summering—as we did every year in a rented cottage—that news came that my Father, fighting on the Eastern Front—indeed just a few miles east of Lodz in Poland where Brigitte lived as a girl—had been severely injured and his left arm had been amputated. And a few weeks later he came there himself, with the empty sleeve of his uniform tucked into a pocket.

But let me, having paused, startled by this memory, continue my comparison. In Hopkins too, no doubt, families took the train from the station to spend a weekend on the splendid lake. Excelsior indeed—and even in our day, some of the splendor remains, I mean on shore: the water and the sky are ever and unchangeably the gift from above.

Hopkins Depot, now a Café

Funny thing. Hopkins actually owes its name to the building of this artery, the name of a man, and that man’s self-assertion. The town, then called Village of West Minneapolis, wished to take advantage of the railroad and built a station house. They persuaded a man called Harley H. Hopkins to sell them the land for the depot. He finally agreed—but only if they put his name on the building. As this picture shows, they did. And the people, coming and going by train, saw that name. And the place, consequently, came to be known as Hopkins. Eventually the city elders caved to the inevitable, the vox populi.

The Sopot Rainbow Fountain

Brigitte, in her childhood, spent her summers on the Baltic at the still thriving resort of Sopot. That place, as always in such cases, was a mere hop by car (about 8 miles) from Gdynia to the north and Gdansk to the south. In her case vacation was a real trip because she first took the train from Lodz to Gdynia (200 miles); but the distance from there to Sopot is now a hop but then was an excursion, still accomplished by taking a train. Now beaches are the same all over the world, and in their dunes of sand and roaring surf almost generic; therefore I choose here to illustrate Sopot by one of its parks and a fountain known as the Rainbow.
————————
Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia available here: Palics, Hopkins, Sopot.

Travel Now and Then

Once the children of the World War II generation have passed away (and count me as one of them), few immigrant will be able to say that they reached these shores crossing the Atlantic by boat. We sailed from Bremerhaven in Germany and arrived way down there in New Orleans thirteen days later (that number again). The long trip (over to New York took half that time) came about because we thought that we’d end up in Texas. But our sponsor died while we were on the ocean blue; unseen and unheard by us, our sponsoring organization labored away and found us a new sponsor in Kansas City, where everything was up to date.

Yes. Thirteen day at sea—not counting long em- and debarkations, each lasting a couple of days. And ours was a fine ship, the USS General Muir; it escaped retirement after ferrying troops to fight Hitler to bring the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the homeless and the tempest-tost, the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shore, to New Orleans. Like many things I count this as a grace from on high. I spent the entire voyage at a port rail contemplating the Atlantic and communing with dolphins and flying fish. I went through, hoping no one saw me, two pretty rough storms; I watched the ocean turn from frowning northern vigor to smiling southern charm. And the first American land my eyes beheld were over-grown wild islands in the vast estuary of the great Mississippi—by the shores of which I later lived for many years—after years encamped next to one of its great tributaries, the wide Missouri. And I once actually jumped across the Mississippi at its place of birth in Lake Itasca in Minnesota. I was with a French geographer, an exchange-family brother of Michelle’s, but we got there by—car.

Right up to and somewhat past my years of adulthood trains carried people. A train took us from New Orleans to KC. A train took me to Chicago, twice, once when as a member of the Lillistrator, the Lillis High school’s high school paper, we all attended a journalism convention there for youngsters—and I came back madly, desperately in love! And again when, having won my state’s oratory championship (and had my picture in the Kansas City Star), I went to the Windy City to compete in the national contest held there. A train also took me part way back to Europe as a soldier, the segment from Kansas City to New Jersey, but the last leg of that long trip was, alas, by air. (Brigitte insists, having read this minus the parenthetical that I’m now inserting—and it fits here best—that I confess putting her and our children on the wrong train in Newark, NJ, on the way back from Europe—and this her first experience of the Land of the Free, with Monique still fed from a bottle in her portable crib. Well, Okay. I do confess it. Wasn’t all roses and contemplation, trains. The ladies always know how to keep things real…)

These thoughts because an old gent in the neighborhood reminded me of trains. He is 84, so that makes sense. And on my walk later I pondered travel, now and then. And it occurred to me that I learned in a visceral way just how far Europe and America lie apart on this great water planet. I remembered endless train-trips, the time they took—and the time they gave, consequently, for reflection on life, people, and to read thick books. We always lose by gaining something—and also gain by losing something of the frenetically new. The old had its adaptations and its compensations; the new offers much relief, and ought to: it causes stress we didn’t feel, in the Anno Long Ago, because it was spread very thin across vast fields of time.