automobiles gleaming hotly in the sun. Beyond stands a scattered complex of buildings
among which move crowds of people in shorts and baseball caps. It has the air of a
world's fair bizarrely transferred to a mountaintop. You get so used along the AT to
sharing summits with only a few other people, all of whom have worked as hard as you to
get there, that this was positively dazzling. On Washington, visitors can arrive by car on a
winding toll road or on a cog railway from the other side, and hundreds of people--
hundreds and hundreds of them, it seemed--had availed themselves of these options.
They were everywhere, basking in the sunshine, draped over the railings on the viewing
terraces, wandering between various shops and food places. I felt for some minutes like a
visitor from another planet. I loved it. It was a nightmare, of course, and a desecration of
the highest mountain in the northeast, but I was delighted it existed in one place. It made
the rest of the trail seem perfect.
The epicenter of activity was a monstrously ugly concrete building, the Summit
Information Center, with big windows, broad viewing platforms, and an exceedingly lively
cafeteria. Just inside the door was a large list of all the people who had died on the
mountain and the causes, beginning with one Frederick Strickland of Bridlington,
Yorkshire, who lost his way while hiking in an October storm in 1849, and ran on through
a quite breathtaking array of mishaps before concluding with the deaths of two hikers in
an avalanche just three months earlier. Already six people had died on Washington's
slopes in 1996, with the year barely half over--quite a sobering statistic--and there was
plenty of room on the board for more.
In the basement was a small museum with displays on Washington's climate, geology,
and distinctive plant life, but what particularly captivated me was a comical short video
called "Breakfast of Champions," which I presume the meteorologists had made for their
own amusement. It was filmed with a fixed camera on one of the summit terraces and
showed a man sitting at a table, as if at an open-air restaurant, during one of its famous
blows. While the man holds down the table with his arms, a waiter approaches against
the wind with great and obvious difficulty, like someone wingwalking at 30,000 feet. He
tries to pour the customer a bowl of cereal, and it all flies horizontally from the box. Then
he adds milk, but this goes the same way (mostly over the customer--a particularly
gratifying moment). Then the bowl flies away and the silverware, as I recall, and then the
table starts to go, and then the film ends. It was so good I watched it twice, then went off
to find Bill so he could see it. I couldn't spot him in the restless throngs, so I went outside
on to the viewing platform and watched the cog railway train chuffing up the mountain,
pouring out clouds of black smoke as it went. It stopped at the summit station and
hundreds of more happy tourists tumbled off.
Tourism goes back a long way on Mount Washington. As early as 1852 there was a
restaurant at the summit and the proprietors were serving about a hundred meals a day.
In 1853, a small stone hotel called Tip-Top House was built atop the mountain and was a
huge and immediate success. Then in 1869 a local entrepreneur named Sylvester March
built the cog railway, the first in the world. Everyone thought he was mad and that even if
he succeeded in building the railway, which was doubtful, there wouldn't be any demand
for it. In fact, as the disgorging throngs below me demonstrated now, people haven't tired
of it yet.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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