Joe, Beans, and the Dope

Frédérick M. St. Simon

The beanery counter at Mandan, North Dakota — urns, magazine rack, and a full house of railroad men — Mandan, North Dakota — the counter, urns and all

My father put a Zeiss Ikon in my hands at eleven and a timetable in my head not long after, and the two of us ran the Hi-Line through the Glacier corridor chasing Great Northern smoke — and every chase, without exception, ended at the same place: a stool at the Two Medicine Grill in East Glacier, where the coffee came in a heavy mug and the railroaders came in off the road. That was the first beanery I ever knew. I have been looking for the next one ever since.

The beanery was the railroad's commons. Every division point kept one — a lunch room, a Harvey House, a hash joint shouldered up against the depot — and it ran on a vocabulary all its own. You came in off a cold drag for beans, which on the railroad meant both the meal and the meet, the lunch period and the orders that governed it. You drank the joe, or the mud, drawn black from urns the size of artillery shells. And you got the dope: the lineup, the rumor, the bad order on the head end, the name of the trainmaster who'd just been sent packing. The counter was the railroad's first network, and the beanery queen behind it — Hubbard's word, not mine — knew every crew on the division by the order they never had to place twice.

Wishram, on the SP&S, the lunch room sign still bolted to the clapboard while a string of ALCo DL-701A demonstrators idled out front — brand-new and already losing the war to EMD. Mandan, on the Northern Pacific, the urns gleaming beneath a rack of True Detective and Bromo-Seltzer, every stool taken. Seligman, on the Santa Fe, where in 1943 Jack Delano caught a room full of railroad men playing cards and waiting on the call — the way railroad men have always waited, anywhere there was a pot, a stove, and a clock that would not hurry.

Most are dark now. The Harvey Houses shuttered, the urns cold, the counters sold for salvage or left standing the way the Great Northern's Cathedral Mountain observation car ended up an outbuilding behind a sports shop in Walla Walla — Schönheit im Verfall, beauty in the decay. The division points consolidated. The crews stopped laying over. The talk had nowhere left to go.

So we kept one. Not the building — those are gone — but the thing the building was for. The dope still belongs to The Manifest; the dope is serious work. But here, at the counter, we shoot the shit over joe. Pull up a stool. The pot's always on.