A true and hair-raising story near Camp Meeker
It’s here! 2021! Hooray! Yes, I know we’re still stuck in Groundhog Day, doing the same little things every day, trying to stay sane and healthy. That’s what I’ve been doing. The ‘Rona, and my sore knees are preventing me from walking the proverbial beat and getting the skinny on the neighborhood doings. That means I don’t have a lot of hard news to share. So instead…how about a story? A true and hair-raising story?
You see, there used to be a railroad that ran through Camp Meeker. It was a narrow-gauge railroad initially known as the North Pacific Coast Railroad (NPCRR), and it opened in 1877. 1877 capped a very busy decade for railroad-building, eight years after the “golden spike” completed the transcontinental railroad. The NPCRR ran from Sausalito, out through West Marin, then up alongside Tomales Bay, Valley Ford, Freestone, Occidental (the original “Howard Station”), Camp Meeker, Monte Rio, Duncans Mills, and Cazadero. The first cargoes were lumber from the many sawmills in the area. As that dried up, the NPCRR began carrying tourists up from San Francisco, creating the “boom years” for Camp Meeker and the Russian River. The story I am about to relate took place in 1894 between Cazadero and Duncans Mills, and it’s a hair-raiser - it may have been the inspiration for the old country chestnut “The Wreck of the Old Number Nine” by Carson Robison, written in 1927. It’s too much story to tell all at once, so here is part one. Pull up a chair and get you some hot chocolate.
It was a dark and stormy night.
My friends, I beg your indulgence. It’s just that my entire writing life I’ve been waiting to open a story that way. My excuse: in this case that is the exact and only way to inaugurate the recounting of these events. I can’t even promise to contain my missive to this month’s installment. It’s a juicy story, one with a bona fide claim to a two-volume opus. It began, yes, on a dark and stormy night in Cazadero. It was pumping down rain the way it does there in a non-drought year, and Austin Creek was a foamy mass, abrim with flotsam. As you know, the formula in such a storm is to hunker down in warmth and safety under a suitable dry roof, if such can be arranged. When you are a drinking man without a drink, however, the equation is somewhat different. As you probably also know. When you change that to “a group of drinking men” the calculus becomes exponential.
The basic facts of the case are these: A group of 8 men boarded the No. 9 train in Cazadero for an unscheduled run to Duncan’s Mills in the very center of this torrential downpour. Trouble developed as the plucky adventurers endeavored to cross the trestle right by Elim Grove when the floodwaters (aided by downed trees and the like) battered the poor trestle into submission and No. 9 was tipped into the maelstrom. Eight men went into the water and one came out. Seven bodies were recovered, the last of which via arguably supernatural means, the telling of which will form the epilog of this grisly tale.
Intrigued yet? There’s more to be told here, and I will now apply for some poetic license to connect a few of the dots and perhaps speculate on the personalities of some of the men involved. I will ask you for an additional boon, that you grant my opening premise: that drinking men are drinking men, be it 1894 or 2014.
In order to set the scene for this little docudrama, consider how the good folk of Cazadero learned the details of the tragedy: Through the words of the lone survivor. That would be the train’s conductor, one William Brown. You literary types must now consider the idea of the unreliable narrator. It is through that lens that we view his testimony. And with that I must cruelly leave you hanging until next month’s installment.
