Steganography Photographed

Discover deliberately here. Gaze up and around before the climb. Then look out and around, but chiefly along the sinuous ribbon so difficult to designate. Glance down always too, at the decrepitude that snares and trips, at the precipices snickering adjacent. Long-distance marvels hover, draw the eye, fix the attention. Close-up, in the grass, under the snow, lurk the stubby solidity of permanent structure and the detritus of temporary abandonment. Here find a genuine place, a place more route than road, more node than square, more rill than river. Photographs of whatshimmer here? What grimoire harbors the right word? What sort of find is this discovered in these images?

Urban autobiography begins in discovery. But nowadays discovery engenders vexation.In the schoolroom and almost everywhere else, it denotes only the finding of what no one has ever seen or otherwise experienced. In 1992, the meaning suddenly perplexed educators. Children learned that Columbus discovered the New World or America or some sand-spit Caribbean island, but surely the locals who greeted him knew their own location. Did not discovery demean the discovered? Discovery blundered into serious peril by the middle of the 1990s, and now it cowers when it does not hide or sally forth to irritate. John Davys definitely discovered the Falkland Islands in 1592. No humans had ever visited or inhabited the little archipelago before European contact, and nowadays no one begrudges discovery to Davys. But Columbus knew. Almost certainly he visited Iceland in 1477 to hear the sagas retold, if only in fragments. Almost certainly he knew the tales of Inuit shipwrecking on Scottish beaches, of the remarkable strangers whose canoes washed ashore in Spain. He discovered the New World knowing where it must be while masking his intent with talk of the Indies, and discovery properly designates his accomplishment.

It denotes the finding of something already known to others, even to the self. Period. It properly designates the accomplishment of British shipmaster Richard Boyle, who recorded in his Adventures of 1726 that “on 3 November we discover’d England, whose Chalky Cliffs gave us all a vast Delight.” Homeward-bound, Boyle found England more or less where he thought it might be, more or less where he left it, and he used discovery in the King James Version sense of Acts XXI, 3: “Now when we had discovered Cyprus, we left it on the left hand, and sailed into Syria, and landed at Tyre.” Cyprus turned up where seamen expected it, and England turned up at the end of Boyle’s long passage. Discovery means the finding or experiencing of what one knows by direct experience or second-hand information, even by supposition.

It not only denotes first-time finding and ten-thousandth-time ascertaining, it denotes too the uncovering of something private, something frequently hidden. Attorneys and judges know this meaning well. “The disclosure by the defendant of facts, titles, documents, or other things which are in his exclusive knowledge or possession, and which are necessary to the party seeking the discovery as a part of a cause or action pending or to be brought in another court, or as evidence of his rights or title in such proceeding,” runs the 1933 Black’s Law Dictionary definition. Given sufficient grounds demonstrated by a plaintiff or would-be plaintiff, the defendant or would-be defendant must reveal what has been secreted away or closeted or put in a pocket, or maybe hidden in plain view, as Poe explains in The Purloined Letter, the master-guide to steganography. Outside of the law, the meaning profoundly discomforts. Why should the defendant surrender secrets? Do discovery proceedings give unfair advantage to the plaintiff? Here surfaces the concept of equity, itself a whole body of jurisprudence, but one grounded on the most comfortable notion of all. Fairness, right dealing, justice—all such concepts originate in equality before the law; the judge, the jury, and equality demanding a fair sharing of information. Facts must be presented. Documents must not be shredded. Closets must be opened. Structures must be descried.

Descrying is more than seeing, more than glancing around. Descrying—and its ancestor, scrying—designate an almost fierce sustained scrutiny preceding a cry of alarm. English usage smells of the sea, the watch-long effort made by masthead lookouts staring at the horizon for the sliver of white sail against the whitecaps, the sea, the haze, the sky, and always ready to shout “Sail Ho” to the officers on deck below. “Day was almost over, / When through the fading light I could discover / A ship approaching,” wrote Shelley in his 1817 Revolt of Islam of the sort of discovery-making charged to descrying masthead lookouts. Shelley and his contemporaries accepted the ordinary speech of a seafaring nation. “Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies,” wrote Byron in his Corsair four years earlier, “With all the thirsting eye of enterprise.” Nearly a century earlier in his Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift casually accepted the salty usage known to the romantic poets: “I descried a sail steering to the southeast.” And nearly a century before Swift, Thomas Herbert, in his Some Yeares Travels, wrote equally casually that “our admiral descried a sail and made toward her.” Descrying is what discovering seamen did, or did better than almost anyone else.

Lexicographers worry over the word, and have for centuries. Often they define it as “to spy out” or “to discover by the eye objects distant or obscure” or “to detect by observation.” They frequently link it with espy, meaning to look acutely, particularly “at a distant object partly concealed,” in the words of the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. But British usage of descry typically suggests an intensity beyond even the acute. “To catch sight of, esp. from a distance, as the scout or watchman who is ready to announce the enemy’s approach; to espy,” runs the contemporary Oxford English Dictionary. Descrying suggests a warlike intensity, an acuteness of vision excited by trespassing and the spying of espionage, and always the imminent cry of alarm. And almost every English-language dictionary defines descry and espy using the word discover. “To discover, to perceive by the eye, to see anything distant or obscure,” asserted Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary of the word descry, a term he defined as a noun too: “discovery; thing discovered.” Espy meant to Johnson something similar: “to discover a thing intended to be hid.” In 1828, Noah Webster also merged the three terms. “To detect, to find out, to discover anything concealed,” he wrote of descry, while espy he defined almost identically. “To see or discover something intended to be hid, or in a degree concealed, and not very visible, as, to espy a man in a crowd, or a thief in a wood,” he asserted in the first United States unabridged dictionary, his American Dictionary of the English Language, before elaborating: “to inspect narrowly, to make discoveries.” While Johnson did not know the word espionage—he merely noted the occasional use of a French term, espial, meaning a scout—Webster most certainly did, and he understood it to mean “attempting to make discoveries.” Webster’s fierce competitor, Joseph Worcester, defined descry in his 1859 Dictionary of the English Language, a United States reference work he hoped Britons would adopt, almost brutally bluntly: “to perceive by the eye, to discover, to spy.” But espy he treated subtly differently, defining the term not only as seeing things from a distance, but “to discover or see unexpectedly.” The last is critical. Webster held to the seafaring focus that informs eighteenth-century British lexicography and poetry. Indeed, his definition of espy includes the following definition and example: “To see at a distance; to have the first sight of a thing remote. Seamen espy land, as they approach it.” Subsequent editions of Webster’s American Dictionary, such as that published in 1852 by George and Charles Merriam, reproduce the earlier definition entire. But Worcester insists on something fundamentally different from Johnson and Webster—the unexpectedness of some sorts of discovery.

Discovery by accident is often discovery within discovery. The would-be discoverer of something espies something else, perhaps something more valuable or intriguing than the original goal. Sometimes discoverers keep secret accidental discoveries, sometimes for no other reason than surprise or embarrassment, sometimes because they seek to unravel the mystery of accidental discovery. Sometimes discoverers share their surprise, in a way descrying the very process of discovery. The cry that succeeds discovery, intentional or accidental, is a sort of descrying or discovery itself, perhaps especially when it becomes public in other form—say in a book of photographs.Nowadays the Oxford English Dictionary includes a definition of discovery it deems archaic: “to divulge, reveal, disclose to knowledge (anything secret or unknown): to make known.” Such discovery need not be made by human effort only. “They contain some secrets which time will discover,” wrote John Davies in his 1662 translation of Mandeislo's Travels in a passage twenty-first-century Americans understand as casually as Herbert, Swift, and Shelley knew the intensity of looking that found sails cresting horizons. Time reveals things—maybe in the growth of a child, maybe in the erosion of a river bank, maybe in the bewildering of an abandoned railroad right of way—and in older English such revelations are discoveries too. Turning the pages that follow these words produces two sorts of discovery: one, the intentional discovery of images of a route known to exist but scarcely realized; the other, the accidental discovery in image after image of fragments of an inchoate visual order only partially descried by the photographer discovering discovery.

Unexpected discovery certainly originates in sustained scrutiny, in painstaking espying. But quickness discovers things too. For all that the hasty glance leaves so much undiscovered, the fleeting view sometimes reveals more than the sustained, calculating one. The bicyclist speeds past the high board fence, suddenly sees between the spaces, and perhaps—just perhaps—realizes the vision as the railroad one that reshaped seeing long ago. Such ephemeral visions profoundly altered the meaning of discovery, and not just for lexicographers.

Worcester understood something profoundly modern, something that by 1859 transformed the entire basis of discovery. He understood the train trip as the molder of discovery, the giver of the fragmentary, fleeting vision that reveals by accident. He understood something twenty-first-century Americans persist in not regarding, indeed in not even addressing: the uncanny resemblance of the express-train view to twentieth-century cinema and video, to twenty-first-century digitized kinetic imagery.

Thoreau liked train travel, especially express-train travel. It gave him another view of the constituents of landscape, and of whole landscapes too. Too many undergraduates suffer through partial and frequently erroneous lectures on his view of the railroad, especially the tracks just beyond Walden Pond. Almost no one—especially no one young—reads his journals, the ultra-modern records of express-train travel that led to what Worcester knew as discovery by accident.

“9 a.m., Boston to New York, by express train, land route,” he wrote in November of 1854. “See the reddish soil (red sandstone?) all through Connecticut. Beyond Hartford a range of rocky hills crossing the state on each side the railroad, the eastern one very precipitous, and apparently terminating at East Rock at New Haven. Pleasantest part of the whole route between Springfield and Hartford, along the river; perhaps include the hilly region this side of Springfield.” South of New York he stared into the night. “Saw only the glossy paneling of the cars reflected out into the dark, like the magnificent lit façade of a row of edifices reaching all the way to Philadelphia, except when we stopped and a lantern or two showed us a ragged boy and the dark buildings of some New Jersey town.” His return sent him across New Jersey by daylight. “The country very level—red sandstone (?) sand—apparently all New Jersey except the northern part. Saw wheat stubble and winter wheat coming up like rye. Was that Jamestown-weed with a prickly burr? Seen also in Connecticut. Many Dutch barns. Just after leaving Newark, an extensive marsh, between the railroad and the Kill, full of the Arundo Phragmites, I should say, which had been burnt over.” By day and by night, the express train produced fleeting discovery after fleeting discovery, some enduring and large scale, some as ephemeral and minuscule as a boy staring up at the shiny cars stopped for a moment. To be sure, Thoreau kept his eyes open, his head turned toward the window. He scrutinized acutely, at speed. He discovered, he descried.

Nothing unique informs Thoreau’s journals. His contemporaries noticed the identical discovery provided by the high-speed view. “At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The House of the Seven Gables in 1851. “The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.” Unfixing the immovable and unchangeable became the railroad view in the years before war rent the Republic, and to many antebellum observers of the political scene, events in Congress and elsewhere suddenly seemed as accelerated as the view from the express train—and offered accidental discoveries in the staccato fashion Hawthorne acknowledged and subsequent writers confronted, sometimes unsuccessfully.

Henry James wearied of discoveries flicking before him and then flicking away. “We had traveled indeed all day, but the process seemed simple when there was nothing of it, nothing to speak of, to remember, nothing that succeeded in getting over the foot-lights, as the phrase goes, of the great moving proscenium of the Pullman,” he whined in his 1907 American Scene. “I seemed to think of it, the wayside imagery, as something that had been there, no doubt, as the action or the dialogue are presumably there in some untoward drama that spends itself at the back of the stage, that goes off, in a passion, at side doors, and perhaps even bursts back, incoherently, through windows; but that doesn’t reach the stall in which you sit, never quickens to acuteness your sense of what is going on.” As his train raced across South Carolina into Florida, James confessed his inability to address the discoveries beyond the plate-glass window of his first-class car. “So, as if the chair in the Pullman had been my stall, my sense had been all day but of intervening heads and tuning fiddles.” He missed even the large view that so inveigled Thoreau. “I was a little uncertain, afterwards, as to when I had become distinctively aware of Florida; but the scenery of the state, up to the point of my first pause for the night, had not got over the foot-lights.” Discovery became fundamentally different in the 1830s, but seven decades later continued to irritate observers who preferred to descry and espy in older, far more sedate ways.

How James grew comatose somewhere in Florida might have perplexed T. S. Eliot, who watched from express-train windows in ways that Thoreau would have understood. “I had previously been led to wonder, in traveling from Boston to New York, at what point Connecticut ceases to be a New England state and is transformed into a New York suburb,” he mused in a 1934 American Review article, “Tradition and Orthodoxy.” “But to cross into Virginia is as definite an experience as to cross from England to Wales, almost as definite as to cross the English Channel.” Twenty-first-century readers, however surprised they might be at the pages upon pages Thoreau wrote about his express-train-window discoveries, more or less expect the remarks on trees, shrubs, and soils. But Eliot nurtured the same focus, albeit with far less ecological expertise. “A new forest appeared blazing with the melancholy glory of October maple and beech and birch scattered among the evergreens,” he wrote of a train ride south from Montreal to Boston, "and after this procession of scarlet and golden and purple wilderness you descend to the sordor of the half-dead mill towns of southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts." Surprise, surprise, surprise, each a discovery of its own in Worcester’s sense of the word discovery, floated past Eliot’s express-train window.

Mid-twentieth-century American writing displays the discovering view from the express train to the most cursory contemporary searcher. By the 1930s the view struck viewers not so much as modern—Americans had been riding trains for a century—as jarringly cinematic. "Something I saw or thought I saw / In the desert at midnight in Utah, / Looking out of my lower berth" troubles the narrator of Robert Frost’s 1936 poem On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind. What had the narrator seen, so momentarily, "Going by at a railroad rate"? The narrator cannot stop the train and scrutinize further, that much is certain, and it is certain in other of Frost’s poems, perhaps especially A Passing Glimpse, in which the speaker bemoans his inability to name all the wildflowers he sees on his railroad passage. "I want to get out of the train and go back / To see what they were beside the track." In the 1930s Frost returned again and again to the fleeting railroad view, the glimpse that discovers, the focus of poems like The Figure in the Doorway. From the dining car of a train creeping up a mountain grade, the narrator discovers for an instant "a living man" outside the window, and is almost stunned by the apparition of a human in endless miles of "scrub oak, scrub oak, and the lack of earth / That kept the oaks from getting any girth." But the speaker can barely cry out what he descries before the view changes and his discovery is memory.

"The locomotive quickens your pulse, but it does more," opined Benjamin Taylor in 1874. "It quickens vegetation, and makes things light and frisky. See that little bush squat to the ground, like a hare in her form. It grows before your eyes. It is a big bush, a little tree, a full-grown maple, that gave down the sap for the sugar-camp kettle in your grandfather’s time." His World on Wheels is one of the rare nineteenth-century works focused on train travel and the railroad view of things. "Two miles ago, a strolling farmhouse stood in the middle of the road, staring stupidly down the track. It has just got over the fence into the lot, behind some shrubs and flowers and pleasant trees, and looks, as you fly by, as if it had never moved at all." Unlike Thoreau and Eliot and Frost, Taylor analyzed the view from the train rather crudely, but at least he tried to fathom something he deemed critically important to a changed way of seeing, one peculiarly American simply because of the vistas stretching out on each side of the track. World on Wheels appeared when a great deal of the East and South stood open for agriculture and when the Midwest and High Plains stood far more open too. From the coach window almost any passenger anxious to discover might look across a wide arc and see optical events like the farmhouse leaping back from the track.

After 1890 or so, however, American writers and foreign travelers visiting the United States began to associate the wide arc or broad foreground with travel west of the Mississippi River. Farming had failed across much of the East and South, and fields had grown up in forest, something that worried Eliot and others who saw the woods as failure. "The beautiful desolate country of Vermont," deeply troubled Eliot, who knew that the hills had once "been covered with primeval forest; the forest was razed to make sheep pastures for the English settlers; now the sheep are gone, and most of the descendants of the settlers." The wildering of rural New England—wildering meaning something more topographical than bewilderment, the closest English translation of the German Ortsvermistung—preoccupied many thoughtful observers in the 1930s, who saw in square miles of scrub oak not merely a screen raised against train-window viewing but the imminence of rural industrial failure too. The sordor of mill towns followed the sordor of farms, implied the shift of manufacturing to great cities making gigantic infrastructure improvements, and heralded the return of scrub vegetation to village and mill-town streets. Only in the High Plains did twentieth-century travelers enjoy the optical play that preoccupied Taylor in the 1870s.

While the enjoyment is everywhere in American writing, often in nuggets like the opening sentences of Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia, few writers dissected it. Thousands of writers and hundreds of thousands of passengers extolled the virtues of western scenery, but only a handful considered how spatial openness skewed the act of seeing beyond the car window. Almost none took the route of Julian Street, whose 1914 Abroad at Home analyzes a west-to-east passage away from long views to truncated ones. "On you rush toward the metropolis," he decided of the charge into New York. "The farms, flying past, are small, and are divided into little fields which look cramped after the great open areas of the West. Towns and cities flash by, one after another, in quick succession, as the floors flash by an express elevator, shooting down its shaft in a skyscraper; and where there are no towns there are barns painted with advertisements, and great advertising signboards disfiguring the landscape." The foreground foreshortens, advertisements flash up in the few longer-foreground places, and detail proliferates beyond measure. "When you raise your window shade, you see no plains or mountains, but the backs of squalid suburban tenements, with vari-colored garments fluttering on their clothes lines," and then "outside are factories, and railroad yards, and everywhere tall black chimneys, vomiting their heavy, muddy smoke." On an ordinary day, when trains run on schedule, the detail clogs the mind, drowning any possibility of discovery at all. "But always the train glides on like some swift, smooth river. Now the track is elevated, now depressed. You run over bridges or under them, crossing streets and other railroads. At last you dive into a tunnel and presently emerging, coast slowly alongside an endless concrete platform raised to the level of the car floor." However much the east-to-west railroad journey endured in 1930—and endures today—as a motif of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s or as a symbol of the harried city dweller moving toward a slower-paced rural area or a natural-wonder National Park, it invariably meant a growing delight in long-view discovery from speeding trains. It means so today, and visually astute travelers choose Amtrak’s Empire Builder or Southwest Chief for the surfeit of discovery they provide. Once a train races west of Chicago or St. Louis or Fort Smith, discovery-by-surprise opens upon almost any voyeur, even those flummoxed—like Henry James—by miles of scrub trees blocking views in the East and South.

High-speed trains made discovery less and less possible after about 1890, however, and trains sped fastest in the vegetation-choked East. In 1935, when the Pennsylvania Railroad introduced its new electric locomotives operating between New York and Washington, it casually but proudly pointed out that the January 28 run of the first inspection train cruised at speeds of 102 miles an hour. By 1947 the Pennsylvania Railroad offered many trains making many stops between the two cities, but completing runs in four hours or slightly less. That year the Interstate Commerce Commission forbade any railroad to operate trains above seventy-nine miles an hour unless it equipped its entire track with automatic train-stop equipment, an invention all railroads found erratic and expensive, and which no railroads operating west of Chicago could afford. Ninety-mile-an-hour premier trains already operated everywhere in the country, and the railroads had begun taking delivery of diesel-electric passenger locomotives geared for 118-mile-an-hour speeds. But in 1947, in one of the murkiest moments of deep-pocket politics the Republic has experienced, the United States became the only industrialized nation in the world to deliberately slow the speed of its passenger trains. However much the edict putting railroads at a competitive disadvantage with airplanes and automobiles stimulated the explosion of airport and highway building that followed, it perhaps eased the strains speed imposed on some viewers looking from fast-moving railroad-train windows. Before taxiing airliners reach speeds the Pennsylvania Railroad envisioned as ordinary for 1950, most twenty-first-century passengers stop looking through windows and turn their gaze on magazines, cabin interiors, and the backs of fellow-passenger heads. Something about 110 miles an hour overland down the runway thrusts attention away from landscape and toward some indoor, often virtual reality—perhaps the video monitors mounted on the cabin ceiling.

The racing train neither stops nor backs up on passenger command. The similarity with cinema demands notice. Getting a second look at any film once meant attending a subsequent screening, all the while knowing that when the theaters stopped showing the film, the print itself usually went to some locked-room limbo. Television reruns made some period films accessible from the 1950s onward, as did film festivals, and eventually the video-cassette revolution enabled pleasure-seekers and serious, often idiosyncratic inquirers to look repeatedly. The inquirers sometimes attempt to descry, espy, discover—to see the different handguns in the hand of the western-feature hero, to see the jailer forget to lock the cell door in a 1930s prison film, to see the same extras play both Union and Confederate troops—to finally know the something seen or thought to have been seen, to discover something more or less deliberately concealed, perhaps accidentally hidden.

Twenty-first-century Americans see cinema differently now, knowing that most films are or will be available on videotape or some hard-plastic disk that jerks backward and forward and stops—and now zooms in and out—at the beck of a handheld remote-control device. Grasping the older understanding of cinema as ephemeral proves harder every day, and impossible for young people accustomed to late-twentieth-century personalized control of kinetic imagery.

Someone, some Benjamin Taylor of the late twentieth century, might have studied the relation of the television remote-control device to the remotely controlled videotape player, then considered both as progenitors of Web surfing. Maybe someone did, perhaps especially someone in the pay of advertising and marketing firms. Maybe someone particularly tough-minded now examines the long-term shift in the very meaning of cinema as something ordinarily malleable by the well-equipped viewer determined to discover if Bogart is always right-handed, if the English voice-over from Italian or German or Japanese or the subtitled Navajo proves anywhere near accurate, if the Bikini Beach films routinely refer to war in Southeast Asia. Maybe someone glimpses the technological origins of the present unwillingness of so many young people to deal with cinema they will never see again, let alone with the view from the train.

Young people know to save Internet information to hard drive or Zip drive or diskette, for website information proves uncannily ephemeral, even evanescent. No assurance of permanence stands next to any Internet portal. Sites change continuously, sometimes several times a day. What one saw a moment ago may be gone in a click, never to return or to return ever so slightly altered. Every virtual site offers an illusion of virtual permanence, for anyone may save any site to disk, assuming anyone owns spacious-enough disks. Yet in the end, all Internet discovery occurs through search engines, and however much serendipity guides the surfer, the programming of the engine makes the final determination finite.

Discovery in virtual realms, especially in contemporary digitized virtual realms, proves so effortless and produces such a seeming surfeit of information that it draws would-be discoverers—especially young would-be discoverers like university undergraduates—from discovery elsewhere. Of course, authority frequently forbids real-world discovery, and the prohibitions explain in part why college professors persist in assigning the works of Thoreau to young people rarely guided into trespassing and warned constantly against hacking into anything. Whatever the duty of civil disobedience might be in relation to slavery, taxes, and foreign wars, in all of Thoreau's thinking it floats above an extraordinary disregard for the rights of landowners. Thoreau trespassed everywhere, going "cross lots" on most of his walks, and routinely delighting in slipping unnoticed past farmers working in fields and barnyards. He trespassed most regularly on railroad rights-of-way, however, in a way that gives fits to twenty-first-century parents, attorneys, railroad corporations, and perhaps especially locomotive engineers. Whatever they might have been in the 1850s, railroad tracks offer no safety to errant or voyeuristic pedestrians today, especially to those wanderers attempting to verify something they saw or thought they saw, perhaps earlier in the week from a commuter-train window. Scrutinizing anything away from the track can lead to collision with immense, sometimes silently speeding trains on the track. But teachers persist in flaunting Thoreau in front of young adults educated since childhood to stay off the tracks. Like Columbus, Thoreau knew. His knowledge of discovery remains so staggeringly powerful that teachers disregard his love of trespass. Indeed, his love of trespass becomes transparent.

Thoreau asserts his independence near the middle of Walden, in the poem familiar to many university students and beloved by any authority on technology, environment, and individual perception of reality:

What's the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

The poem flows into his prose so simply that its larger context swirls beyond analysis: "but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods." Here Thoreau poses more provocatively than he poses anywhere else. Most certainly he knew where the railroad ends, or at least where it led, for he traveled to Philadelphia and New York and Quebec and elsewhere with aplomb. Local- and express-train riding aside, however, the passage still poses. Yes, he crosses the tracks, although his journals make clear that he learned to look, that he knew the tracks as other than cart-paths: even before the Civil War the trains came quickly enough to demand a bit of scrutiny, especially in Walden Pond fog. But far more importantly, even elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau makes clear his continuous walking along tracks. "The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee." A terrific amount of the ecosystem analysis and natural-system meditation that characterizes Waldenoriginates on the railroad right-of-way. Thoreau discovered and descried while walking—and while standing still—along the tracks.

His journals make clear that his routine use of the right-of-way had become so ordinary that he scarcely journalized about it. One winter day in 1857, having found poison-dogwood branches laden with pale-green berries so beautiful that he determined to carry some home, a brakeman atop a passing freight train had time only to shout "dogwood" in warning at him as the train swept past. Thoreau, as usual, had been walking alongside the tracks, and the sharp-eyed brakeman, who knew poison-dogwood when he saw it, even at speed, warned the walker a few feet from the track. The discoverer of poison-dogwood greenery discovered the keenness of brakeman vision too. Any reader of his journals learns that the right-of-way figures significantly in all of Thoreau's thinking, that Walden Pond, Estabrook Woods, and other nodes only equal the route in importance.

Visitors to Walden Pond bring more than the stones they add to his cairn in the park on its shore. They bring trouble to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the owner of the railroad on the far bank, a very active freight and passenger line that remained unfenced into the late 1970s—and on a summer Saturday peopled with serious students of Thoreau attempting to recreate topographical views, if not other angles of vision, sometimes with tripod-mounted cameras, all the while dodging commuter trains. Repeat visitors discovered what well-instructed visitors knew before arriving in Concord: the railroad makes a perfect if dangerous end-of-day shortcut back to the center of town, restaurants, and lodging. No wonder Thoreau used it so frequently that railroad employees thought him a track-walker. It offered not only intellectual stimulation but a far more pleasant route than the town road.

More than gentle gradients, shortcuts, and disturbed ecosystems attracted Thoreau to the right-of-way. Nowadays, only a handful of outdoor-adventuring people discern the link between his first book and all the writing that followed. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published when he was scarcely out of college, makes clear his understanding that he lived in an extraordinary moment of changed travel. The railroad had begun making long-distance highway travel obsolescent, and Thoreau realized the sudden unwillingness of taxpayers to improve roads in the face of a far better, tax-paying alternative. But the railroad had well-nigh emptied rivers of commercial traffic too. Thoreau found himself almost alone on his rowboat passage. "Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion," he mused, "silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr." He and his brother slowly realized that they almost never saw other people, and moreover, other people almost never saw them. His book becomes a sort of espionage adventure. "Thus, far from the beaten highways and the dust and din of travel, we beheld the country privately, yet freely, and at our leisure." Now and then they encountered people stopped at the riverbank, usually men fishing, but almost never did they find people walking along the river edges or moving about in boats. Even below the factory dams, near the sea, the Merrimack River had become what Thoreau heard called "waste water," good only for boats, not power, and abandoned to the "iron channel farther south" filled with trains upon trains.

Throughout A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Thoreau wonders why more people are not on or near the rivers, indeed why more people are not looking at the rivers. In the final analysis, his book is about being at cross purposes with rivers, about the difficulty of finding a way to move along a river, rather than cross at a bridge. The very edge of the riverbanks, overgrown, marshy, difficult to walk along dry-shod, let alone use for an overnight campsite, screens the river from the view even of farmers working fields adjacent. Of course, the screen of tall vegetation Thoreau catalogues serves also to block the view of the rowers, who find themselves surprised whenever their boat brings them to a long-distance view. Trudging along the riverbank proves difficult almost at once. Even reaching the bank from inland, even for the most devoted fishermen, means slogging through muck and shoving aside dense undergrowth. In 1839, Thoreau asserts, the river is seen largely at a handful of isolated crossings or as a sinuous silver ribbon far distant from hilltops. No longer is it discovered by passengers on boats carrying bricks, hay, and other bulk commodities; indeed, no longer is it discovered by passengers aboard the few little steamboats supplanted overnight by railroad travel. And neither is it discovered by road or railroad travelers, for the roads and railroads snake far enough from riverbanks to be immune from all but the worst floods. The Concord and Merrimack Rivers have become invisible overnight, invisible in a fundamental way that vexes Thoreau and taunts him to explain even as he descries his discovery.

While he spent much of his life exploring the wetlands of Concord and surrounding towns, and while every spring meant a rushed effort to caulk and paint his homemade boat so that he could get out on the nearby river and explore, Thoreau spent most of his time moving about on dry land, often on the railroad itself. How the wetlands, ponds, and rivers look from the railroad right-of-way orders an extraordinary amount of his published writing and a truly gigantic proportion of his journalizing. What he learned in 1839 rowing along the Concord and the Merrimack shaped his subsequent view of looking. Unlike almost everyone else in his era, he not only traveled extensively by train but walked extensively along the tracks. He found the right-of-way as aesthetically intriguing as the rivers—and just about as un-peopled, except when trains passed. He had found a secret pedestrian route that flowed almost as a river flows, one that made him an observer as scarcely seen as the wind, one that offered discoveries as accidental as any made from the express-train window.

Trespassing often meant walking on the railroad ties that flowed from under the last car on a train in ways that dizzied downward-looking discoverers. The tactile sensation of stepping from tie to tie, now about as rarely known—or felt—as the sensation of rowing miles along a sluggish river—most certainly alters viewer attention every bit as thoroughly as scanning the view of them spurting from under the rear car. The ordinary wood railroad tie, about eight and a half feet long and eight or nine inches square, lies nine inches from its neighbor. Nothing particularly uniform characterizes tie spacing now or did in 1935 or in 1840, but among the slight variations of tie shape and spacing is none that makes walking pleasant. Walking on railroad ties tires anyone, causing the walker to try to run, skip, or otherwise change stride, then stop for rest, then determine to walk onward beside the ties, perhaps away from the edge of the ballast, on the nearest flat ground. A new-built railroad, like the one Thoreau walked, has open ground on either side of its ballast: the builders leave behind the ground on which they stood. But almost immediately weeds and other pioneer plants sprout up, and within five years or so the ground away from the ballast and ties becomes a low-growing thicket that defeats the casual trespasser. As the plants grow, trackmen sometimes cut or burn them to forestall brush fires, and in a decade or so the lacy greenery floats above thick stubs that trip the unwary.

Walking along the railroad consequently meant and still means walking along the track, often between the rails. For most Americans, looking along the track meant and still means something other than it did for Thoreau, whose lifetime of right-of-way exploration remains well-nigh unique. Ordinary Americans crossed and cross railroad tracks with more or less care, glancing at right angles up and down the rails when a lack of approaching locomotives provided and still provides an opportunity for discovery. And despite a genuinely stunning attention devoted to trains by painters, photographers, and other visual artists since the 1830s, almost never does the right-of-way itself shape art.

"I like trains, but it's the track that comes first," notes painter Michael Flanagan, author of Stations: An Imagined Journey, a 1994 volume of paintings and narrative. "The excitement is about this being a kind of connecting network. As a child, I can recall standing by the tracks and looking off to a vanishing point across the utter flatness of northern Ohio. I remember thinking how the train came from somewhere and went somewhere else and how I was stationed at a certain point along this route to witness whatever might pass." Flanagan catches the converging-rail illusion that prompts thoughtful children to learn about parallax, but far more importantly, he realizes the importance of being stationed at a point on a line of flow. The face glimpsed by Thoreau and James and Frost and so many other on-the-train viewers might as well be that of Flanagan, looking at the train flowing past the way Thoreau so frequently watched sticks and leaves flowing along the Concord River. But once Flanagan turns his face away from the train and along the track he becomes unknown to the train-bound viewer, and when he begins walking parallel to the rails, either between them or on one side of them, he trespasses into a continuum every bit as sinuous as the rivers Thoreau found stealing through the countryside.

Nowadays few writers grapple with the visual nuances of walking the railroad right-of-way. Cinema, television, and video all skewed twentieth-century viewers from analyzing an activity illegal everywhere because everywhere it is dangerous. The evenly spaced railroad ties almost hypnotize some trespassing discoverers, especially those intrigued by the ties themselves. "Imanishi alighted from the train at Enzan Station and sought out the stationmaster to ask permission to walk along the tracks. Then he started walking slowly toward Katsunuma along the narrow path beside the railroad tracks with his eyes on the ground," writes Seicho Matsumoto in his 1961 Inspector Imanishi Investigates. "It was a hot day. He had to look carefully among the small stones wedged in between the railroad ties as well as among the blades of grass on the cutting alongside the tracks." Soon the policeman becomes dizzy, not so much hot and tired as visually pummeled by the surfeit of detail interlocked among the evenly spaced ties running like cinema frames toward infinity. What Thoreau did almost daily defeats the fictional detective. In one of the handful of late-twentieth-century depictions of walking along an active railroad track, Imanishi reveals the strictures settling about the modern walker of the rails. How does the would-be discoverer choose when to stop the flow of ties? How does the would-be discoverer excise the cloying virtual-reality grasp of cinema and television and video and actually espy, descry, discover? How does the contemporary discoverer realize the right-of-way? Must time discover something, must time let wilderness reclaim the ties?

An answer lies in the photographs that follow, a sumptuous answer indeed, but scarcely a simple one. The photographs are their own concatenation of virtual reality. Each image not only arrests the eye but holds the eye, charging it with sustained energy. Balanced disorder graces each image, the balanced disorder of contemporary great-city existence. Each image reconciles twenty-first-century discovery with the sorts of discovery known now chiefly to lexicographers. Each image descries something historians know as the great secret masquerading as the ostensible subject of each image.

Here follow images of a secret railroad.

No passengers rode the High Line. Enduring rumors of a wee-hour franchise-protection coach notwithstanding, the High Line carried only freight trains, not Thoreau, Hawthorne, James, Eliot, Frost. Confronting the photographs that follow these words makes clear how out of joint the High Line was and remains.

Nothing spindly characterizes High Line construction. The elevated right-of-way, essentially a massive double-track viaduct, is more than trestle or bridge or the fitful tracery of rapid-transit el. Its permanence two decades after its official abandonment advertises its engineering and manufacture. Its long-ago volume of traffic meant more than the frequent trains that demanded two tracks. Traffic was dense and heavy too. The solid construction in the air today exists to bear the burden of immense weight.

No passengers meant no stations, no public access, no wide places in the structure ornamented with flights of stairs. No passengers meant no excuse at all for trespassing.

Elevation forestalled trespassing. Getting up to the High Line involved more effort than Thoreau expended getting across to the banks of the Concord River. Maybe the High Line tantalized would-be discoverers who wanted better views of it, let alone some views from it, maybe not. But its height shielded it from would-be discoverers. Intrepid trespassers found no wooded perimeters to hide from the view of trainmen or railroad-company police officers, indeed no place to stand when trains passed.

No passengers, no trespassers, no access, no perimeters but the air itself, all of it in plain view from street or upper-story windows but all of it hidden from close scrutiny, such is the conundrum the High Line posed and poses.

Above the altitude of Central Park flourishes a bewilderment worthy of Thoreau, an elevated ecosystem essentially unmanaged and uncontrived. As the images so forcefully demonstrate, here seasonal change comes to meadows and thickets and swaths of brush. It comes free of the fetters of leaf-sweepers and snowplows. It comes as it comes perhaps nowhere else in New York, almost certainly nowhere else on Manhattan Island. And it comes all but undiscovered. We know. We know it is up there, over our heads, above the streets. We know it is out there, beyond office and apartment windows. We know it is down there, a ribbon of green or white or brown according to the season, a ribbon floating far below high-rise glass. Do we know as Boyle and Shelley and Byron knew or in some other, more cursory way?

But do we espy the wilderness in the air, the bewilderment steganographed above us? Do we descry it? Is that which lies off limits all the more desirable? Does the forbidden wilderness beckon more strongly than the local park? Or is that which is unreachable essentially dismissed?

So discover carefully here. Discover what the photographer discovers and descries. Discover that which hides in plain view. Discover the plain that offers views unknown to almost everyone. Discover the act of discovery itself.

Discover the secret avenue of New York. And linger.