When Gary Krist read the old woman’s diary, he finally knew he had a story.
The writer, whose new book is “The White Cascade,” flew to Seattle in the winter of 2003 to look into a horrific but largely forgotten railroad disaster. Nearly a century before, in late February 1910, a relentless blizzard had stalled two westbound Great Northern Railway trains – a passenger train and a mail train – trying to make their way through Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mountains. Snow piled up for days, and passengers got more and more apprehensive.
“They say it has snowed 13 ft in 11 hours,” wrote Sarah Jane Covington, 69, in the diary Krist was examining. “The mts. loom up a thousand feet or thousands … the tel. wires are down. No communication with the world.”
Krist already knew how the petite, white-haired grandmother’s story would end. On March 1, a little before 2 a.m., a wall of snow estimated at 14 feet high and a half-mile wide would sweep the trains off the tracks and hurl them into the ravine below, killing nearly 100 passengers and railroaders, including Covington.
He knew this catastrophe still ranked as the deadliest American avalanche ever.
He knew, once he’d seen Covington’s diary and a few other documents, that he had a wrenching human tale to tell along with the technological one.
What Krist didn’t know was whether he could pull it off.
At 49, Krist has had his ups and downs as a fiction writer, and was in a down period when he met his agent, Eric Simonoff, for a lunch that changed his writing life.
“Have you ever thought about nonfiction?” Simonoff asked.
Yes, he had.
“I was tired of having everything come out of my own head,” Krist says. Plus, he’d loved talking to historians while researching his last novel, “Extravagance.”
Serendipity and Google led Krist to that 1910 avalanche, known as the Wellington Disaster after the tiny mountain community where the Great Northern trains were destroyed. He was looking up the Duke of Wellington when up popped a reference to a Wellington he’d never heard of.
He clicked on a Web site run by retired Boeing executive Bob Kelly, who’d been researching the avalanche since 1990. Determining there were no major books on the disaster, Krist gave Kelly a call.
Over the years, Kelly says, he’s been contacted by numerous writers and producers. Nothing had ever come of it. “Gary was just the next one,” he figured – until the novelist showed up on his doorstep with “kind of a gleam in his eye.”
Kelly’s collection of Wellingtoniana was a godsend to Krist. In it, he found Covington’s diary, along with a letter discovered near the body of another passenger. Ned Topping had been writing his mother, making new entries day by day as the snow fell and the trains failed to move. The night before the avalanche, he and many other passengers had resolved to try to walk to safety.
“I expect to leave in the morning,” he wrote. “Oh, if I ever get out of this place, how happy I will be.”
What Krist didn’t find in Kelly’s trove was anything personal relating to the man he knew would be his story’s central figure.
As superintendent of the Great Northern’s Cascade Division, James O’Neill was responsible for the decision – reasonable at the time, fatal in hindsight – to leave the passengers at Wellington while he and his crews worked tirelessly but futilely to clear the tracks. Kelly had been trying for years to locate an O’Neill descendant. Krist hired a genealogist who came up with one.
“I remember calling up Bob and saying: ‘I found the granddaughter! And she has two boxes of stuff!’” Krist recalls.
Krist says he used every scrap of personal information he could obtain about those involved in the disaster.
“Since I have this history as a fiction writer, I knew I had to be especially scrupulous,” he says.
Krist says he got the same craftsman’s pleasure out of constructing the narrative, “balancing the pace and background,” that he does with fiction. He’s writing another nonfiction proposal now. “I loved the whole process of writing this book,” he says. “I want to duplicate this experience at least a couple of times more.”
That said, he’s also got a novel underway, and there are a number of stories in his files that he confesses to looking at now and then.
“I still think that maybe what I’m best at is short stories,” he says.
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