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The White City

by Miles Clements

THE RUINS of the Echo Mountain House appear like a low-budget Machu Picchu wrapped in smog, like a run-down Hollywood stand-in for some lost civilization. The building’s stone base, now crumbling into the mountain’s topsoil, traces the outline of the spot where the elaborate Victorian hotel once stood. In place of its seventy grand rooms are patches of overgrown chaparral and a pair of scorched pines. Sagebrush lizards dash through what was once the ornate lobby while a bluebird flies circles in the sky.

At the site of the ruined structure, day hikers come and go. Some sit on the remaining tracks of the Mount Lowe Railway, taking in the obscured vistas of the Los Angeles basin and the San Gabriel Valley. Others, more intent on exploration, head to the strategically placed “Echophones” and shout into the megaphone-like devices, waiting for their voices to careen off the canyon walls.

As the hikers’ yells slowly fade into the mountainside, a family of six ascends the granite staircase leading to the Echo Mountain House. They mill about the former chateau, taking pictures and eating granola bars. But after about fifteen minutes and a few swigs of water, the mother, donning a green Nike sweatshirt, corrals the family back into a small cluster. Walking past graffiti-covered plaques and huge, rusting railroad equipment, they head down the mountain and pack into their minivan, leaving their brief contact with the Echo Mountain House behind, surely taking only a few scant memories with them on their way back to the stucco houses and well-maintained lawns of Los Angeles’ suburbs.

* * *

Young Thaddeus Lowe gathered his instruments: a huge kite, a metal cage and a watchman’s lantern. As the cold Maine wind began to pick up, the teenage Lowe placed a cat inside the cage, tied it, along with the lantern, to a string and sent the kite up into the air – he was a boy who loved to experiment. With the wind whipping the kite back and forth, Lowe secured it to a hitching post and left the cat and the lantern tethered there overnight, watching the lantern’s trails of light from his room. In the morning, he untied the kite and released the terrified cat. The young scientist was convinced, among other things, that there was something special in the currents of the Earth’s upper atmosphere and that one day he would build some sort of vessel that would glide through those high, gusty winds as easily as ships did through the seas.

For much of his life, Thaddeus Lowe defined himself by that dream. As a young man, he would buy up small hot-air balloons and send them into the sky, testing different gasses and delivery systems trying to achieve the optimum balance of speed and control. With larger balloons, such as his enormous City of New-York, Lowe began to travel longer distances, hoping one day to conduct a transatlantic flight. Eventually, Lowe’s balloon experiments gained national attention, with Harper’s Weekly routinely covering him and the other balloonists of the era in their quests to circle the globe and fulfill their
Jules Verne-like fantasies.

Thaddeus Lowe even brought ballooning to the Civil War. With the consent of President Lincoln, Lowe established the Army Balloon Corps, a group that pioneered the tactic of aerial reconnaissance as it floated over Confederate strongholds. It might be called America’s first Air Force. Soon after the war, Lowe led a campaign to found a National Weather Service, an organization that at its inception was tied all but directly to Lowe’s billowing silk balloons and his constant fascination with weather patterns. And even as Lowe began a wildly successful career as a brilliant refrigeration and gas engineer, he kept his focus on the sky, on the dream of a transatlantic flight in some massive balloon.

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