Train Dreams

Heidi Crist and Destiny Gonzales
1302 Dillard
7-7-13

In the novella Train Dreams, the characters struggle with the influenza pandemic. The infection of influenza spreads throughout America and devastates all in its path. Robert Grainer, a character in Train Dreams, explains how this disease has affected his life and how serious this pandemic was in 1918.

Grainer is an average man who as a child is sent to Idaho to live with his father’s mother and her husband and children. His three cousins all told him different things of where exactly Grainer came from. “All three of his cousins agreed Grainier has come on a train. How he lost his original parents? Nobody ever told him” (25). Robert worked with the Simpson Company getting timber out of the forest. One of his co-workers, Arn Peeples, an old man who was formerly a jim-crack sawyer always said, “The trees themselves were killers” (14).”Peeples real use was occasional” (16). He would set charges into tunnels, blasting his way through the mountains. One day Peeples set a charge and nothing happened. Arn new that a dud had to be dealt with, so he emptied his pockets, removing his valuables, and proceeded into the tunnel without looking back. As he walked out of the tunnel and turned the screws again, all the men cheered and it looked certain that Arn’s death one day would be a result of blasting through tunnels. But ironically, he was hit across the head by a dead branch. He seemed to be fine, until he came down with the chills and fever; the same symptoms as the influenza. “Arn Peeples had said a standing tree might be a friend, but it was from just such a tree that his death had descended” (19). Two days after Arn’s death and burial, Harold took dizzy and fell into the path of a running horse. Grainer managed to save Harold a mutilated death. Harold was “feverish and crazy” (20). That same night, Billy also took chill and had pain in his joints. Six more men had come over with chills by that Sunday. With the captain worried that another influenza epidemic like the one in 1897 was occurring again, he sent all of the men home. The captain himself had been an orphan. He lost his entire family of thirteen siblings within a week.
Later in Grainer’s life, he becomes married to a woman named Gladys Olding, and has a daughter named Kate. When Grainer comes home from the Robinson George job, he hears that there was a fire consuming the Moyea Valley where his house and family were. Grainer begins searching for his wife and daughter, yet has no luck. He morns the loss of his family and tries to continue his life but is haunted by his wife in his dreams. Four years after his wedding, Grainer continued to life off the river where he lived previously with his family.
With losing his whole family and all of his friends, Grainer lived on to be a lonely widower. The influenza took away many of his co-workers, friends, and siblings. Even though no one knows for sure, people believe that the outbreak of influenza is what fire started that killed Grainer’s wife and child. The horrible disease devastated Grainer’s life and thousands of others.