My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey, Part II

12 January 2009
Somewhere in Middle America

I just spent the past three days in Omaha. As it turns out, Omaha is a very good place to think about trains. I arrived at the tiny Amtrak station—the sad remains of what was once a booming passenger rail system—thinking, This is IT?? I was expecting a station similar to Denver's, which has been in use for 105 years. It has obviously seen busier times, but has recently started servicing one of the light rail lines, and is once again becoming an important part of the city fabric.

In Omaha, the station was tucked away, in the shadow of the former passenger train station—this enormous, ornate, art deco thing that was built in 1929, which now houses a history museum. The friend I was visiting took me there, and it was a magnificent space. We wandered through the exhibit detailing the history of the station and rail service through Omaha, and I imagined what it would have been like to be alive when the station was built—it would have been such an exciting time in history, with the whole country suddenly opening up to be explored and experienced. The museum gives you a sense of that residual novelty on the train  in the old train cars they have on display, where you can poke around in a coach car from the 30s, a sleeping car full of bunks with tiny toilets hidden under the fold-up beds, a lounge car decked out in red velvet. "It was a great place for socializing!" the volunteer museum guide told me in the lounge car. Surely this was better than the utter pain in the ass that air travel has become...slower, sure, but time much better spent.


As cities go, Omaha kind of sucks—a tiny downtown, surrounded by a huge, sprawling wasteland of strip malls and subdivisions, with crap public transit and virtually no walking access to anything of use. My friends live on the edge of downtown, and even they can't really walk to much—a coffee shop and an artsy movie theatre, and that's about it. Most of the city has the seedy look of a place that hasn't seen any development at all since about 1952, save the constant addition of cookie-cutter housing developments and big box stores. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect the city's economy started to dry up around the same time as passenger rail was superseded by widespread car useage and interstate highways. I learned at the history museum that Omaha's role in the regional livestock trade was once so significant that it warranted the building of one of the city's grandest architectural features to serve as an exchange building (today it's a general office building), but much of the city's importance as a regional economic hub seems to have disappeared around the time that other modes of transportation—modes that did not depend upon transit access to and from a single, centralized location—became cheaper and more feasible. Driving around, you can tell that the city was once very prosperous—buildings from the turn of the (last) century through about the 30s or 40s are elaborate and ornate and still dominate the skyline—but there doesn't seem to have been much of anything with any sort of aesthetic or functional quality built since. (On a side note, Omaha is also home to the corporate headquarters of ConAgra. Fun, no?)

And this is unfortunate, because as it turns out, Nebraska is kind of an okay place. I'm writing this on the train in Iowa which, as it turns out, is also an okay place. Did you know that Nebraska and Iowa are actually incredibly beautiful? I did not. I have driven through Nebraska and Iowa no less than 42 times (no joke), but I have only once ventured off the interstate. Now that I've seen other parts of Nebraska again, I can safely say that the U.S. government, for some reason, built the interstate highways through the most hideous, barren parts of the landscape—or else the ugliness of the interstate highways has gradually seeped into the surrounding land and turned it all blah. Once, while driving through Nebraska on I-80, we were detoured onto back roads going through the Sandhills, and I almost flipped my lid over how unbelievably beautiful it was. This is Nebraska?? I thought. No wonder everyone thinks Nebraska is such a pit—they've only ever seen the flat, drab, uninspiring rows of corn monocultures that surround the ENTIRE rural length of I-80, but there is definitely more to the state than that (who knew?). My train from Denver to Omaha traveled through the same Sandhills area I saw on my detour from I-80. The moon was full, and I could just make out the outline of the undulating hills against the night sky, and it was incredibly gorgeous and peaceful. This is what we're missing when we rush from point A to point B with no interest in what lies between.

Lately, I've found that I've become a student of the minute: one city block, one old house, one columned porch, one tomato plant. Each contains enough detail to keep a person occupied for far longer than we typically spend on it. What do we miss when we breeze right by them?


15 January 2009
I Think the Honeymoon is Over

Well, the bloom may be off the rose. Some of the glamor of train travel has started to wear off. Shortly after I typed out the above musings, things took a turn for the slightly inconvenient. A major train derailment in Illinois between Galesburg and Chicago prevented my train and a bunch of others from making it into Chicago via that route. After an hour of sitting and waiting, those with connections in Chicago got put on a charter bus and the rest of us took a detour into the city. In the end, my train was about four hours late, and for much of this time the train staff were either unable or unwilling to tell us where we were or when, approximately, we might arrive in Chicago. Kind of annoying.

However, two facts made this experience far less irritating than it might have otherwise been—for me, anyhow. First, we found out when we arrived in Chicago that the charter buses had gotten hung up in traffic—it was basically blizzarding the entire day—and still had not arrived in Chicago when we got there. On a nice day, bus travel is probably significantly faster than train travel (though only because we've got crap train infrastructure in this country), but when the weather's bad, taking the train is totally the way to go, derailments notwithstanding. In fact, once we got going on our detoured route, we were traveling much faster than at any previous point in our journey.

And second, I was surprised but very pleased that they were able to put together a detour route so quickly that, when you subtract time we spent sitting and waiting for instructions, really only took us a few hours longer than it otherwise would have. When asked, one Amtrak employee told us that he couldn't guess when we might get into Chicago because the route we were taking was akin to taking the back roads in your car—none of the employees was at all familiar with it or where it went. Evidently there must be serviceable rail routes out there that don't currently see passenger traffic...I wonder how feasible it would be to get these operating again in a lower-energy economy?

Today I am heading from Chicago back to Minneapolis. My train's departure was delayed for nearly four hours due to some mechanical difficulties; however, it's a good -10°F here, and the mechanical issue and the long repair time were both reportedly a factor of the weather. I don't doubt that if I'd been flying from Omaha to Chicago on Monday when it snowed like mad the entire day, my plane would have been delayed as well, so I looked at it as a fair trade-off with the universe. Others in the waiting area were not inclined to be quite so chill about it, though, and one woman proclaimed, loudly and repeatedly, to the entire waiting area, that she was absolutely livid about having spent $175 on this ticket, and wanted a refund and would never take the train again. Train travel is not for everyone.

But this is unfortunate, because it certainly could be, if we got our act together over here and actually put some money into our train network and infrastructure. In terms of the conveniences we've all come to expect from our modes of transport—on-time departure and arrival, speed, staff knowledgeability, etc.—Amtrak gets a big ol' F (through little fault of its own, honestly), but despite all of this, I've actually really enjoyed my train experience. The delays have upped the stress level a bit, but it certainly hasn't been any more stressful than flying. (Yeah, so how about that plane that crashed into the Hudson River this afternoon?) It's been warm and cozy, relatively comfortable, laid-back, and scenic. Monday, on my way from Omaha to Chicago, a woman from Fairfield, Iowa sat next to me, and we had a wonderful chat for three hours, until she got off the train. We both got out our knitting and worked on that for a while, and swapped tips and stories. Of course this kind of thing can and does happen on airplanes, but it's not the kind of thing that I ever do; usually I'm too nervous about flying, and stressed from all the rushing around (mine and everyone else's), and completely focused on getting from point A to B as quickly as possible.

And then there's stuff like this: Earlier, on this leg of my journey, I went to the lounge car to have a beer, and witnessed the following spectacle: a group of 20-somethings with spiky pink hair and the like, congregated on one end of the car, singing folk songs to the accompaniment of a banjo; and a group of 40-somethings at the other end, completely trashed, having what I would consider a very lewd conversation, and punctuating their points by (I shit you not) pulling down their pants and mooning each other. WHAT. Umm, so like I said...train travel isn't for everyone, but it is definitely more eventful and, um, social (if you can call seeing someone's butt social) than other modes of transport. This trip has been as much about the experience as it was about the destinations, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone with the time to spare, inconveniences and all. That is, if you think you can tolerate the occasional glimpse of some stranger's butt.

My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey

I'm trying to cut my airplane travel. This is hard, because I make the journey from my current home in Minneapolis to my parents' place in Denver four times a year or so, and these trips are probably the last thing I am willing to eliminate in my attempt to cut my carbon footprint. In the past, I've been working full-time, and thus I've had extremely limited vacation time, so plane travel was almost a necessity to make the trip worth the effort and expense... Now that I'm in grad school, though, I've got a LOT more time (this is the absolute BEST thing about being in school), so I figured I could afford to start taking more time-consuming forms of travel.

As Jim Kunstler has pointed out, America is really, REALLY big; WHY on earth aren't we paying more attention to the imminent demise of the airline industry, and re-investing in our rail system??? My parents and I took the train from Denver to New York City in 1999, not because it was cheaper than air travel (it wasn't, and we didn't even get a sleeper), but because we'd always wanted to take the train somewhere. And it was pleasant enough, but fraught with the kind of inconveniences that would deter 90% of everyone, especially people on a tight schedule. For example, our train was approximately eight hours late into NYC; apparently, this was because Amtrak was having disputes with freight rail companies over right-of-way, and our train kept getting diverted to the side tracks where it sat completely stationary for hours at a time while coal trains rambled past. This was during the World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. The Amtrak employee running the snack bar had tickets to the game the evening we were supposed to arrive, and he missed it entirely, by a good number of hours...he was so mad that he gave away all the snack bar's food for free. So, given that it took the better part of three days to get there, and the timing was completely unreliable, I can't imagine that the majority of people would ever willingly choose such a mode of travel over planes.

But I've had exceedingly pleasant train experiences as well—though not in this country. In 2005, a friend and I spent three weeks in China. We took the train all over the country, from Hong Kong to Beijing, hitting eight other cities in between. Looking back on this trip, I think the train journeys were my favorite part. They were LONG—some of them over 24 hours (China is a BIG country), which ate up some of our travel time, but also provided a much-needed respite from the otherwise constant action of our adventure. We booked beds in the open sleeper bunks—second class, essentially—where we shared an entire car with bunk-fulls of other travelers. Most fortunately, my friend spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, so she was able to converse with all of our fellow travelers and learn all about their lives, and we had a great time swaping stories and passing around the scarf I was knitting for my dad, which the Chinese women, it seemed, couldn't wait to take a crack at. It was just pleasant all around—clean, friendly, affordable, and best of all, on-time. I honestly can't imagine NOT choosing the Chinese train over airplane travel, given the difference in price, not to mention the opportunity to watch the (fascinating and beautiful) countryside go by. If only American trains could be like that...

So, upon learning that my winter break would be an incredible FIVE WEEKS LONG, I went onto the Amtrak website to find out how one might get to Denver from Minneapolis on the train and discovered that it was actually quite difficult: I could either take a THREE DAY journey west from Minneapolis, through the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle, then down the west coast to San Fransisco, and east to Denver (which would undoubtedly be a beautiful journey, but a bit long for my tastes); or, I could take the train to Chicago and then southwest to Denver, but I'd have an overnight layover in Chicago. Neither of these really struck my fancy...but I realized that I have friends I can visit along the way and in Chicago, and a rambling, slow-paced cross-country train journey might be just what I needed to top off my fabulous, month-long winter vacation.

So I flew home, but booked a one-way train ticket back (thanks to Amtrak's multi-city fare finder), and tomorrow I will be leaving Denver on the train and heading to Omaha to visit my college roommate and her husband. I'll stay there for a few days, then move on to Chicago for a few days to visit some other friends, and then head back to Minneapolis from there. It will be slow-paced and, I hope, relaxing. I suspect it will be much less-stressful than airplane travel (knock on wood). I haven't exactly been pressed for relaxation over the past few weeks of my break, but even so, having the opportunity to kick back for 8+ hours between cities with nothing to distract me from my reading or knitting sounds fabulous. And it will be nice to have some sort of connection to place—a sense of what lies between me and my destination (besides corn), an alternative concept of space to that of the near-instantaneous movement from A to B that I've been experiencing for the past...well, forever. I don't want to overly romanticize a world characterized by slow movement—air travel has had its distinct benefits (like its ability to open up far-flung places to people of average Western means, like me), but as long as we're headed in the direction of limited air travel (and I truly believe that we are), we might as well focus on what we've lost by making it possible to rush across thousands of miles of landscape without a second thought as to what we're missing in between.

Though it does seem to me that with the enormous expanses that we must cover out here, west of Ohio or so, train travel will never be an appealing option to anyone on a tight schedule. This is yet another unfortunate aspect of the measly two-to-three weeks vacation that most Americans get—it makes any sort of slow-paced vacation or travel totally unappealing. I wouldn't have considered a multi-day trip back to Minneapolis if I didn't have the time to spare. So, while I hate to wish underemployment upon anyone, I suspect that a lot of us are going to have a bit more time on our hands in the future than we do now...and I can't help but think that a little bit more travel of the old-fashioned, laid-back, slow-paced variety will do us some good.

How I Got Here

I've had the sense, since a very young age, that there was something terribly amiss in the world.

Maybe this was partially a function of growing up towards the end of the 20th century, when a combination of factors—the back-to-earth reality check brought on by hard economic times in the 70s and early 80s, the increasingly sensationalized television coverage of the world's many crises, maybe the alienation and ennui caused by an increasingly complex and stratified social and economic structure, etc.—combined to create a much more demoralized narrative than the one with which my parents were raised in the 50s and 60s. We might have beat the commies at creating a prosperous and functional society, but there was a hole in the ozone layer, and black babies with distended bellies cried on late-night TV, and American teenagers were depressed and doing hard drugs and shooting each other at school.

As a result of all of this, many people in my generation, it seems, have a less optimistic outlook on the world than our hippie-turned-stockbroker parents. But I have been plagued, more than most of my peers, by perpetual unease over all the things that are wrong with modern society. I have never found comfort in the fact that there are also many things right with modern society, like the (ostensible) recognition of universal human rights, and humanitarian aid that transcends cultures and borders. We are a society that put people on the moon, for Pete's sake. It has always seemed to me that if we really wanted to fix the world's problems, we could do it easily.

As I grew older and began to express my views, this became problematic. I was billed by friends as a downer, or worse, a pessimist (the gravest of all personality traits in this feel-good culture). I alienated people with my constant focus on injustice and dysfunction in the world. I had a brief respite from these troubles during college, where I met other similarly-minded folks who cared about similar things, but I found, upon graduation, that most people's enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of What's Wrong With the World was pretty thoroughly extinguished once they had jobs and car payments and such—as it turns out, most people just want to be happy...they don't want to be constantly contemplating how their consumer choices are creating misery for sweatshop workers in Indonesia.

I began to suspect that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Possibly even chemically unbalanced. I was probably just a natural misfit, doomed to an ill-fitting existence in a culture I couldn't escape—it wasn't society that was all wrong, it was me. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.

And then, gradually, I began to discover voices that made sense.

It began with Kunstler's criticisms of suburbia, which I read during the six months I spent stranded at my parents' place in suburban hell, where I regrouped after doing some extended travel. From there, I started to read about peak oil, and and I found it absolutely FASCINATING—enthralling, almost, in a morbid sort of way. I had never before considered the impact energy flow has had on our society. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of understanding the world (and the world's problems). I was somewhat tempted to interpret peak oil as some sort of cosmic limit or override that confirmed what I'd been claiming all along—a message from above, if you will, that we'd completely botched everything up and The Powers That Be would be revoking our most critical resource shortly, thank you very much—and despite recognizing this train of thought as rubbish, I began to feel slightly more validated, and slightly less insane.

Eventually this led me to the the internet and in particular, the blogsphere, where I discovered voices that had been there all along, sounding off about the raging dysfunction that has gotten us in this predicament of peak oil, climate change, resource depletion, and, more recently, the financial crisis. I devoured these people's thoughts like my life depended on it. And as I did, I felt secure in my worldview for the first time ever. As Rod Dreher of the Dallas News said in his column on austerity, "[T]he U.S. government is trying to restart an economy blown to bits by debt by encouraging Americans drowning in debt to resume spending money that they don't have for things they don't need. You tell me: Who's crazy here?"

Precisely.

As I've thought and read and synthesized, I've begun to take certain ideas for granted that are fairly controversial, or even totally unheard of, within the mainstream. I will treat these things as given in all of my writings from here on out, so I figure I might as well get them out there on the table.

In no particular order:

1. This is not progress.
And by "this" I mean modern society. Most people seem to believe that in spite of hard times, the world is progressing towards a better and more just arrangement, à la Thomas Friedman. This is the story that we're fed in order to get us to accept the particularly ugly aspects of the modern world trajectory like poverty, exploitation, apathy, depression, obesity, cancer, divorce, senseless violence...the list goes on. It should be pretty clear to anyone paying attention—really paying attention, that is, not merely reading the New York Times with the so-called critical eye of the educated liberal class (who happen to be quite vested in the status quo)—that things are absolutely NOT getting better in the long-run. There are ups and downs, depending on the world economy and general political atmosphere, but in the long run, corporations have become more powerful at the expense of individuals, both in developed and "developing" or "underdeveloped" nations. Income disparity in the U.S. is growing, the environment is increasingly degraded and unable to support the full range of human activities it used to, and modern economic arrangements in many third world countries are breaking up families and providing a lifestyle that's hardly, if any, more sufficient than subsistence farming at providing basic needs. I could go on, but I won't for the time being—my point is that the evidence does not indicate an increasingly just world, even if that's what the rhetoric says.

And on that same note...

2. Modern capitalism is not "good". It does not "work".
Any economic system that does not have inbuilt checks on greed is an economic system that will likely benefit the few at the expense of the many—and thus, is NOT an economic system that most of us should support! Until recently, many have tried to claim that capitalism does keep greed in check, by giving consumers the option of moving their business elsewhere, if a certain company is getting a little greedy—but this argument takes for granted that consumers are informed, and I have trouble with this one...if we're so informed, how did so many of us end up with retirement money in repackaged sub-prime mortgage securities? We're too busy getting lulled into a semi-coma by cable television to know a sound investment from a con, let alone where our bank banks or who sold seeds to the farmer who grows the tomatoes we buy at Big Box Mart, and a lack of transparency, coupled with the ridiculous tangled web of corporate ownership that recent takeovers have produced, are making it increasingly difficult even for those of us who want to be informed consumers.

Capitalist principles actually make quite a bit of sense in certain contexts—particularly, the context in which they were originally observed—but today's enormous, complex, technologically-intensive global economy has about as much in common with that original context as George Foreman has in common with my grandmother. Therefore, in order to benefit the greater good (which is what most of us little people should be rallying for, considering where unchecked greed has gotten us), those capitalist principles require some serious tweaking—otherwise, we just end up with the kind of morbid economic train wreck we've got currently. I'm not saying we need to switch to a USSR-style planned economy, where you've got to wait in line for three hours just to be able to wipe your butt with something other than a leaf; people jump to the grossly-uninformed conclusion that anything other than pure market capitalism (which, by the way, we don't even have in this country) is automatically socialism, and nobody seems terribly interested in setting them straight. But some regulations, made with the well-being of the individual consumer rather than the corporation in mind, would be fabulous, and we'd be so much better off for it, even if these regulations contradicted everything we hold dear about the free market. I have a feeling that Adam Smith would be horrified by the society that we've created through our blind adherence to capitalism. Poor man's bones are probably spinning in his grave even as we speak.

3. Perpetual economic growth is not only not good, it's not possible.
And all those people working in factories in third world countries are never going to see a first world lifestyle as their country moves through the phases of industrialization, the way we tell them they will. There's not enough stuff to provide it for them, unless we discover fresh water and trees and fossil fuels on the moon sometime very soon. (And besides, then who would manufacture our Nikes and false eyelashes?) Anyone who believes that perpetual economic growth is a possibility needs a refresher in basic common sense; we may have made amazing technological advancements in creating synthetic materials, but all of these technologies depend on real, tangible, scarce, and increasingly depleted resources. Again, you tell me: who's crazy here? You can not run a growth economy in perpetuity in a closed system. End of story.

Of course, this has some pretty major implications for the way our economy is set up, not to mention the priorities we've set as a society. But more on that some other time.

4. The people with the greatest investment in the status quo happen to be the same people who control idea flows in our society.
I mean this very generally, because the internet has really changed how we get our ideas; nowadays, people can go online and find communities based around the ideas they support and wish to exchange, just like I did. But in general, among those without access to the internet or knowledge of the countless ways to connect with others online, and most definitely among those who spend any significant amount of time watching TV, the ideas, values, and norms to which they are exposed are at least somewhat—probably largely—influenced by the media, and by powerful interests speaking through the media.

And not only is media ownership increasingly concentrated in fewer and more powerful hands, it is with few exceptions a profit-driven business that owes its revenues to whatever company is making this month's must-have consumer shiny, and thus, has a limited capacity to question the processes that make this dysfunctional society run: consumption, capitalism, maybe exploitation, and a little bit of existential desperation brought on by the mind-numbing rat race. They don't want you to wonder whether you really need that new shiny toy, so they're not going to encourage you to think for yourself. And thus, the band plays on...

5. We fail to solve most of the problems we tackle because we treat the symptoms instead of addressing the causes.
Whether this focus on symptoms is an accidental feature of our culture, or engineered/encouraged by elements of the power establishment, I don't care to speculate right now—though it's probably some of both. There are certainly powerful interests that have a stake in this approach, such as pharmaceutical companies, which profit from the long-term treatment of chronic conditions far more than they do from preventative medicine. But it's unfortunate that this approach permeates nearly everything we do to make this world a better, happier place, from our approach to poverty to our response to terrorism.

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This blog will be a place for myself and one of my college friends to vent our frustrations with business as usual in the world, hash out thoughts or ideas that need refining, and generally join the dialogue about what went wrong, what it means, and how we can work to make it better. We welcome your thoughts, ideas, and feedback.