THE VIEW FROM VANCOUVER

With my eyes shut tightly and my other senses shifted to neutral I lift my imagination up to a satellite view of our blue planet. Our beautiful marble Earth is a swirl of clouds and water and patches of green-brown-white continents. I zoom in for a closer look and try to locate all the paths on land, all the trails and roads. The American part of my continent is a scattering of asphalt and concrete tangles connected by furiously busy interstate highways that connect our cities. In this richest of nations, one would expect to see railroad lines everywhere; but there are actually fewer passenger rail connections between towns and cities now than there were in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy growing up in California, my friends and I often took the train on Saturday afternoons from Live Oak, population 2700, to Gridley, six miles up the road with no more people than my town but which did have a movie theater. The little iconic train depot in Live Oak is now a real estate office. I don’t know if the pretty little Gridley station is still there. In those days we took the train to Gridley to the movies rather than to Yuba City or Marysville because the movie theater in Gridley was close to the station. We could have gone on up to Biggs and to Chico. Once upon a time the railroads that transported vegetables, rice, fruit, and nuts outward from America’s primary breadbasket also transported people. OUR BRIGHT NATION of moon walkers and cyber geniuses got many thing right in the Twentieth Century. What it didn’t get right was transportation. We didn’t get transportation right because we didn’t know it mattered... to the environment and to the economy. We were too much in love with our colorful cars and sprawling surburbs. We were smug enough to assume our ways would always be better than the ways of old fashioned, stodgy European and Asian nations.. While we drove with our tops and our minds down, countries that had been brought to their knees in two great wars and a couple of smaller ones were slowly but surely replacing battle scarred infrastructure. While we celebrated the present, other countries built for the future. We thought we were being clever to let Japan and Germany make our cars and our television sets. We preferred to produce the shows for T.V. Sitcoms were more fun to make than automobiles. Blockbuster movies were more our style. We were content to entertain the world. We were amused at little Singapore’s feistiness. With our help South Korea turned from backward nation to prosperous country,. While our backs were turned, the great sleeping giants, China and India, woke up.

On a train journey from San Diego to Vancouver I was reminded that people who need to get somewhere don’t take the train. It takes twice as long to go from San Diego to San Francisco by train as it does by car. We take the train in Western America for sightseeing. The journey from San Diego to Vancouver on Amtrak, a distance of about two thousand miles, takes forty-two hours... if the trains are running. It took forty-four hours for me to make the journey. None of the conductors and service people on the train seemed to know why we were late. It was routine. It didn’t seem to matter. Only in Russia and a few places in Africa and South America are the trains as slow as ours. As long ago as the late 1960s I rode “Bullet Trains in Japan between Tokyo and Kyoto, and you could then and can now set your watch by them. China recently inaugurated a fast train from Beijing to Lhasa in Tibet. Don’t be surprised if Russian has a fast train between Moscow and Vladivostok before we get one between Washington and New York.

It’s not that I personally want to get somewhere fast. After all, I’m the old guy on the bicycle slowly making his way down the West Coast from Canada to Mexico. It’s my country that needs to get itself into gear... and to do it responsibly.