Driving to Work

On my way into to town I saw a disturbing sight. It was a mushroom in the road. It was whole, had not been run over. It was just laying there, I assume. Perhaps it was crossing the road. Why did the mushroom cross the road? Because he was a fungi. It doesn't work. No normal explanation, joke or otherwise, begins to make sense of what I saw. Have I fallen into a Tom Robbins novel? Was can o' beans in the ditch nearby? Plenty of inanimate objects seem at home sitting in the middle of the road. But Mr. Mushroom caught me off-guard. What was he up to? I didn't see him this afternoon.

When you wake up too early, say about 3:50am, and you can't fall back to sleep, you find some pretty cool stuff on tv. Sure, infomercials take up the lion's share of the airwaves, but you can count on History International to show something of substance when the sun has yet to rise. They had a feature on trains and transportation. My love of train riding was documented a while back, so I won't rehash my unapologetic love for it. Trains were so important as people movers back in the post-war era, 40's and 50's. Then, Eisenhower signed Federal Highway Act of 1956. We built cars, built suburbs and built parking lots. Trains shifted increasingly to freight. There are areas where you can still make good use of trains, but if you look at Amtrak's route map, you'll see some huge holes. It's too bad, especially for city to city travel where you don't want to drive a car once you arrive. There are a lot of creative transportation concepts that would be leaner and greener than the monstrosities we've created. It would be great if for long parts of a trip you took the train, then had a little electric car waiting at the train station to use for a your short range needs. Electric cars that are only good for 50 miles would be plenty if we hadn't built a world to expansive for them over the past 50 years. Alternative transportation will catch up in cost and viability, but still, we have grown unnecessarily apart. Me included. We included. I like that I have no neighbors and can sit out on my stoop and type here and run around like an idiot with my dogs without worrying that a neighbor is wondering "what's up with that McFarland guy?" Nevertheless, I'd still like to ride on a train.