Trains
I have a little history with trains. Enough to speak of now and then, anyway. Growing up outside NYC we would sometimes take the Long Island Railroad in to see one thing or another, although we’d just as often drive. As we grew older we’d sometimes take the train on our own for this or that. Busses were usually cheaper during the college years, but sometimes Amtrak would be the preferred mass transit option. In Brockport a train line ran straight through the campus, unlike the Erie Canal, which ran along what had become the edge of town, and sometimes, out of some Kerouac affinity, I’d hike the rails in one direction or another and then swing off along whatever road crossed it and find my way home. I can’t say as I got to know the town well by striking out this way, as towns in upstate NY are often just set down in the middle of miles of nothing around, SUNY Brockport being a good example, built on a swamp as it was. Ann Arbor, Michigan, however, was another story, and I sometimes wonder if you could drop me off somewhere on the edge of town even now, that I could find my way to the University. Probably not. It is one of my fonder memories of that period when engaged in this activity I found my progress impeded by a switchman who’d been charged with delivering a message to a train on its way through: Ringing Brothers Barnum & Bailey. Trains being what they are – unattached to anything but the rails – and this being pre-cell phone days, messages were passed by hand by means of a forked stick with a wire strung across the mouth of the Y and the paper slip wound around the wire. The engineer could reach down to the stick held up as he passed and scoop the message into his hand. The need for this particular communication was that the elephants had been able to open the doors of their cars and were reaching out from the moving train and grabbing branches from the trees they passed, trumpeting. So I stood with the switchman and waited for the train and watched as it went by and saw the elephants and the carneys and the moment pass into the night, a moment of light on a dark night that I will never forget. I’m reminded of this encounter by having just gone for a walk at lunch and seeing, just at that moment, an old steam locomotive with four cars and a caboose pass along the Epping rail line. I don’t know what force in the universe serves to maintain this link between me and trains, but there it is, for what it’s worth. How strange that I should see this now, when Ann Arbor is the place I most often feel most strongly connected to here in Sydney.
500 Years
It will take a long time for global sea levels to seriously threaten coastal cities if the trend reported by AVISO continues, but that’s not a reason to ignore global warming. Well, I’m sure our kids can figure something out. Maybe by then hydrogen fuel cells will be economical, and they can use the extra water to power their flying cars. Thanks to Kenneth Miles, the unaustralian, for the link.