Hitting the Road...

Just a quick note to say I'm leaving for Vermont tomorrow morning.  I've been needing to go there to do a bit of research, and I'm very excited because I've never been and I've heard that pretty much the whole state is gorgeous.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to post at least a picture or two while I'm up there - we'll see!

I had the romantic idea that I would take the Amtrak up there - the route is charmingly called the Ethan Allen Express (which brings to mind buying bedroom furniture with my mother in the early 80s).  However, there is only one "express" running each day, at it takes over nine hours to get from NYC Penn Station to Burlington - quite a long journey when you only can stay for two nights!  The bus takes even longer.  And of course if you want to see other towns and scenery while you're there, there's no way around renting a car anyway.  So of course I ended up reserving a car here in New York, and plan to drive up there myself, first thing tomorrow morning.

A few years ago I read Ragtime for the first time, and the thing that I remember most about the novel (which I did appreciate but was not really to my taste) was a sequence where one of the characters travels from New York City all the way to Western Massachusetts entirely by streetcar.  It seems that in the early 20th Century, it was possible to take a streetcar from one town all the way to the end of the line, and then pick up the streetcar from the next town, and really travel quite a ways like that.  Now I'm not sure how much to credit E. L. Doctorow for historical accuracy, but it is amazing to what extent that the auto industry has "won," in that it now seems virtually impossible to get around most parts of the country without driving.  

I can completely understand why Americans love their cars; there's an amazing sense of freedom that comes from sitting behind the wheel and feeling as though at that very moment you could just drive to the supermarket a mile away, but you could turn West and drive straight across to California, and nobody could stop you.  Yet it does seem terribly inefficient for every individual (and I do mean individual, not family unit) to be in his or her little vehicle, burning up gas to get to exactly the point where he or she needs to be, and creating a great deal of traffic to impede getting there quickly.  The only way this is efficient is if you think of it from the standpoint of expending the minimum amount of human energy possible - this way we don't even have to walk four blocks from the bus stop to an office building.  In light of all of this, I'm really hoping that Obama's proposed transportation and infrastructure program will at least have a small positive impact on the status quo - for it seems to me that outside of big cities like New York, the public transportation system really couldn't get much worse.  Besides, while I confess that I like to drive (which I think satisfies my inner control-freak), there's something to be said for being able to just sit back, read or stare out the window, and enjoy a trip without having to be endlessly focused on the road!  And maybe forcing people to spend more time together in buses and trains would help Americans to bridge some of our nation's giant cultural divides.  It seems to work well in the subway...

Sometimes...

(Not for me today, when I was utterly horrified by a lean young man in a ribbed cotton tank top and a sort of trucker-hat perched sideways on top of his head, long black hair tumbling out of it and very sharp incisors (truly), mumbling to himself and belching and holding a can of Pringles under one arm and a round container of shrimp in one hand, which he began to carefully count... He looked a little bit like John Galliano, out of money and gone mad... or perhaps it WAS Galliano, after too many parties... it's fashion week after all!)  

Comments

[Amanda]

Hmmmm... Personally, riding on the subway makes me hate other people. But so does driving, so I'm not sure what my point was. Maybe just that packing way too many people with nothing in common into a small space none of them wants to be in (because, let's face it, if we had the time, wouldn't we all rather walk to work? Or, if it were an option, teleport?) might not be the best way to initiate cultural exchange. ;) But if the gov't devoted more $$ to public transport. infrastructure and less to private transport. infrastructure, the commute might be more pleasant and leave people less cross and more open, I suppose.

[Awake]

yeah, I was kind of joking about riding the subway being conducive to getting along... although you could think of it as "exposure therapy." And New Yorkers think a lot less is "weird" than most of the rest of the country!