As I was dressing this morning (which would’ve been afternoon for you east coasters), I was listening to an interview / call-in show featuring Congressman Mike Doyle (D - PA).

He was speaking at length on the necessity of saving the US automobile industry by granting their request (to be made formally this afternoon by the CEO of Ford, I believe) for a large taxpayer loan. As I listened, I kept hearing him say that the auto industry must be saved really for two reasons, which were repeated consistently no matter what the initial question.

The first, which I don’t dispute the fundamental truth of, is that the automotive industry is a major employer of middle class workers in the US. This is all well and good, but discussing this bailout (and, loan or not, it is a bailout) as if the industry will disappear completely overnight is extremely misleading. Yes, certainly the industry is in trouble. Companies have been slashing their workforces for years, continually hemorrhage vast amounts of money, and seem incapable of genuinely gaining ground against their foreign competitors. Further contractions of the industry will hurt, yes, but we’re not actually talking about 3 million additional unemployed skilled laborers tomorrow morning if we don’t drop tens of billions of dollars on the Big 5 (or is it 3 now?) today.

The second major presumption of Doyle’s “Save the Automakers” position was that the loss of this industry (again, all of it, immediately, by implication) would represent the catastrophic loss of all the Research and Development work that the industry does and which America needs in order to remain competitive in the global economy.

This point I dispute on a couple of levels. First, and I hope you’ll forgive the snark, if the United States automotive industry’s R&D was really all that, they wouldn’t be requiring tens of billions of dollars of assistance. They are just years, decades maybe, out of touch with the state of the art being developed in Japan and Germany. They’ve moved only reluctantly towards retooling to support hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles and even then had to be dragged, kicking and screaming about their bottom lines and the needs and wants of the American consumer, to that table. Claiming that we need to salvage their vaunted R&D programs at taxpayer expense represents either a clear misunderstanding or a deliberate oversight of the meager reality.

Of course big companies do R&D, and many do it very well, but the foundation of the argument for saving the carmakers because of their R&D wings presupposes that there are no alternatives, and further relies on the belief that market forces represent the most efficient way to allocate resources for this kind of work. The market is a wonderful thing, but if there is one area that arguably is least benefited by reliance upon market economics, it’s basic scientific research.

Let’s face it, the market is a lagging indicator in most cases. It responds only as rapidly as consumers recognize and understand the conditions that affect the market. In a perfect case, the consumers are all well informed about current circumstances as well as the predicted future conditions that will affect the market, and in that case only, the market may (but is not guaranteed to) respond rapidly and ahead of immediate circumstances. In reality, most consumers are not that well informed, either because they aren’t paying attention, don’t exercise reason in tracking through difficult issues, or, commonly, aren’t provided enough genuine facts about what to expect in the future.

This argument underpins most of my response to knee-jerk free-marketeerism — even allowing that a perfect market will best allocate resources, we don’t have perfect markets, and we must be sure to recognize those cases where the imperfect ones that exist in reality actually do provide the superior solution.

To presuppose that the kind of basic scientific and engineering research that will support the future generation of energy efficient cars (not to mention all other devices that will benefit) ought to be performed by the historically deficient auto industry is just absurd. In fact, it’s clear that the market is largely to blame for the very situation we face. The American public demanded big trucks, SUV’s and other inefficient but fun vehicles, and the industry not only made their billions by filling that desire, but actively lobbied in favor of policies (energy and otherwise) that would keep them in the high margin business of selling these types of vehicles, even after the writing was on the wall with respect to our eventual need to reduce consumption drastically.

So here’s my alternative proposal… let’s not loan billions of dollars to a set of organizations whose credibility in performing basic scientific research is nil, and whose management has been self destructive or brain dead for 25 years. Rather, make that money available to organizations who can and will make good use of it. Direct those funds to the National Science Foundation and other funding mechanisms for academia, whose ability to perform basic science is part and parcel of their mandate. Set aside 200-300 million dollars towards establishing a series of X-Prizes for advances in the materials science and engineering disciplines necessary to advance the state of the art in this country. Provide incentive for American entrepreneurs and researchers to do this kind of work for the auto makers, whose market incentives were never before, and will never be, sufficient to make them forward looking and responsible stewards of the huge power they hold over the economic, environmental and energy policies of this country. Perhaps even found a national laboratory with a mandate for performing work on modern energy and automotive technology, much as the Sandia, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge labs did for Nuclear research and as the NIH does for much basic public health research.

By all means, salvage what can be salvaged of the auto makers in the interests of job retention and maintaining an industrial and manufacturing base in the US. But please don’t foist this ridiculous notion of automaker funded R&D on the public. It’s wrong, and while it may be politically sensible to speak well of companies that employ your constituents, in this case doing so is to spread misunderstanding and inaccuracy. Basic science will almost never be performed best — and by best I mean best for the world at large… by this metric, even the drug companies largely fail — by organizations responding to market forces, because by it’s very nature, basic research may or may not be economically rewarding and will always have to be initiated well in advance of the day the resulting technologies are needed. At best, todays markets provide incentive just as new ideas need to be available, and at worst, lag until they’ve been needed for some time already. It’s time to wake up to this reality and stop throwing good money, money that could be made to serve this nation in countless ways, at companies that provably, unequivocally, do not deserve to be trusted with it.

This is a neat looking little town, though all neat looking little towns make me think they’re carefully constructed but inauthentic neat looking little towns. Still, we passed a good looking ski area a few minutes ago, so perhaps this is a place I might try to come back to someday…

Lake Tahoe is away somewhere to the south of us and I’ve always wanted to make a skiers tour of northern California, so I guess I may make it back to this neat little town someday, be it authentic or otherwise.

I’m having a late breakfast in the lounge car after spending an hour or so chatting with my seat neighbor Marco. He told me he’s been working for the past 7 months at a gold mine in Elko, NV and heading back to see his wife and (by my count) 6 kids, as he does every two weeks. He’s a treasure trove of knowledge about mining, paving, welding, landscaping, concrete and surely a lot more, but that’s already a lot for a single hour. He’s a driver of those gigantic loaders, the ones that look like dump trucks scaled up to preposterous size… whose independently driven wheels are each taller than a normal dump truck, and can shuffle around 100 tons of ore (or other, smaller trucks, as Marco learned to his surprise, and related in turn to me). He tells me he loves life too much to venture into the underground shafts, but will happily work any job that lets him see the sun and make enough money to support his family.

Meeting people is half the joy of the train I think (well, maybe a third of it… the creature comforts of legroom and the scenic lounge are worth an awful lot). I had dinner (a decent though overpriced affair, save for the company) with a couple from outside of Little Rock — whose daughter had gone to Vanderbilt as an undergrad in 1999, while I was still there, and who stayed for medical school — and a young woman originally from Alaska, who was on her way out to visit family in Omaha. A few seats behind mine I talked with a woman from Sacramento who recently lost her job and moved to Vermont on a promise of work, and while between jobs is taking her opportunity — much as myself — to sightsee and visit her family back in California.

I met a pastor’s wife from Golden, CO who was bringing a sizable group of teens and tweens to a youth conference on the other side of the mountains, and an elderly couple who told me they ride the train up from Denver and then back the next day, just for the view, every so often.

Most people on the trains have been nothing but friendly and the sort of casualness and openness of the environment make conversation happen organically. To purposefully and deliberately beat a dead horse, in every single way besides efficiency, the train is superior to air travel.

I hope I got a few good photos this morning of sunrise over the low hills in northern Nevada. Before long, the light revealed a pretty bleak desert landscape, miles of not much besides scrub brush and dirt between hills that not so very long ago drew so many people west during the gold rush. Some, Marco proves, continue to produce wealth for some and jobs for others, and some that had ceased being profitable long aog have apparently been reopened to take advantage of the surge in gold prices over the past couple of years. Still, it’s not a place I think I’d like to live.

There are little towns, or settlements anyway — some consisting of less than 5 structures and a single incongruous tree — along Interstate 80 (which we parallel most of the time), incontrovertible evidence of the variety of human experience and interest, that people would choose to live in such a place. Marco, who has spent most of his life in Nevada, found the depictions he saw of New York City on television shocking, the density and rapidity of life there, the avenues of midtown Manhattan filled with men and women in suits (the latter of which he laughingly told me was the sexiest thing on the nightly news), and the complete absence of children. I hadn’t thought of that before… a New York built from the images you can see on the news is an even stranger place than New York already is.

I’ve been typing now for long enough that we’ve passed out of Nevada and into California, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and soon to head over and through them. Suddenly there are trees again, mostly evergreens, and it makes me realize that rich or poor, I could never live in a place without trees. When I’m without them, I feel an anxiousness, a fear that should my world go completely bad, I might end up poor and in a place like that, with nothing to do, and little to hope for. In other words, I get depressed. Here, I just feel different, and wonder if it’s because it feels like home in at least some small way. I think, despite the fact that most modern families live in their own sort of diaspora, everyone takes the place they grew up along with them, and is comforted when they find themselves in similar surroundings.

Coming down out of the highlands of Colorado offered even more spectacular scenery than going up into the mountains earlier this morning. Where that was the green and white of ski country — a color scheme and starkness with which I’ve always been in love — we left the state still hugging close to the river that shares it’s name, through canyons and valleys of vibrant red rock in dozens of strata that even an armchair geologist can appreciate. In places the rocks look as if they’ve been excavated by industrious animals or insects, hundreds of little holes pocking the sheer surfaces, but on closer inspection they’re soft-edged and have the smooth curves that only flowing water can produce. Presumably whatever rain falls up above seeps through the differential densities of the sandstone and wears down the face as it escapes. Still it’s a surface that surprises, and would look perfectly at home on the set of a movie depicting some alien landscape.

As the sun falls lower behind the enclosing hills, it alternately casts long shadows and brightly illuminates the already ruddy cliffs, occasionally becoming visible as a burst of light over a low saddle or through a wind-etched hollow. When we finally leave the valley and depart the river, the sun is well below the horizon, and casts its goodbyes into a sunset that stretches in a grand arch from one side of the world to the other, which would be a god to rainbows, if rainbows had gods. The reds and flame oranges limn white and gray stratus clouds before fading into the blues and blacks of night behind us.

Soon enough it’s fully dark, and we’re in Utah. By the time the light returns, we’ll likely be all the way through the other side, having made the most of the flat and empty land by night.

Sensibly, the train follows the course of the Colorado River starting a few miles past Fraser. It’s become a pretty clear and sunny day, with views all the way to the next ridge on all sides. This is apparently horse country and each meander of the the river and tracks reveals another ranch nestled into the land inside the bend, with the river as a border around it, a few trees, and a group of horses trotting around their enclosure.

Here the rocks are clay red or gray, the trees little more than bushes, and the valleys a bit more expansive than they have been. It’s a softer, less extreme feeling area, though I expect that in the dead of winter the dirt roads are impassable and the power and phone lines unreliable. So, maybe not so very soft after all.

The Icebox of America, they call this place, which has the lowest average temperature of anywhere in the United States. It’s a short bus or taxi trip from here to Winter Park, where I’d be heading if I’d decided to try and do some skiing on this trip. It’s good that I didn’t… too much trouble for too little payoff, and soon enough I’ll be able to drive up to Bellayre or Windham or maybe even some of my old favorites in Vermont. This fact is one I happily haven’t adjusted to yet, meaning I get to experience a pleasant surprise every time I re-realize it. Skiing is one of those great pleasures I missed most living in the south, to such a degree that I largely tried to avoid thinking about it in order to minimize how often I had to feel disappointed. Crazy I guess, but one more psychosis that’s soon to be remedied.

Fraser looks like most ski towns I’ve seen, albeit a pretty big one.. Once a mining village where they pulled gold and other valuables out of the rocks, it still looks like a place with plenty of money, only now it’s made on the tops of the mountains rather than inside of them. I look forward to skiing here someday… there are ever so many places I’ve yet to try. My next major train trip will be a ski train, perhaps, and I’ll spend a few weeks poking along from slope to slope through these passes.

It would figure that my camera battery would die just as we enter the picturesque passes and switchbacks that lead us into the heart of the mountains. I guess I took too many pictures of all the nowhere we’ve been going through. There’s a dam up in the hills here (Carver? Harper? some Denver kids are shouting something like that) that spans a small gap between two hills, rising sheer from a narrow valley floor that appears to have a few (hopefully uninhabited) structures standing in it’s shadow.

This really is gorgeous country — my kind of country, anyway — evergreens and brown grass and snow, hills that surround wide open, gently rolling plateaus, or long curving lakes, soft peaks broken occasionally by promontories of bare rock that hint at the mountains to come. In a little valley, surprisingly anachronistic, even up here, stands an old fashioned one room school house, peeling bright yellow paint beneath a white bell tower. Gusting wind raises up plumes of snow from the little hills and sends it curling through a stand of 4 or 5 foot tall pale reed-like bushes that terminate in a profusion of reds, oranges and rich browns.

In places here the tracks run along a sheer drop only inches away, and 150 feet below a starved and lazy stream trickles along its stony course. There are dozens of tunnels up here (42, the conductor will later tell us) to deal with places a train couldn’t climb or go around. The girls in the lounge car, middle schoolers I guess, attempt to hold their breath each time we enter one, while also trying to make each other laugh, and thereby lose the game. Like all good childhood diversions, they end with everyone laughing and no single winner.

Shortly we enter the longest tunnel of the line, 6.2 miles, passing beneath the Continental Divide, and are admonished not to change cars during the 10 minutes within in order to minimize introduction of the coal dust and diesel fume that permeates the tunnel all the time now despite efforts to clear it. It’s impossible to avoid some fume though, and I find my diesel headache coming on almost immediately…

The ventilation system clears the air quickly once we’re out, and my sick feeling recedes as rapidly as it came on, thankfully.

I awake this morning to a horizon of blue and gray and white pressing itself hazily into the ochre and brown earth, dusting it with new snow that continues to fall softly. This snow is the kind that children hope for… large fluffy flakes, slightly wet, perfect for packing and forming into dream structures (or weapons). Miles distant the mountains form a backdrop, in places only visible as a line where the clouds wait on high peaks before sliding down the east faces and into the Denver plateau.

The snowfall strengthens as we get closer, confining the visible world further. Near by, we pass clusters of dilapidated, slant roofed structures, not much more than shanties, with small horses fenced in behind and beside. There’s still some empty space out here, if not much of it, and the muted colors are broken only by the occasional splash of blood red scrub brush. A cemetery fills the view on the right and it’s even more ghostly in the dim early morning and snow than it’d be in the middle of a clear night. Nearest the track are rows and rows of small, identical white markers with little American flags stuck into the ground next to them — a miniature echo at Arlington.

Denver itself comes out of nowhere, or, i guess, out of increasingly dense clusters of cattle yards and small factories until we’re rolling past the Rockies’ baseball stadium, then rolling backwards into the platform. The train empties a good deal, and while a large number of people get back on, not nearly as many, and no one at all sits in our now very quiet car. Early though it is, I hope I’ll get back the double seat I lost in Omaha to a whiny kid and his worn down mother last night.

Somewhat unexpectedly, riding the train has become kind of surreal. A function of the timing I think, for the most part… with the days so short, and most of my train time so far having been at night, I feel almost no sense of motion, despite having walked around a Chicago (a little) during the day today.

Mostly I’ve been sliding smoothly through a typically unbroken blackness, interrupted only by brief stops at rural platforms, much smaller even than Rhinecliff and not half as pretty… cinderblock and clapboard buildings with bare bulbs, an old and clattering (I assume) Coke machine, a few random folks milling under an awning to escape the light drizzle.

Perhaps it’s a kindness, the dark… I suppose Nebraska and Kansas will provide me my fill of the wide open spaces of brown fields.

Shortly I’ll have my first train dinner, largely just for the experience… I still have some food packed away that I can eat to save money, and will rely on that as much as possible, but it’s worth a shot to try the dinner at least once. I’ll get the chance, it seems, to do so on a becalmed train, as the conductor has just announced a stop so they can look into a mechanical issue. The lights are dimmed and the air conditioners off, their fairly substantial noise more noticeable now that it’s gone, and the train is filled with that stillness that comes of sudden quiet and dark.

On arrival, I was contemplating meeting Miss IL for lunch, but it became clear that I made some errors in judgement regarding the quantity, composition and location of clothing for this trip. My backpack is far too heavy to haul around much, and I’m too paranoid to leave it in a locker with my laptop in it (not to mention all the other tech in there). Frankly I just brought way too much stuff, particularly considering I should have fairly consistent access to wash facilities.

So I’ve removed a volume of clothing from both bags, redistributed things a bit, and now have a backpack that can be carried around town with not-unreasonable effort, and a roller bag that’s fuller and heavier. The downside is that I now have to truck these removed pieces to a UPS store a few blocks away and mail them home to my folks. Probably only a $20 fuckup, but annoying nonetheless. I always overpack, even when I’m actively trying not to.

Also of note : compression bags are awesome, but they reduce access to the stuff in them considerably. Undeniably good for situations where you’ll be going to one place for a longer period of time and want to maximize options. Not so good for situations where you don’t really know what you’ll need from day to day and are generally living out of your bag(s). Lessons learned.

Alas, the worst of it is that I’ll miss having lunch with my friend. I’ll be back to crash on her couch for a few days in early December though, so we’ll be able to make up for it.

I awake to a world that remains gray and wet, and hope Chicago itself isn’t likewise, or I’ll almost certainly spend my layover in the station. Still, it’s light enough now to see again, and we pass a series of fields with isolated houses, followed by the occasional and inexplicable little development… 10 or 12 identical houses sit clustered around a cul-de-sac in the midst of essentially nothing, while a school bus trundles through without stopping.

It seems like people get up with the sun (such as it is today) on the train, though I wonder if that’s because our Chicago arrival is relatively early. The lounge car fills up as I sit and look out the windows. Feeling guilty, I give up my seat at a table to a family speaking amongst each other in what sounds like German, but I guess could be Dutch, again dressed in homespun, blue and black, white bonnets or black suspenders. I’m told later that the Amish and Mennonites take the train quite a bit… a loophole or special dispensation from their otherwise low-tech way of life. But then, later, I see one using a cell phone, and begin to wonder if, once they leave their community, all bets are off and they get to do what they want. Like walking out into the world happens through a hole in the sheet (inside joke, couldn’t help it).

I consider buying breakfast, but I kind of want to leave the dining car a mystery for a bit longer, and have some granola bars and such that should suffice anyway, and save some money. Besides, the lounge car is comfortable, amongst the chatter of the other passengers, and I don’t really have much desire to upset my calm by moving.

My train departs at this very moment…

I don’t know what I’ll find or see or learn, but I can’t wait to find out!

At every show — and I mean it, I’ve been to hundreds and I’m completely comfortable calling this a truism — there’s at least one guy (and also, yes, always a guy, though there’s a female analogue that may demand later exploration) who is just way more into it than everyone else.

Points to note :

1. It makes no difference how into the band or performance everyone else is… that guy is always two or five degrees more rabidly into it.

2. That guy generally has a bottled beer in his hand (and I’m claiming it’s Bud Light with about 90% accuracy)… hand and bottle are frequently raised up in a low-brow salute to the rock, while the rest of him gyrates in some awful white man’s version of “grooving”.

3. That guy is never black, latino, asian or anything other than super fucking white.

4. That guy frequently screams “Wooooooooo!” or “Yeahhhhhhh!” like he’s at a fucking football game or monster truck rally.

lastly, and most importantly,

5. That guy does not care what kind of music is playing. It’s irrelevant. Denali’s Slo-mo drone rock is treated no differently than The Darkness’s throwback hair metal or, to give last night’s example, Mates of State’s quirky indie rock. To that guy, all forms of live music are indistinct from, it would seem, indoor or outdoor sporting events.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like a jackass hipster talking trash about a (rhetorical, in this case, though easily actualized by, for example, going to any show) dude who’s just enjoying himself. At the same time, I’m pretentious enough to disdain a lack of decorum of that degree. I always wonder if he’s really such a big fan or if he’s the result of some divine equation where Bud Light plus Live Music plus some ineffable genetic or psychological trait results in becoming that guy.

Whatever the cause, don’t be him. I beg you.

Kind of a depressing tag line for an opener perhaps, but frankly it’s kind of the impetus behind my whole mode of thought now.  Life’s way too short to miss out on the majority of it sitting behind a slab of particle board in a small padded cubicle with no windows, listening to other people’s inane conversations or babbling talk radio, working on projects that ultimately can’t possibly satisfy.

A new acquaintance of mine described me as a romantic, and maybe I am, if it means I’m inclined (finally) to pursue something the average person considers unrealistic or even impossible.  I guess it is romantic to believe I can live my life in such a way that the necessity of making money in order to live doesn’t circumscribe, fetter and ultimately define the life it enables.

Rather, I want my work and my life to balance and reinforce each other.  Frankly, that means freedom to move around more.  It means partnering with people who share the vision of work that’s not constrained by arbitrary rules and policies or prescribed by inscrutable or inane superiors.

I’ve been relatively lucky in my work life, in all honesty, but it still wasn’t enough.  So maybe I’m not so much romantic as difficult, hard to satisfy.  I’ll admit it…  I’ve got high standards for what life could and ought to be like, and maybe I pine for a world that doesn’t really exist.

In the end though, we create our own lives, and if the world I want doesn’t exist, I’m just going to have to do everything I can to build it myself, one piece at a time, until I’m in it.

this. fucking. election.