FlamingText

Road Trip: Portland

From the Beginning
Part 2:
  If you want to see the guts of this country, travel by train. Driving down the interstate it’s easy to get lulled into thinking that you are seeing the countryside you are passing through, but what you are actually seeing is the painted face of the countryside. It is a sort of Potemkin village, like the front of a movie set. The landscape that surrounds an interstate is there for the benefit of the travelers on that interstate. From this vantage point it is easy to believe that this is a land of billboards and service stations and motor lodges. Of course, if you bothered to talk to the locals in any of the towns you passed you would undoubtably find that most of them spend very little time hanging around the Days Inn and the Circle K. Even knowing this, the subconscious effect is powerful. I’m sure it’s the reason why in Washington state all the clearcuts start a quarter mile back from the road; The sight of those big, healthy trees by the highway reinforces the perception that there are more of the same behind them, while also serving as a physical barrier to block the view of hillsides covered with mud and stumps.

  Not so when you take the train. Nobody has taken the trouble to tart up this landscape. What you see is what you get. There are no billboards pointed towards the tracks. What would be the point? What we do see out our window is the industrial heart of these Western Washington towns, lumber yards and grain elevators and gravel pits. We see the sides of buildings that nobody bothers to repaint, faded and peeling logos for lubricant companies and ancient hand-lettered "Pause that Refreshes" signs. We see railroad trestles that have fallen into disuse and been allowed to rust, green ivy wrapping around the reddening iron, moss growing over rivets. The back forty of rural properties, where people inter their derelict cars and broken-down tractors. Second-growth forest, tenaciously reclaiming land that was cleared in the early twentieth century.

  And of course we pass the freight trains that run all day and night to every corner of the continent, carrying goods from place to place. The lifeblood of industry.

  My most recent ex’s maternal grandparents are fundamentalists. Southern Baptists, to be specific. Every once in a while they drop in on her wherever she happens to be and try to talk some Jesus into her. I got to meet them on one of these visits and found them to be perfectly charming, if predictably straight-laced people, as long as we avoided all topics of controversy. We talked about the weather a lot, as I recall.

   Her grandfather is the sort of guy with whom I agree on virtually nothing. He’s a Korean War veteran who thinks of Jesus as his Commander-in-chief in the battle against the forces of Satan. I’ve met plenty of this brand of Christian throughout my life, believers who skimmed over all that boring "thou shalt not kill" and "turn the other cheek" crap and went right for the good part at the end of the Bible. You know, the final action-packed chapter where the forces of Good open up the seventh seal on a giant can of divine whoop-ass and finally settle this thing once and for all. His is a he-man, ass-kicking Jesus: a Nordic superman who long ago laid aside his shepherd’s staff, the better to swing his fiery sword of retribution.

  Anyway, the one point on which we did agree was the sorry state of neglect that our nation’s railways have fallen into, and how it did not bode well for the future. His contention was that the rails were the backbone of industry and were thus the crucial link that enabled our country to keep its lines of supply and distribution flowing freely during WWII, allowing this great nation to bring its unrivalled industrial might to bear against Germany and Japan . He believes that allowing the rail system to lapse, therefore, presents a grave security risk.

  That may well be. I just think that putting goods in lots of boxcars attached to one big engine moving down an unobstructed rail is a more efficient method than parceling the same goods out into semi trucks hooked up to lots of little engines and having drivers haul them down the interstate.

   Plus, I think trains are cool.

  Not only are the vistas lovely, but one can still ride a train without being asked to remove one’s shoes or submit to a strip search. At least until some clown figures out a way to hijack a train and steer it into the Pentagon.

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  With this backdrop scrolling by outside our window, the Diabolical Mr. J and I discuss the finer points of the power ballad, which has become something of an obsession of mine over the course of this last summer. He points out that, structurally, it parallels the development of a symphonic tone poem.

  "Which is more essential to the atmospheric intro?" I ask him. "Mandolin or fog machine?"

Posted by flamingbanjo at September 26, 2004 11:14 AM