AN ODE TO MODERN TRAVEL

ASTONISHING, IS IT NOT, that it is possible to travel over six thousand miles in just over two weeks and have about ten days to spend with friends in two beautiful parts of North America, British Columbia and Oregon? Three days or so by car and, returning, one day by plane. I shudder to think of my carbon foot print (about 2,600 pounds of CO2 for the car and 1300 pounds for the air travel).

Despite the cost to the environment, there is a lot to be said for going by road. For a start, one gets to understand HOW BIG are the United States. There are greater distances across land masses, of course (try Paris to Peking), nevertheless the US is VAST. Six hours in a plane at 37,000 feet can give little idea of this. Next, one realizes how richly endowed is the land one traverses...vast cropland and grazing land, oil wells, coal mines, and wind-farms are passed by. Another advantage is the opportunity to stop off at historic places to get some sense of how Europeans encroached the land, numerous as the stars in the sky, advancing relentlessly westwards.
I got to see the faces of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jefferson carved into the side of Mt. Rushmore and the hugely more massive ongoing work of carving the Crazy Horse Memorial. This had me thinking more about the Indian wars than the pioneers, though they are inextricably intertwined. It was natural to stop by the Battle of the Little Big Horn Memorial (Custer's Last Stand) just a mile or two off I90, passing through Montana. Finally, at gas stations and stores along the way, one gets to meet local folk eager to know from where you come and where you are going, and to tell you about their place.

Apart from the relative brevity, there is not much to be said for air travel. As a one-time private pilot of gliders and small planes with the privilege of a thousand or so hours in the sky in such, I confess to detesting commercial flying. The flight is not so bad (time to read and sleep) but...the airports and the "security"!!! Rarely is the walk to or between connections short or convenient (beware of Philadelphia, surely one of the the worst for finding connections). Then there is 'Security'...having traversed airports in other countries, this seems to me be overdone or even absurd. On their occasional tests of this system, the FBI reportedly get a high proportion of contraband items such as hand guns past inspections. At any moment, in the US, there are 250,000 folk in the air aboard some 5,100 airplanes. Per day, that is a lot of folk passing through security, removing their shoes, belts, and what not. One morning last year, at Denver International, I lined up for more than half an hour in a queue snaking this way and that before temporarily discarding belt, shoes, hat and coat. On the upside, this provides employment for many folk.

Going out to the airport by bus, I was stuck by the vast amount of land dedicated to airports, necessitated by the increasing length of runways in several directions and also occasioned by the need for supporting services. To tell the truth, I have began to feel a certain sense of absurdity with this business of air travel. For example, at Phoenix Airport last Tuesday, the pilot informed us that, by a narrow moment at push back, we had lost our slot in the takeoff queue and had been demoted to number 20 and might have to wait a further half hour to take off. Luckily, ground traffic control figured a way around this. So many potential bottlenecks on so much ground!

My mind went to my last Very Fast Train trip from Paris to Marseilles. After validating my ticket, I walked down the platform, stepped onto the train, stowed my baggage, and found my seat. To the minute, the train glided out of the station and, speeding at almost 170 mph and stopping at important towns along the way, arriving some three or so hours later. What, no 'security'! No, and excellent food service, cell phone use, Internet aboard...and, so quiet and restful. Starting and stopping seem so much safer and less dramatic on a train compared with taking off and landing on a plane. No danger, either, of the locomotive's engines being stopped by digesting large birds.

I suppose we have been as much in love with air travel as with car travel. If there are future generations who have not descended into ignorance and savagery, they might well wonder at the absurdity of our travel arrangements based on cheap oil. Cars and trucks need roads and planes need airports. In the US, paved main roads cover an area the size of Kansas and who knows how much farm land and marsh land have been claimed for airports.

Maybe the day will come when travel over land will be limited to trains. I hope so, and I hope that President Obama will take the first steps to secure this. Air travel over oceans is amazingly convenient but I expect it will be replaced by cruise ships for most of us. Air travel may have had its day but what a blast it was for a while. It was a triumph of romance and adventure over economics (only rarely are airlines actually profitable) and for a while, it shrank the world.

Back on the West Coast

LOCATION: FORT LANGLEY, BC
So here I am, some 3000 road miles from Painted Post, enjoying this historic place, the site of the first British settlement in this part of the world. There are plenty of signs of their visits prior to setting up here to establish a fur trade center to compete with the Russian presence in Alaska. For instance, Captain James Cook left a bottle near what is now Anchorage containing a note claiming that part of the world for the King. There is a fine statue of him at Anchorage. Mt. Hood, Portland's local volcano was named for a British Admiral and Lewis and Clarke, on entering Oregon Territory, found that the Indians had many English words and possessed English sailors' jackets! Oregon Territory came to include British Columbia, northern Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. California was then under the influence of Spain and was really part of Mexico.
The Louisiana Purchase led to a great change and, with Jefferson's initiative, the Lewis and Clarke expedition brought back a better idea of what was beyond the Mississippi. Even before their return, many settlers were heading up the Mississippi into the Missouri...going West! However, on the other side of the Rockies, those Brits had quite a strong presence through the fur trade and visits of ships. It took a flood of settlers traveling the Oregon Trail to make fast the claim of the US in this part of the New World. In Kennewick WA, on the bank of the Columbia River, there is a plaque memorializing the President's instructions to the Army Corps of Engineers to get the road through and over the Cascade Range so that settlers could ensure the presence of Americans against the British influence in what is now the Seattle area, during the 1850s.
Immersed as I may be in all this history, the immediate reason for my being over here is to deliver my car to its new owner, visit friends, and celebrate several birthdays. Nonetheless, my interest in history provoked a desire to visit Rapid City in South Dakota. This city is near Mt. Rushmore on the side of which are carved the faces of four Presidents of critical influence in US history (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and 'Teddy' Roosevelt). I hope that there is room for another and that, one day, the face of Obama will be there also. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was there on August 10th, 1936, for the dedication of the face of Jefferson (this had to be done a second time due to weakness in the granite found during the first attempt at carving his face). FDR had no intention to make a speech but, so impressed was he by the memorial, he had this to say,

".....There will be (other dedications) by other presidents...when we get through there will be something for the American people that will last through not just generations but for thousands and thousands of years, and I think that we can perhaps meditate on those Americans of 10,000 years from now...meditate and wonder what our descendants - and I think they will still be here - will think about us. Let us hope... that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under."

FDR said these words during particularly difficult times - the Great Depression still held sway - with many characteristics of our own time. What with climate change crisis and impending loss of cheap energy, nations face the challenge of re-inventing the essence of our culture to save not just American life but that of our human race and countless species. One must admire his optimism about the endurance of our species and our life but it is open to question where his sense that there will be those around in ten millennia who will applaud our efforts. I pray there will be but we will have to reach deep into wisdom, courage, creativity, and collaboration to ensure a good outcome.

Two books I am reading are assisting me to see that there may be a way through our impending troubles:
'The Green Collar Economy', by Van Jones; and
'Resilient Cities', by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer.
I like these books because they are showing me that there are actions I can take that are beyond personal survival, that we as individuals can find ways to influence the development of our cities and towns that may ameliorate or even avert the troubles that we will surely bring down upon our heads if we do little, or not enough.
I am sure that Obama is on the right track; reading these two books will show you why. I recommend them to your reading. I will pass on my own gleanings in future blogs. In the meantime, food for thought:

It is time to shift our attention from what we have inherited from our parents to what we are borrowing from our children.

WHAT? ANOTHER CAR!!

I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD COME TO THIS...
Suddenly I have two cars: the ancient 1991 Infiniti G20 most of you know has been in my possession since November 1999 and which I thought would remain so for the rest of my driving life (over 295,000 miles on the odometer and like its owner...in excellent condition) and now a 1998 Nissan Altima. Here they are, a little like soldier ants mating, end to end:

As with so much of my life, there is a bit of a story about this. Briefly, I discovered the other week that it would be almost impossible and certainly a long and tedious process to register the Infiniti here due to it having an Oregon salvage title. Luckily, I was able to buy the Altima very quickly from a professor about to go on sabbatical and solved my transport problem. The Infinity has in store a pleasant fate...a story I will tell in an email at the end of the month.

From the pictures, one might think that I do not know if I am coming or going... in certain respects, a metaphor for my state of being at times. You will understand this reference when I tell you I am reading two books, The Party's Over (Richard Heinberg) and Divorce Your Car (Katie Alvord). These lead me to think I should be ridding myself of cars, not acquiring them.

In 'The Party's Over', Heinberg reviews the possible effects of the diminishing of fossil fuels, particularly oil, and the changes that might well overtake us as we overtake the asymptote of global oil production ('Peak Oil') even as global demand continues to rise. While this is not pretty reading, I strongly recommend you check this book out. We are having a break from this currently as we enter a global recession caused by the financial madmen (once revered as financial wizards) on Wall Street. Amazingly, gasoline costs around $2 a gallon at the moment. A problem is, everyone in India and China wants to have a motor car just like we do. Inevitably, this will adversely affect availability leading to rising prices. That the oil refinery workers here in the US are contemplating going on strike, as I write, and may well be when you read this, thus closing down 60 refineries, will intensify matters.

Katie Alvord urges us to end our love affair with the automobile. This also makes for chilling reading; do not pick it up late at night if you want to get a good sleep. However, do not let this stop you from reading this remarkable book. The history of the car in our society and its effect on remaking our culture is well told, and the ill effects attendant on our devotion to the car elegantly detailed.

So, why do I have a car? Like many of you I am caught in the pincers of urban misdesign. While we have a Wal-Mart and a Home Depot just down the road a mile or so and easy to reach by walking (no footpaths or sidewalks by the way, however) we are five or so miles from the town while my classes at college (thoughtfully perched up on a high hill well outside town) are about seven miles distant. I can make do with cycling most of the year but, here in winter with the temperature 10 to 15 degrees below freezing most days, one does not see many cyclists abroad!

It is no comfort that this 'urban misdesign' is the direct result of our dependence on the car as the center point of our culture. Those of you who live in Portland, Oregon, be thankful for the city planners who have managed urban growth pretty well (but maybe not well enough if Heinberg is halfway right), have developed a rich network of public transport, and have encouraged bicycle use. According to Wayne Gretzky, the secret of great hockey is to be where the puck is going to be. For the rest of us, the key may be to know where the global currents are taking us and arrange ourselves accordingly.