I’ve just completed a long stay with a dear friend and sister in faith and by adoption. It was a healing time, that helped me to regain some equilibrium and hopefully refresh my mind enough to finish some projects. I’m truly grateful for the opportunity and for the hospitality that she and her extended family and friends offered (in some cases proffered).
That said, I traveled by train. I’ve no particular distaste for flying, but the quarters a re cramped and the experience is made worse by the hysterical and draconian security measures. The body scanners for instance are a marvel of technology, and completely and utterly in opposition to the constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable search. So I took the train.
Trains are a source of liberty in travel, in that you can get up and move about. You don’t have to operate the vehicle yourself. You can eat, drink and relieve yourself on your own schedule, within reason, and never have to stop for either. But trains are not glamorous so in general they do not atrtact the brightest and best America has to offer. The crew of a train works very hard to provide as comfortable and safe an environment as possible, while dealing with the same complaining, selfish and hostile public that flies or buses or uses the highways.
The difference is that the members of the crew are often stretched beyond their mental, emotional and physical capacity by public service jobs. This is not a fault of the applicants, who certainly should be congradulated for getting work and keeping it, for stretching themselves and for enduring the harsh reality of living aboard public transportation. But they are being asked to do a job that should pay better and should be filled with brighter, more creative and in some cases younger people.
The smiling pretty face and efficient coping of the flight attendant, aboard AmTrak, is replaced with the obstreperous nature and limited abilities that would normally be found among the TSA or your local mall security. People doing their best with inadequate ability leads to mistakes. Couple that with an intermittantly and inadequately funded Railroad and you can imagine that some egregious events and equipment failures occur, regularly.
I want to thank the passengers and the crew of the trains I traveled on: The 14, the 3 and 4, the 50 and the 51. Thank you for making the best of a bad situation and for being human in an environment that encourages the ape within us all. And I thank God for getting me through it and that it is in fact over.
Until, yes, I intend to it again,
Fred