7 Color Lagoon

The expatriate is back in town, in Miami, in Florida, in the great, free bastion of liberty, my United States. What do I find when I flick on the no-longer-flickering eye of the TV? A young man, muchacho, student with a hint of serious in his demeanor approaches the podium at the old but un-respected University of Florida and insists on questioning one Senator John Kerry after the politician has given his views and opened the floor for questions.

The U of F has never been regarded as an academic school. It has been noted for its pre-professional ball teams, called “gators” to warn of the harshness of its environment. I remember my uncle’s graduation when I was about 3 or 4 but only the red-brickness of the campus. It had, for a time, a great photography department after I had left another poor Florida state university for an academic college in New York that revels in the protection of liberty, freedom and constitutionalism within an atmosphere of academic freedom firmly protected from the ever-present threat of interference. Waves of paranoia roll across the American landscape at regular intervals.
Each threaten our liberties. There were the Tories who wanted to tie us to King George, southern spies who would have enslaved our history and Japanese to store in the Nisei concentration camps out west (but none for the Germans). Each was a good excuse to protect ourselves by giving away our rights in exchange for “security”.

Now there is a world of Arabs waiting to destroy all of western civilization, to explode themselves in murderous frenzies against women, children and random men. No question but that they are there and do want to bathe the world in blood. But does that mean that America must give up everything that made us free in order to protect ourselves from the forces of evil?

Today Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student did that which students are supposed to do. He thought about politics, about candidates, about the nature of democracy and about his vote and he barged up to the podium in that party school and attempted to engage Senator Kerry in a discussion. Yes. He became heated and took more than his minute and that catapulted him into his 15 minutes of international fame. (more…)

Halloween has become a harbinger of Christmas with Thanksgiving a small detour in the consumerism that thrives on early hype.  I liked these fellows — cheerful versions of the living dead — I found on a Miami walk from shopping mall to shopping center.  They beckoned.  They smiled.  They were empty-headed but seductive, fabric straw men to my rusting tin man.

Another step toward the review of my Nikon D40X which took me by storm and again a camera resides on my shoulder as I stumble through life.  It is not only my first digital but my first auto-focus.  Since a pleasant fellow recently cut my eye open to take out cataracts I can now be a blind photographer.  The camera focuses, develops, prints, presents, drops its own files into iPhoto and seems to find its way to my eye on its own.  I merely provide the shoulder.

Photo © Howard Dratch, 2007.

In New York, the old hunting grounds, shooting grounds, the life that was for so long, there was no way to resist the pull of “going home” to the Hudson Valley. Bard beckoned, the old Alma Mater, a place of learning, love, beauty and a client for 16 years or more.

I had seen pictures of (by Peter Aaron, one of America’s fine architectural photographers) the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, an architectural gem of New York, of the Valley. I still could not picture the building in spite of the drawings for its plans when I left a decade ago, when Frank Gehry was at Bard working on the design nor even after Peter’s fine pictures. It is a complex, new building in a space I had known well which was totally rural and which I feared could not house the work of a post-modern architect who specialized in monumental urban designs. This, after all, is the mind who fashions parts of the Pompidou in Paris and recently designed to fit into the urban landscape of Barcelona. How would it work near the Manor House where I had lived at Bard, in that open field in the woods of the Valley where I had ridden my motorcycle or, much later, parked my car to photograph graduation ceremonies.

The drive to Manor House is a tree-lined, somewhat paved road of one or one-and-a-half lanes that turns into riotous color in the fall, sweet canopies of green in the summer. Then the field is on the right and the dorms (there are two) on the left, themselves nested in the landscape although from a time when buildings were allowed to fight for their place in the viewshed.

I made the hill and the curve and the building was there. Space shifted. It rippled like still water jostled by the fall of a pebble. The closest analogy is Dashboard on my Mac’s screen. When activated it ripples the plane of the desktop of the computer in the same way. It had been dropped into a landscape and, wondrously, fit itself into it as if it belonged forever in that plane and dimension.

Photo © Howard Dratch, 2007

I made the return trip and thought perhaps I had killed myself with physical and emotional exhaustion. Now that I am here, ensconced in a sublet for a month I am trying to rest but have medical appointments seemingly constantly for the first 2 weeks, then time to recuperate. I will post more but must cook and ready myself to be picked up at 7 AM for outpatient surgery.

The trip from New York to Miami was one of my most disorganized. I am disorganized and, this time, constantly making surprising and out-of-character errors.

Highpoints:

Early morning in Jacksonville getting our Sunday New York Times together — the first Sunday in many years I could read the Times leisurely from the real paper edition.

Photos © Howard Dratch, 2007

Jim L. left a comment on my last post on my Amtrak trek northward.  It is more than a comment — an amazingly complete story of the real Amtrak story of passenger railroading that I hope everyone will read.  Here is only the start:

“Howard, nice article on your Amtrak trip. It is interesting for me, a veteran north american rail traveller, to see the perspective of a “new” passenger. While I work in the freight rail business, I get no “deals” riding Amtrak or Via Rail Canada. I have travelled by those carriers, and their railway predecessors, all across the US and Canada over the last 40 years. The service and amenities have varied much over the years. You thought a 10 car 2 locomotive train was big, heck, the New York - Florida Silver Meteor and Silver Star routinely handled 18 car trains up through 1996, when Amtrak was forced to retire several hundred older cars (that did not have retnetion toilettes) and was not provided with enough replacements. They could likely fill 18 car trains now, if they had them, but instead turn people away and use airline style “yield management” to maximize revenue from what they have. VIA Rail Canada’s tri-weekly “Canadian” from Toronto to Vancouver runs with up to three locos and 27 passenger cars (single level )during the summer! Amtrak’s diner service was “streamlined” at the begining of the year, with a reduced staff, and reduced on board preperation, in order to reduce costs (Congress, which likes to micro-manage, thinks they should “make money” on food service, not understanding the concept of “loss leader” or necessity. The fact is, even in the 1930’s when the railways made tons of money on passenger service, the cost of food service usually exceeded the revenue it generated). Having just this summer taken a trip around the country (Tampa-Richmond-DC-Chicago-Seattle-Sacramento-Bakersfield-LA-San Diego-LA-San Antonio-Chicago) I found that most diner crews had “adjusted” well and were good, though those on the east coast Silver trains were not as motivated (like yours). As for the cool temperature in the diner, look at the bright side, given those east coast diners are now 50 to 59 years old (and rebuilt at least once, 9 of them twice), better a cool one than an oven! The Viewliner roomette is indeed “cozy” but you do have the two tiers of windows. As for the horns, engineers have to sound them at each crossing, though I do not understand why Amtrak does not run the sleepers on the rear of the east coast trains. Suggest you try a couple other trips when you have the time…”

I am tripping a non-Kerouac ramble from jungle-Mexico up to tourist-Mexico, on-board a cruise ship to Miami, to New York and back to Miami for the medical games for which I came . This is not the journey of Jack, Mrs. Kerouac’s son nor his roll of paper to document the journey across the land. This is not Robert Frank’s photo-trek across the landscape of American people and faces, waitresses and signs, the landscape of hope and despair. Frank worked with film with real grain, gritty pictures pushed to the limits. Kerouac had a grainy head, highly sensitive and harshly ready to show itself to posterity, that generation down the road of time.

It is my trip into what I thought would be the lonely road of the forgotten railroads washed over by time and jets, federal highways filled with vacation throngs. Not. There is a new view of the rails in America. Changes are happening fueled by the forces of Arab threat and hellish security.

In 1959 Cary Grant crawled into the upper berth of a spacious room on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago in order to hide in the corn rows from the biplane of doom. Back in 1954 or so this boy watched the Silver Meteor in its diesel aerodynamic glory ring its glory bell as it pulled in Tampa’s Union Station from New York. The stuff of dreams, of travel, of exotic New York and of that shiny fine locomotive of gleaming power.

Eisenhower’s federal highway system grew from a semi-military, cold war path for missiles into the economic arteries of America. From it came the red highway network of coast-to-coast trucks and the slow strangulation of the passenger rail, the ascendancy of the 4 car family and the blossom of airline routes tying the nation together at high speed, business travelers rushing to the airport gate to be stopped by all the other travelers headed for the gates.

America reacted to another Pearl Harbor. It installed guards at the gates to shut the barn doors and guard them with machine guns against explosive shoes. Air travel which had fueled great industries began to be painful. There seemed few alternatives. Passenger ships were mostly gone and Amtrak had lost the luster of the glory days of romantic rails.

AN AMTRAK TREK: PART I

This expatriate came visiting America again but needed to keep going from Miami, where the ship left his non-flying soul, to The City: New York. Ah, the romance. Ah, the luxury. Bring on that Pullman porter and hear the bell ring and the proud conductor call “All aboard”.

It is 2007. The ticket was booked on-line. I made this trip about 10 years ago from Rhinebeck, NY, through the City to Tampa to visit my ill mother. I was broke that year — could barely afford a coach ticket. It was better than I thought but the coach for 27 hours was stiffening, the train and toilets clean until somewhere in the South when everyone was too tired, the trip too long.

This is another year, another life and I splurged on the roomette for luxury, for survival and perhaps for the romance of railroading. The roomette was an extra $185 dollars over the $113 for the ticket. It was said to be fine for two but there is only one of me. Super-sized Americans may not fit into the roomette with ease.

Meals in the dining car are included along with bottled water and other first class perks. I didn’t believe it would be worth the money. Trains are great for medium distance intercity travel. New York to Washington, Albany to New York, throw in a Boston and these are great trips of luxury, speed and comfort delivering the traveler from center city to center city without the taxi ride out to where they hid the airports. (more…)