This train don’t carry no con men, this train;
This train don’t carry no con men, this train;
This train don’t carry no con men,
No wheeler dealers, here and gone men,
This train don’t carry no con men, this train.

                                              — Woody Guthrie

 

   Carol and I were enjoying an afternoon of profound joy and utter dissipation on our third and final day aboard Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, when my idle mind wandered into the devil’s workshop that belonged to the new CEO of the nation’s one and only long distance passenger rail service. Seems the same kind of cost-cutting mentality that would reduce the cost of a face by cutting off the nose has invaded the executive halls of Amtrak. Get this:

This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.
This train is bound for glory, this train.

                                         –Woody Guthrie

 

    There’s two ways to look at the climate change issue from the observation car of a long-distance train:

 

1)    The planet is just too big for one species to destroy it on its own.

2)    What a horrible species we are to be able to destroy a planet this big all on our own.

   Fortunately, Carol and I were simply enjoying ourselves too much as we awoke to day 2 of our excursion from L.A. to Chicago to consider the prospects of global warming. Except maybe to smugly contemplate the smaller carbon footprint we were impressioning on the earth compared to planes and automobiles. We had bigger fish to fry, ecologically speaking.