All travel looks backward. Technological advances build on what came before, and often the modes of transportation that seem revolutionary today claim their novelty by redefining earlier modes — quicker, safer, easier on the psyche or the seat of your pants, but based on concepts developed over generations.
Generations on the move. The settler pushing over the plains with his family, horse and carriage, now the U-Haul with trailer hitch. Current-fueled raft, ocean steamliner, speedboat, personal watercraft, kayak, canoe. The physics behind today's jumbo jets, the same physics behind the Wright Brothers first flight, though the size and comforts of air travel may have improved a bit. A train is a train, and riding the train into work every day I can imagine how passengers on those first transcontinental rails must have felt, hurtling across the countryside, speed at their window, the chug of car hitched to car in tandem, lungs once filling with burning coal smoke, now filling with chemical exhaust of unknown origin.
The variety of America is evident in its travel. Mark Twain, in "Roughing It," traveled from Missouri to Nevada, first on riverboat, then by stagecoach — no Pacific railroad yet, Twain informs us. No less adventure more than a century later when Steve Martin and John Candy found their way home on a mix of planes, trains and automobiles.
On my recent trip to visit Kyle and Keith in St. Paul, Minn., Liz gave me a ride by car to the train station, and I caught a Metro-North train down to Harlem and the M60 bus from Harlem to La Guardia, where I caught a nonstop Northwest flight to MSP, and there another car was waiting, with Kyle and Keith inside. The trip home run in reverse. I get home, find my car has been towed for some emergency road work. (Why is such nonsense even possible this day and age, why such an assault on efficiency and mobility?)
And it intrigues me that Keith, Kyle and I have three distinct ways of getting to work. I spend nearly two hours on a train. Kyle spends maybe 45 minutes in a car. Keith pedals a few minutes on his bicycle — the "way of the future," as 19th century Paul Newman famously said in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" before stealing Katherine Ross, Robert Redford's girl, for a ride on the handlebars. Cue the Burt Bacharach.
I, too, dabble in the bicycle commute, at least as far as the train station. Someday, perhaps, we will all commute by bicycle. Viva la revolution, as Keith would say. All forms regress as they progress. Trains, once a dying form, are making a comeback. Planes are falling out of style with their rising ticket prices and increasing fees. As cities rise and small towns decline, the transportation mix will evolve rapidly. But no wheels need be reinvented. With everything close at hand, the best way to get from Point A to Point B might just be a short walk.
