Behind Door No. 1, a $12 Billion Train. Behind Door No. 2 ...

Comparisons, anyone? Brightline Holdings, a company developing high-speed train service from Las Vegas to the L.A. area, broke ground the other day on a system it says will cost $12 billion. The 218-mile route will include four stations. The company says it will begin service in 2028, in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. We’ll see how credible those estimates and promises are, but in…

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Birthday Chronicles and Travelogue

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How Helper (Utah) Got Its Name, and Other Stories

Helper, Utah, and environs. (this is on the northern outskirts, and according to some maps, this was part of a hamlet, or maybe just a siding on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, called Martin at some time in the past. Maybe the locals still call it that. In October 2022, I took a driving trip that took me to Salt Lake City, Moab, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, among other…

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'For Bigness, It Has the Right to Be Called "Colossal" '

A friend sent me a link to the movie trailer below — “The Colossus of Rhodes.” It was made in 1961 and is listed as the directorial debut of Sergio Leone, who found his niche a few years later remaking Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.” After seeing this preview, I don’t think you need to see the movie. The script for the trailer: a tour de force of overheated verbiage. The delivery: Bombastic and…

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Your American Mass Shooting Calendar

This week marks the anniversary of a couple of recent mass shootings: The massacre of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, last year, and the slaughter of transit workers in San Jose two years ago. Naturally there will be coverage of the anniversaries. We’ll revisit the trauma. We’ll hear hopes and prayers that we’ve learned something about how to prevent similar tragedies. The anniversaries made me…

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From My Big Pile of Old Baby Boomer Stuff: Governor Otto Kerner, 1965

Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, 1965. The way I remember it is I was home from school — I was a fifth-grader at Talala School in Park Forest, in Chicago’s south suburbs. I’m sure I was bored and looking for something to do — I wasn’t that sick. I was as interested in politics as any fifth-grader — well, not counting my former classmate Billy Houlihan, whose father, John J. Houlihan, was getting…

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Dispatch from '73, Part 2: The One-Legged Man and Other Strangers on the Train

Amtrak’s San Francisco Zephyr in Denver, April 1975. I believe the station and trainyard were blanketed by several inches of snow when my train passed through in January 1973. Photo: Drew Jacksich via Wikimedia. Continuing the mini-saga of my first trip west in January 1973. Part 1 ended with the Amtrak’s San Francisco Zephyr just rolling out of Denver in the snow. As I transcribe this, I’m…

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Dispatch From '73: Chicago to Oakland on the San Francisco Zephyr (Part 1)

'The train rolls out slow from Chicago's center, and gathers speed through the West Side. The afternoon is cloudy and is turning dark as you enter the Prairie, past the grey, dirty town of Aurora.'

I arrived in the Bay Area for the first time 50 years ago this month. I was 18 and had never been more than a few miles west of the Mississippi River. On summer evenings sometimes I’d see clouds building in the west and thought maybe that’s what the Rockies might look like on the horizon. After working for eight months at my first job — as a copyboy at Chicago Today — and saving most of what I…

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Journal of Holiday Greeting Studies, Boxing Day Edition

Journal of Holiday Greeting Studies, Boxing Day Edition

On Christmas Day, we went out to a spot on the other side of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to check out the bird life on a trail around a tidal marsh and channel. There was lots to see — mostly waterfowl and shore birds with the odd raptor and corvid thrown into the mix. We encountered many two-legged mammals, too. Generally speaking, when I find myself passing someone else on a trail, I make it…

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Dawn of the Toot

Dawn of the Toot

Like many others put off or revolted or … — what’s stronger than “revolted”? — by developments at Twitter, I’ve started a Mastodon account — mostly to see if it’s a viable alternative to what I’ve gotten used to over the last 15 years as a news and information tool. This is still Day One, but early signs are that it might. My major first-day “learning”: Individual messages are “toots,” not…

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Was It Wild?

Boy Scout path, La Loma Park, Berkeley. Late Guy Fawkes afternoon, the last bit of daylight before we turned the clock back an hour from “savings” to standard, I hiked up into the hills. It’s one of the best things about living here in Berkeley, the fact you can stroll out your front door and walk for miles and miles in any direction; and if you choose to head east and up, you’ll soon be far…

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Road Blog: Utah Ghost Bike

Road Blog: Utah Ghost Bike

Roadside memorial for Tyler Droeger, killed in September 2021 when a driver drifted off this stretch of U.S. 89 in central Utah. Along U.S. 89 just north of Hatch, Utah. Tyler Droeger was riding a 4,000-mile circuit of the West on a fund-raising mission in late September 2021 when he was hit from behind by someone who drifted across a rumble strip and the highway shoulder where the cyclist was…

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Road Blog: What's in a Sign?

Road Blog: What’s in a Sign?

Driving in search of an aspen grove I had read about — more accurately described as a “clone,” a grove generated from a single seed and growing from a single root system — that is alleged to be the world’s most massive organism, I happened across the above, painted on the side of the general store in Koosharem, Utah. That’s about 150 miles south of Salt Lake City and not too awfully far from…

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Loneliest Roads

U.S. 6, Nye County, Nevada. At some point in the not so ancient past — July 1986 — Life magazine off-handedly dubbed U.S. 50 across Nevada “the loneliest road in America.” The picture caption that included that phrase also quoted an auto club official as saying of the highway: “It’s totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there…

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Road Blog: Pack, Shop, Shave, Cut Hair, Fill Bird Feeders ...

Road Blog: Pack, Shop, Shave, Cut Hair, Fill Bird Feeders …

Lake Don Pedro — the reservoir that captures the Tuolumne River downstream of the Hetch Hetchy system — along Highway 120. Day One of an n-day trip to Salt Lake City and destinations still undetermined. I’m in Lee Vining now after driving from sea-leval Berkeley out of the Bay Area, across the Valley, through the foothills and Yosemite and up the Tioga Road to Tioga Pass, elevation 9,945 feet.…

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County Courthouse

Going through some pictures I took on a quick drove around North Texas four years ago. This is the Foard County Courthouse — humble and lacking in the architectural fancies that characterize some of the other courthouses I’ve seen in the Lone Star State. The plainness appeals to me. It’s even more pronounced in the Google Streetview of the spot The town of Crowell, 65 miles west of Wichita…

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Sunday Storm Report, or Emotional Rain

Sunday Storm Report, or Emotional Rain

Rain shower, with scrub jay and stiff breeze. Well, it’s here. Rain, I mean. Not in copious, toad-strangling, gully-washing volumes. And I just heard a National Weather Service forecaster on the radio counsel patience — more will be coming later today, overnight, tomorrow. As I said the other day, we’ll take what we can get. In drought times, and even just at the end of our long summer dry…

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