Summertime approaches and, as always, I am thinking of Jason Bourne.
Remember him? The super-spy thrillers starring Matt Damon, so full of car crashes and derring-do. Bourne spends most of the movies darting around Europe from Berlin to Barcelona, Paris to Prague on bullet trains.
And the first time I saw the movie, I whispered to my date: Imagine if he had to do all that on Amtrak! How hilarious would it be that a hero could get anywhere on an Amtrak train! Chukka-chukka-chukka goes the 19th century choo-choo along the rails doing all of 40 mph — the world would be lost.
And I think of this each summer as I love road trips, but in America that means only traveling by highways that are all in disrepair, or so out-of-date as to be bursting at the seams. Drive down Interstate 95 to New York, Washington, D.C., or, for me, Wilmington, N.C., and you might was well be riding on the back of a snail! Six lanes worth of cars must travel on four lanes of road. The 495 anyone? The Pike?
So each summer I dream of living in a world where our America has achieved the seemingly impossible dream of having a modern rapid transit system.
Infrastructure is an issue that comes up often in election cycles — only recently President Trump hosted an “Infrastructure Week” in which he was going to gin up the old bipartisan spirit, and that lasted, literally, about three minutes before he stormed out.
Many Democratic presidential contenders speak of infrastructure, usually as a public works project that would update decaying bridges and roads and pay good wages while it does. There is a great and much neglected public need for simply keeping our infrastructure from literally falling apart.
But there is a less noticed social need to our infrastructure that goes directly to the heart of our current political polarization. We are trapped in our socio-economic bubbles — separated by the class barriers of college education and experience, just look at the Tofu Well between Hampshire and Hampden counties! We are isolated, live in our social-media echo chambers, rubbing elbows with and hearing only what the like-minded say and feel.
We have become several nations, in our minds at least — but the borders are often geographical. They say consciousness follows experience, and what we mostly experience is a geographical isolation in a world where technology also invites us to be isolated.
What used to be called Flyover Country (but is now often known as Trump Country) is a vast middle in a huge nation that is increasingly locked in itself — walled off as it were. Folks of Flyover Country are far from metro regions that they increasingly see as the centers of elitism they despise and want to see laid low by the likes of Trump.
Ditto for the urban dwellers, like us in Hamp, who increasingly look down our noses at those who have not had our experience — middle class upbringing, college and liberal values that fell like summer rain. But we too, lived behind walls of sameness.
As of now we cannot physically escape our sameness ghetto without enduring hours of torture on the highways and interstates. Does anyone not rich enough to fly at least business not despise airplane travel?
But imagine, if you can, that we lived in an absolute paradise where trains that stopped in Springfield could carry us to, say, Nashville, almost 800 miles away, in three hours.
And yet the — I guess — utopias known as Japan, Spain, France or China have and do just exactly that!
If we begin to invest in high speed trains now — think of it as a Big Dig for America — the trains themselves would be approaching 300 miles an hour by the time we were done. The only thing utopian about it is the idea that we could break the social/geographic ghettoization of the American mind. And Red Staters would benefit a much as the Blues.
Even if we take a modest 250 mph modern bullet train, the folks of Sioux Falls, North Dakota, could spend the day in Chicago after less than 2.5 hours on the train — and this is getting on in downtown and getting off in downtown. No more shoes removed or endless taxi rides to and from far flung airports.
It’s 475 miles from Missoula, Montana, to Seattle. Not even two hours, do some shopping, have lunch, check out the buskers and back home. Letcher, Kentucky, to New York City, 875 miles in 2.5 hours. My family in Wilmington, North Carolina, could take a day trip to Washington, D.C., 370 miles, in less than two hours. No cars, no hotels, no planes.
And it would spread the wealth, but more evenly, as well as our social experience of our own vast nation.
I long to see a presidential candidate with a map of the USA — a spider web of high speed rail lines connecting the far-flung corners of the nation to its urban centers — and very much vice versa, as studies show that liberal urban dwellers long to get out of the cities.
I imagine that map, the web of high sped rail lines and they look like stitches to me — stitches that could, over time, keep us from literally coming apart at the seams.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net