Train of Thought 5, 6 and the Rest

This is why I don't post series.
And this is why we don't have nice things.

I have long since ended my trek, but I will still recant the end as it was so powerfully inspiring.

The last two days drove by slowly with Illinois, Ohio, Montana, Indiana and eastern Washington rolling on by my window, by every window. I don't have these states in an accurate order because they don't need to be.
What wasn't dilapidated houses and shut-down steel mills still coughing smoke from the years past of poor health and union busts
was fields, open fields underneath the worst of overcast heavens.

Big Sky Country was wide, rambling country.
I sang "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks to my Dad for two days.

He told me about a History Channel special about ruins before I graduated. The show glossed over the ruins of previous civilizations and stated that the modernity's lust for progress and rebuilding has arrested our ruins.
Well Dad, I beg to differ.
These are our ruins: The empty factories and the abandoned homes next to the train tracks. They are our ruins. The Iron Age is over for America.

On a lighter note, some two-seated woman totally hit on my dad as he was stumbling back from the bathroom. Thank you Gods of Contrast.

As we came up on the Rockies, he told me a couple stories about his childhood and why he loves trains. For the first time in my life, I could imagine him as a child, not as an addled young man in the Village or a fisherman off the Oregon Coast, but as innocent and ignorant.
There were a lot of people in the 50s that didn't know any better. That's as much as I can say before I'm stealing stories.

Indirectly, I learned that one thing that can't be taught or explained is nostalgia. We were cooped in a box slightly smaller than the 50 square feet of my dorm room and forced to stare at each other or the dull and dying outside world partly because he was attached to the grandeur of the railroad in his memory.
I'll tell you what, I was born with jetfighters and space ships. We don't need trains like the baby boomers.

It was still a journey and I've seen middle, run-down America.
Amtrak won't go out of business, at least, for the next five years, so if you want to get nauseous and glue yourself to window across the States, I'll tell you, it's an experience.