When The Lonesome Whistle Blows

It’s not especially cheap at $753 – train fare plus a pair of earplugs – but a trip on Amtrak’s Silver Star from Winter Park, Fla., to Boston’s South Station certainly knocks pop culture sprawling. Bye, Britney! Bye, Paris!

Okay, I admit I did carry a Starbucks on board. But otherwise, when the northbound train rolled out of Winter Park, I bid farewell to TV, billboards, and the incivilities of air travel. Boarding the train instead of a plane, I wrenched myself as decisively out of the mainstream as 30 years ago when I gave up my car for a bicycle.

Of course I’ve driven cars since. Fifteen years ago I married a woman with three cars and I still drive one of her remaining two. But while cars have once more become my default choice for getting around, now I also rely on alternatives when I travel. I may ride an urban rubber-wheeled trolley, may prop my bike on a bus. Back in the ’80s, I led the campaign to get bikes on Miami’s Metrorail. In 2007 I proposed the idea of a ferry crossing between Fernandina Beach, Fla., and St. Mary’s, Ga., a link that I helped inaugurate 18 months later when the Cumberland Sound Ferry Service re-connected the pair of historic towns for the first time in 92 years.

Read the entire article in the Summer 2010 issue