San Francisco Business Times Week of April 30, 1990

Opinion

Rail can recover Westering spirit

Mankind’s destiny may lie in space — as in outer space. It used to lie out West. Perhaps John Steinbeck’s cowboy in “Red Pony” wasn’t too far off when he lamented to the boy, Jody, that “Westering” had died out.

“No place to go, Jody. Every place is taken. But that’s not the worst — no, not the worst. Westering’s died out of the people. Westering isn’t a hunger any more. It’s all done.. .“

Yes, there’s land in North Dakota — but few jobs and neither Uncle Sam nor our once mighty industries have the wherewithal to build sustainable cities there. Yes, there’s land In warmer places — but little water.

Unfortunately, the cowboy is right — running out of places to go is not the worst part. The spirit that could deal with these — or any problems, seems to be gone. The cowboy had a rawhide tough spirit, toughened by overcoming challenges. In his twilight, he was being surrounded by those who got too much, too easily. Westering was dying.

Today challenges are different. They include fighting poverty at home and abroad. They include nurturing the environment, raising literacy and increasing understanding of complex issues in a fast-moving world.

Poverty isn’t fought by increasing homelessness, by decreasing America’s home ownership rate, by forcing longer, air polluting commutes, by forcing parents to be stuck behind a wheel instead of playing games and teaching life skills with their kids. Yet many so-called environments would smother the “Westering” spirit that can and wants to address those problems.

To the cowboy, the horse was part of his means to challenge himself and build his western spirit. Today, the iron hose must be part of our way to bring westering. Those who want to smother the Westering spirit, who only want you to see the short-term answer, who want to pass the problem on, ask you to ignore the iron horse and its steel hooves. The iron horse, however, will allow us to address today’s frontier challenges.

Once the rail business was filled with visionaries. Then the easy money of automobiles, concrete, federal largess and good times drained rail companies of money and visionaries. Soon, before the Europeans and Japanese take that business from us, we must bring back the rail lines, not just for Amtrak tourists but for everyday living.

To do that, however, will require political land-use decisions that require a visionary, Westering spirit. In Marin County, that means taking on the “so-called environmentalists” who have had so much property equity given to them so easily that they have become today’s smotherers of the can-do Western spirit.

Yes, but they have enriched our vocabulary. They have given us words like NIMBY, where “Not in My Back Yarders” cause LULUs (Locally Undesirable Land Uses) that force long commutes that deteriorate our air quality while most of the politically adept NIMBYs richly benefit by becoming a DECME, “Density Erasers Causing Million Dollar Estates.”

~Yes, there are answers, to traffic-induced air pollution; lower Infrastructure costs, more affordable housing and more efficient use of time that can be spent making each of us better world citizens. The answers go back to what made the West interesting. They go back to building little towns along the rail line.
What worked then needs to come back into vogue today—least we eat up prime agricultural land, continue to ass to our deficit by importing more than half of our oil needs, and lose touch with the strength that comes from community, which does not grow behind the wheel of a car.

That common-sense answer ties affordable housing, transit and community together. As logical as putting workable communities along rail line is, it would take political courage and lots of work to overcome the power of parochial interests that oppose it.

Has our local leadership really forgotten how the Westering spirit made us great? Is it true that “Westering’s died out of the people. Westering isn’t a hunger any more?”

Dwayne Hunn is executive director of North Bay Transportation Management Association and assistant executive director of Novato Ecumenical Housing.