Wicklow Mountains

The stark landscape that lies between us and the sea.

Local currency

Wealth used to mean something you could directly use – food, tools, land. Later gold came to symbolise that wealth, paper notes came to symbolise gold, computer digits came to represent notes … until we get to Wall Street credit-default-swap derivatives, in which hundreds of billions of theoretical dollars can evaporate overnight without ever really existing.

As time goes on and the arcane world of globalised finance breaks down, we might have to rein in our wealth and return it to some tangible form. One way of doing this is to create a local currency, used only in your town or county.

Local currencies can be based on anything, just like national money. If we in County Kildare agreed to begin a local currency – say, the “Dara” – it could stand for one sack of potatoes, one kilo of wheat, one hour of labour, or whatever we choose. Such currencies were common in the 1700s and 1800s, and towns like Cloughjordan in County Tipperary are now considering returning to a local currency like they had 150 years ago.

Such currencies can be a way of keeping the wealth circulating locally, by putting it in a form that cannot be used outside of the local area. If all businesses in town are using the euro, then an international corporate chain could be sucking money out of the local area – by definition, if it is making a profit here, it is taking more money out than it is putting in.

If local businesses agree to use the local currency, though, they are encouraged to patrionise each other’s shops, and keep the money jumping from one person to another without ever leaving town. Money can enter the area through residents’ salaries or wages, but far less of it goes out again. This is one reason certain immigrant groups have thrived -- one study I read showed that Chinese-Americans used each others' small businesses so much that money circulated six times in their community before leaving.

Once currencies are established, local communities could extend the financial infrastructure with local banks or stock exchanges. The latter could be stock markets in the traditional sense – opportunities for local people to share the risks and rewards of their local businesses.

These ideas may seem exotic, but they were done before in Ireland, and can be again. Such local resilience would help in situations like the bank collapses last fall, and ensure that if anything happened to the global money supply, we would have a local back-up.

Photo courtesy of www.numismotography.com.

Woodpile

This is one of three. Personally, I think we have enough. What do you, the viewers at home, think?

More music

From the Bia Linn opening back in July. Just a snippet, used with permission.

Stone bridge

Between the twin towns of Ballina and Killalloo, County Clare. It's a one-lane bridge for cars -- a traffic light lets lines of cars through in turns.

Preparing for autumn

This past weekend was amazingly sunny and pleasant for this time of year, but we are approaching the official end of summer, time to harvest the year’s abundance.

Most gardeners will be flush with certain crops right now, you probably want to preserve them as much as possible. Can, freeze or dry your tomatoes, ferment or pickle your cucumbers, Freeze or dry your courgettes and marrow (zucchini to Americans). Beans and peas can be dried, salted or frozen for food during the winter. All over the hedgerows here the brambles are erupting with blackberries, which can be made into jam to provide Vitamin C during the winter months.

Some plants can be left in the ground all winter – parsnips, for example, can merely be left in and collected as they are needed. Cruciferous vegetables like kale or mangold can be left all winter, its outermost leaves collected a few at a time.

Most gardeners dig up their potatoes for winter, but they can be kept in root cellars. Farmers used to pile up potatoes and cover the pile with earth and straw, with only a short, wide tube poking through at the top to allow the potatoes to breathe. You can keep most root vegetables in boxes of sand in the basement – carrots, beetroot, turnips – and they will usually keep all winter, longer than they would in the refrigerator.

This is also a good time of year to stock up for emergencies or lean times. You can fill shelves in your basement with dried pasta, beans, peas, lentils and other staples, as well as non-edible things like toilet paper. Calculate how much you and the others in your family might eat in a day -- using the trinity of starch (pasta, rice, bread), protein (beans, peas, lentils) and vegetables -- and then plan your meals accordingly.

Finally, if you don’t already cook, this is the best time to learn, to know what to do with all that surplus. You don’t need to do what the celebrity chefs do on television – just know how to assemble starch, protein and vegetables into a meal everyone will eat.

Come on then John

This is one of the local folk musicians who played at the opening of Bia Linn garden back in July. The guitarist, Rubber Keogh, began his set just as the rain began, and you can see it in the background.

The song, by the way, is for young people about to leave childhood behind and work in the mines:

Schooldays over, come on then John,
time to be gettin' your pit boots on
On with your sark and moleskin trousers,
time you were on your way
Time you were learning the pitman's job and
earning the pitman's pay

Come on then Jim, it’s time to go,
time you were working down below
Time to be handling a pick and a shovel you
start at the pits today
Time you were learning the collier’s job and
earning the collier’s pay

Come on then Dai, it’s almost light,
time you were off to the anthracite
The morning mist is on the valley, it’s
time you were on your way
Time you were learning the miner’s job and
earning the miner’s pay

Schooldays over, come on then John,
time to be gettin’ your pit boots on
On with your sark and moleskin trousers, it’s
time you were on your way
Time you were learning the pitman’s job and
earning the pitman’s pay

Rapids

Streams pour over the glacial boulders of the Wicklow Mountains.

An Open Letter to Amtrak

Dear Sir or Madam:

When I visited my native USA this summer, I needed to take my daughter from Minnesota to Missouri, a thousand-mile trek across the Heartland. I decided to use Amtrak, and wanted to share with you my perceptions of the journey.

I wanted to avoid driving for several reasons. I didn’t want to strap a five-year-old into a car seat for 12 hours, or be forced to stop at numerous roadside franchises designed to sell movie promotional toys and congealed pseudo-food. I remembered the last time we made the journey, when a kamikaze deer smashed our rental car and left us stranded on the Iowa highway. Most of all, though, I wanted to see how easily one could journey halfway down the length of America without a car.

Let me start by noting that everyone I dealt with at Amtrak was courteous and helpful, even funny. As superior as the European trains are, their staff would be less likely to make friendly conversation as they processed our ticket, or smile as they gave us directions. A European conductor might be less likely to stop by especially to check on my daughter, or to announce after an empty small-town night stop, “Folks, that was Dwight, Illinois, and we hope that was as exciting for you as it was for us.”

The staff’s best efforts could not make the train ride a pleasant experience, though. We showed up at 7 am for our 7:45 train – the only train going to our destination that day -- which showed up at 8:30. The delays only increased as the day progressed, and we finally arrived in Chicago two hours late, missing our connecting train. We finally reached Alton, Illinois in the small hours of the morning, long after we were supposed to arrive.

As my daughter played in the seats, she poked her leg on a metal corner, and I considered whether I needed to bring her to the emergency room for a tetanus shot. The toilets were miniscule and poorly ventilated. The only food available on the first, nine-hour leg was six cars up, I was not inclined to leave either a sleeping child or my belongings. The dining car on the second leg opened two hours late. The food that I could find was of vending-machine quality but three times as expensive.

It was a pleasant summer evening travelling from Chicago to St. Louis, but the cars were kept sufficiently frigid that the Russian immigrants in front of us complained loudly. Whether because of the food, the temperature or the stress, my daughter spent most of the next day vomiting.

A sixteen-hour plane trip, by contrast, would probably involve a few full meals, many snacks and a selection of movies. I don’t require an on-board masseuse or French waiters, but some accessible juice or pretzels would go a long way.

A more fundamental problem, which I know is out of your control, can be shown by a brief glance at the map on your web site: Amtrak has only a small number of lines that must stretch between two oceans and serve 300 million people.

Nearby towns that do have Amtrak lines are often inaccessible to each other, as the lines run parallel for hundreds of miles without meeting. For example, Denver, CO and La Junta, CO both have Amtrak lines and are 176 miles apart. But to get from one to the other by train, one must travel from Denver, Colorado to Galesburg, Illinois (!), 889 miles away, and then travel another 896 miles back to La Junta – a 1,785-mile trip in all.

Alternately, one could travel from Denver to San Francisco (1,266 miles), San Francisco to Los Angeles (381 miles) and Los Angeles to La Junta (1,115 miles) for a 2,762-mile journey – again, to travel 176 miles.

To use an example closer to my birthplace, Poplar Bluff, MO and Fulton, Kentucky are 117 miles apart, but to travel from one to the other would require an 858-mile trip to Chicago and back. Oklahoma City and Dodge City are 263 miles apart, but a train would have to take a 1,548-mile journey through Fort Worth and St. Louis to get from one to the other.

I estimated these figures by looking at the stops on your web site and Google-mapping the distances between cities, so the mileage may not be exact -- for Google’s directions, like everything else in America, assumes that you will drive. But you get the idea.

To understand how strange this is, consider my own home of Ireland. The Irish are not the most crisply efficient people on Earth, but their trains usually arrive once every half hour, and if they are five minutes late an outraged grumble ripples through the assembled commuters.

Cross-country trips – only the distance of a cross-state trip for us, of course – have fairly good food served in your car, comfortable seats, wireless service for laptops, and so on – and it is no more expensive than Amtrak per unit of distance, even though everything else in the country is two or three times more expensive.

Other European countries have even better service. When visiting Germany, I could tour major cities with a toddler, limited German and no car, through a series of national rail lines, urban trams, buses, subways, and sub-subways under the first set of subways.

A common response is that America is a much vaster country, so compare Ireland’s dozens of lines and stations with a US state about twice the size – say, Wisconsin, with one Amtrak line and two stops. Or compare vast to vast: Russia is larger than the United States, yet Russians travel 1,220 kilometres per person per year by train, while Americans have only 80 kilometres – behind Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Egypt.

You could argue that this indicates our prosperity, as more people can afford their own cars. But far fewer Americans had their own cars when there were more trains, indicating the opposite: that more people need to pay for cars because they have no rail service. Europeans often travel 10,000 percent more by trains than Americans do, and they are not necessarily less prosperous nations.

We used to be better. The golden spike in the transcontinental railroad looms large in our history books, and my country was once covered by a capillary network of lines that reached hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns. Visit or live in Missouri or Kansas towns, as I have, and you will often see a long-abandoned train station in the old town centre, tracks still visible under the grass. We deserve better, as a civilised nation and alleged superpower, than to live with so many new ruins.

Trains or streetcar networks once branched out inside cities as well – my grandparents met and fell in love on the St. Louis trolleys, around the time Judy Garland was singing an ode to them in the film Meet Me in St. Louis. The film was set in 1904 and made in 1944, so the trolleys had been around for decades at that point – but tragically, not for much longer. They and other streetcar lines were bought and destroyed by a coalition of oil, car and tire companies long ago – the companies were later found guilty of criminal conspiracy in federal court, and fined $5,000 each.

Recent rail lines in St. Louis and Minneapolis were built only after decades of fierce opposition, and critics unfavourably compared existing light rail lines to road use – without comparing it to a road that goes from point A to point B without meeting any other roads. I will also hear people claim that the trains are largely empty, without noting that the cars on the road are also largely empty. And if the stations in Minneapolis and Chicago were any indication, there are far more people clamouring to use even Amtrak than the stations can handle.

I realize I’m conflating the apples and oranges of heavy and light rail, Amtrak and streetcars. I realize I’m ranting about decisions that were made far above you or long ago. But I bring it up to show that I am sympathetic to your situation. I suspect your likeable and highly professional staff works very hard under difficult conditions and an insufficient budget – paid, I understand, not by taxes as roads and electric lines are, but on fares alone. I suspect you are considered, like the Postal Service, a vestigial bit of infrastructure in this era of frequent flyers and broadband, relegated to the poor, the elderly, nuns and the Amish, left to die of natural causes.

I think this is seriously misguided. Rail worked for us for decades, and today Third-World peasants can count on transportation freedoms that most Americans cannot. Every surge in the price of fuel, every dire warning about the climate's transformation, every new plunge in the economy makes Americans’ constant driving more difficult and rails more viable.

But if more of us are to travel by rail, we should be able to widely, with trains running many times a day to many destinations. Riding the train should be an experience people will seek out, and to which we will return.

I have used Amtrak before, and I expect I will again, so let me know who I can write to help change this. Feel free to pass it on to your head of projects, your CEO, the Secretary of Transportation, whoever you think appropriate.

And get that metal corner sanded off.

Top photo: Amtrak train (public domain)
Middle photo: Amtrak lines (each dot represents a station)
Bottom photo: Ireland, smaller than Wisconsin. Each dot represents a major city; individual stops not shown.