7. City of New Orleans - Arlo Guthrie
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It's been a few months since Keene passed; Dan is standing by the subway station, and he is thinking. Dangerous, a voice says from somewhere inside, and it doesn't sound like his, and he smiles.
Subways, sure. Commuter trains over the water to and from the Jersey side. But it's just not the same anymore, and he fingers the subway token. There was another train ride, ages ago, when he was young - he went with his family, all across the country, watching the landscape go by outside. It'd been fascinating, all texture and blurs of color and little details that rose up out of the noise floor. The people that ran the train, the feel of motion-without-motion for days on end. The peeling paint and the worn carpet in the cars, passed over by more feet than he could ever have counted. Warm. Human.
Now, it's all fast trains that disgorge office workers and transients, back and forth, back and forth, not the elegant rolling nomads that wandered the country for its own sake. America's good at a lot of things, he thinks, and one of them is pushing aside and retiring the beautiful things and the human things when it's no longer convenient to keep them around. Everything gets obsoleted eventually, all of its dreams and dreamers and native sons and daughters.
The smile is gone with the memory. The subway token clatters to the ground. He'll be walking today.
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