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The other day my wife and I were driving in rural Louisiana on old highway 190 which was the interstate highway of my youth. I began to recall the old 190 - asphalt and weeds, Esso stations with cheerful attendants who filled up my mom's 8-cylinder Oldsmobile with 25¢ a gallon *leaded* gas. Even then the farms that we passed were already turning a sepia grey. Jim Crow and civil rights hadn't entered the national consciousness yet.

As we drove I noticed a mound that ran alongside the new concrete highway 190, and wondered what it was. Suddenly as the highway rose to a bridge over a stream, I noticed that a trestle connected the two mounds on either side of the water. The mound was the remnant of the old train tracks that ran next to highway 190 and created and connected such towns as Houston, Beaumont, Lake Charles, Hammond, Covington, Slidell, Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula, Mobile, Pensacola, and ultimately Miami and Los Angeles.

Lives and dreams were built on those rails. Whole cultures were transported from one dot in the forest to another, and the United States grew and homogenized into the vast embodiment of its immigrant forebears that it is today. The train ran across this bridge once. And we were young.