The Horse, the Train, and the Car

One of my favorite factoids

is that horses aren't

indigenous

to the Americas,

that an animal

we associate

so closely

with our lands

was a migrant, too.

(Although really

in the final analysis,

everything is.)

And anyway,

what so seldom gets acknowledged

is just how much space

there is

in the United States,

how we tend

like so many countries

to fixate

on the mass population centers

and minimize the sparse,

even denigrate those citizens

as inconsequential,

backwards,

which is funny,

and ironic,

and in all other ways

a curious way

to interpret them,

since both the rich and the poor

dream of ample land

in which to dwell,

and it's only in cities

where land is scarce,

is always at a premium,

and where expansion

never seems to be

enough.

A digression.

So when they were introduced,

horses came in handy,

and then in the 19th century,

rail lines revolutionized

...everything,

as radical as the horses ever were,

and then the car showed up soon after

(and really, not so much later, planes,

but aside from leisure and business,

their immediate applications

serve different ends),

and cars, more than anything,

came to dominate,

at one point so heavily promoted

they shaped the entire nation,

redefined everything,

a car nation,

in tarnation.

One can't properly understand

the migrant culture,

here,

without considering these cars.

Also, just as a sidenote,

just try and picture

any of this

without the invisible truckers,

the moving vans

and the ones

who spend their lives

hucking all our goods;

you really only notice

if they take forever,

with all your possessions

or somehow lose something,

never to be explained,

the true poltergeists

of America...