Jack Heald

…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

W.Shakespeare – Hamlet

I am far more Horatio than Hamlet, but my faith in the basic rationality of my world has been shaken this evening. The story:

We are spending the week at my parents’ cabin in Alpine, Colorado. Alpine sits on the side of Mt. Princeton, at an elevation of about 9600 feet above sea level. The cabin was built sometime in the late 1870s to serve as the home of the railroad foreman. The Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad was building a railroad over the Rockies to serve the various mines that were dug into the mountains here. The railroad ran from 1881 to 1910. At one time, during the height of the railroad building boom, Alpine was home to over 10,000 people, but today it has fewer than a dozen year-round residents. The population swells to about 150 during the summer vacation months.

Just across 1st Street from the cabin is Chalk Creek, and then just the other side of Chalk Creek is County Road 162. CR162 follows the old DSP&P railroad line up Chalk Creek Canyon between Mt. Princeton to the north and Mt. Antero to the south.

Tonight, we were sitting out on the deck enjoying a beautiful Colorado summer evening. The moon was almost full – maybe a couple more days till the full moon, and the sky was partly cloudy. The moon was just rising over the peak of Mt. Antero around 9:00 when we first heard the train whistle.

(By “we”, I mean six of us: Caroline, Scott & Juli, Mom, Liam and me. I emphasize the number of witnesses because what I am going to report is – frankly – fantastic. )

The whistle blew several times. We heard the distinctive sound of the steam engine clattering as the giant pistons chugged-chugged between the compression and exhaust strokes. It went on for perhaps 30 seconds as the train moved up the road toward St. Elmo. Normally, you will hear a train fade away over a period of minutes. St. Elmo is about 4 miles above Alpine, so we should have heard a real train for several minutes. But as quickly as the sound began, it simply faded away like a morning mist.

The train tracks were completely torn up by the 1930s. The last train went up those tracks in 1910.

The nearest train track is at Buena Vista, roughly 15 miles from here as the crow flies. There are no steam engines on those tracks.

The six of us sat here listening to this steam engine go up the road just across the creek, chugging and whistling as it went. Then as suddenly as it started, it faded away. If I was going to write a screenplay that depicted the appearance and disappearance of a ghost train, it would have been exactly like this.

My mom said, “there’s the Alpine Ghost Train”. Apparently, everyone in town has heard the train at one time or another and it has become such a common occurrence that she had never even thought to mention it to me. The most frequent time to hear the train has been 9:00pm.

From the deck of the cabin, where I sit as I write this, we cannot see the road, but it is less than a quarter mile from here. What I heard was unmistakably a train, a steam engine train. It faded in, chugged up the canyon for perhaps half a minute, then faded away.

You can be sure that I will be out in the middle of CR162 at 9:00pm every night till we head home next week. If the Alpine Ghost Train makes another appearance, I plan to gather as much info as I can.

…the only regulation that will ever work is failure… Businesses should fail, that’s the way the system was designed.

Rick Santelli in an interview on King World News

Two years ago, Congress had a chance to keep the economy from tanking. All they had to do was let the banks fail. They didn’t do it because the criminal class, a.k.a. Wall Street Bankers and their minions, ([cough] Paulson, Bernanke, Summers & Geithner [cough]), convinced them that if they let the banks fail, the economy would tank. So Congress gave the bankers roughly nine hundred gazillion dollars so that the economy wouldn’t tank. The bankers got big bonuses, and the economy tanked anyway.

Failure is a good thing. It is God’s/Nature’s/The Universe’s way of saying “You’re doing it wrong”.

I have devoured Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan“. The ideas contained in these two books are profound, disturbing and very, very liberating. For some reason, these books occasionally get labeled as “Business” or “Markets” books. They are not. They are works of philosophy that everyone with the slightest inclination to think about life should read. (Josh: take note.) Christians in particular should marinate in these ideas.

I gave up on “Witness to Hope“, the biography of JPII. The first third of the book, which dealt with his pre-pope days, was terrific. The stuff after he was elected read like a diary or a press release. Boring as hell. I can handle a little bit of boring, but the stark contrast between the two sections of the book was more than I could bear. Since it’s 1100 pages, and I wasn’t even halfway through, I was not willing to devote any more time to it. Anyone who wants my copy can have it.

(Does anyone else always have multiple books going at the same time? I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was reading five books at the same time – and that’s just pretty normal for me.)

I just finished J.S.Mill’s essay On Liberty and am now working on his autobiography. Mill was educated at home by his father and lemme tell you, Daddy should be very proud. What an extraordinary mind that man had.

If you would permit me one quote that I found quite relevant:

The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government, is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employés of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.

I think Mill would look at the state of the modern west and say, “I toldja so…”

I finished The Sovereign Individual just before finishing Mill. Highly recommended.

On deck is Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. This comes very highly recommended and I am eager to get started. Also  The Gods of Athiesm by Vincent P. Maseli, S.J. (Apparently, the Jesuits pay attention to these things.)

I am also doing my annual re-reading of Lewis’ Mere Christianity. I started reading Lewis when I was maybe 10 or 11 with The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve read almost everything he ever published – in most cases, multiple times – and as I was going through MC again this past week, was struck with wonder at how much his thinking has influenced mine. Virtually every significant belief I have about God, the world and myself can likely be traced back to something I read somewhere in Lewis. Not that we don’t have our disagreements, but it is safe to say he is the single most influential thinker in my life.