Jack Heald

Ah, I love a good joke.

In my whole life – almost 50 years worth – I have never been the butt of such an elaborate and successful practical joke, but I guess everyone’s gotta go sometime.

For what it is worth, I am relieved that my fundamental faith in the rationality of the universe remains unchallenged.

The Alpine Ghost Train – I am happy to report – is a fraud. An elaborate, careful and meticulous fraud, but a fraud nonetheless. <Very Big Sigh>

I was chopping and hauling wood on my parents property when a couple of neighbors dropped by. As men will do, we got to chatting about things around the neighborhood, and I mentioned in passing that I had heard the Ghost Train on Thursday night. One of them asked, “when did you hear it”, and I repeated that I had heard it on Thursday night. He commented, almost under his breath, “Pat didn’t say he was gonna do it…”

I didn’t let on that there was anything unusual about what I had heard, but when I got back to the cabin, I told my mom that I had solved the mystery. She began laughing and telling me what a good time she had with fooling me. (My mom is an irrepressible cut-up.)

Apparently, a guy up at Alpine has a specially tricked out Jeep with an elaborate sound system which he uses specifically to play the “Ghost Train” soundtrack as he drives up the road. He has been doing it for at least 20 years. All the Alpine residents know about it but do enjoy fooling the newbies. I fell for it harder than most.

So, the reason there have been so few references to the Alpine Ghost Train is because it is a fraud.

Color me relieved.

…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.

…from Nassim Taleb.

Well worth the time.

This made me laugh out loud.

First, Bear Stearns made a bunch of stupid bets on sub-prime mortgages, and you – the American Taxpayer -  bailed them out to the tune of $29 billion in guarantees to JPMorgan, (who bought Bear Stearns only on the condition that the government assume that debt.)

Then, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac made a bunch of stupid bets on subprime mortgages and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out to the tune of $800 billion.

The Lehman Brothers went belly up, which forced AIG to pay billions of dollars in claims on credit default swaps – claims they were unable to pay, so you – the American Taxpayer – bailed out AIG to the tune of $145 billion.

Then the Big Wall Street Banks went kablooie, because they made stupid bets and you – The American Taxpayer – bailed them out with $800 billion in loans. (No, you will not see any return on that “investment”, other than the comfort of watching Goldman Sachs give out $14 billion in bonuses last year.)

Then, Chrysler and GM both came to Washington with their hands out because they made stupid agreements with the UAW and stupid inverstment decisions, and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out with “only” about $20 billion.

What have you – the American Taxpayer – received for all this largess doled into the laps of these idiot gamblers? You have the worst economy since the great depression. You have over 22% of the population “under-employed”. You have plummeting home values. You have more tax. You have known tax cheats heading Treasury and the IRS.

Now Greece is going to go bankrupt, and guess who is going to bailout that government? The IMF gives money to Greece. 20% of the IMF’s funding comes from the US Taxpayer, so you – the American Taxpayer – are now sending $7 billion to the Greek government so it can pay its bills.

Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, France and the UK are in line for the same thing.

What can you do about it?

You could start by re-reading the US Declaration of Independence and contemplating this phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

When the colonists determined that the government of Great Britain – their government – had become destructive to the very people it was supposed to protect, they moved to “alter or abolish” that government and establish a new one that would be most likely to secure their life, liberty and happiness.