Travelers are curious people. They have the intelligence to understand that in the big picture of a life experience there are things that are not understood without a, “been there, saw that myself,” starting point. Movement alone in the jet set age, flying through a nighttime sky in yet another aluminum tube, headed to yet another bland room of a worldwide chain hotel, isn’t all that exciting after the first takeoff wearing your shiny new “jet set” wings.

I admit to being an old crank-a-dank sojourner that hated to have the elegance of the travels of my youth, relegated to the scrap heap of progress. The Glen Miller song, Chattanooga Choo Choo that stated , “Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,” has no possibly comparison with the bag of salted peanuts, and the sawdust and ketchup concoctions one buys on Concourse “C” between flights. Having “lived” the Super Chief, The City of Portland, The City of New Orleans, The Empire Builder, The 20th Century Limited, and Coast Daylight —and the surviving Alaska Railroad— I can tell you there is no more elegant way to travel than setting in a comfortable lounge chair and watching a diorama pass buy.

So here we are, having vicariously mouse clicked through to an abandoned train station in the middle of the “nowhere” of the Mojave Desert, in what still is America’s Wild West. I mean wild, in the sense of a wilderness protected from the urban blight of convenience stores, rather than Hollywood's ever invasive portrayals of the dark side of anything that sells movie tickets. Yes, from a director’s point of view of the looting of flat screen TVs as freight cars crawl up the steep Cima grade might be exciting —a practice that the National Park Service has curtailed— but I find it more interesting that one of the train robbers out of time and place, died from an unwise exposure to the mid-summer heat of the ‘Devils Playground.’

The wilderness setting of the “Californio” mission style architecture, without the visual conflict of mission villages as San Diego, San Francisco grown into big cities, has been for the movie industry an exciting “geographic” location on the tracks the “City of Las Angeles,” traveled during the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ the Great Depression, and World War II.

Pushing through visions of Judy Garland, playing a Harvey House waitress, belting out ‘The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe,” what was the lesson I had walking footsteps of time through an empty lunchroom that had a great reputation for a nickel cup of coffee.

It was, unfortunately influenced by current events. This private enterprise station was built when California growing. The end came when a “lets build government owned freeways,” of the trucking industry PAC controlled Congress. In retrospect the financial failures of America’s railroads in the 1960’s and 70’s can be traced to the same Wall Street mentality of today. The sad part of government bailout of the day —CONRAIL and AMTRAK— kept America out of the logical development of the truly modern trains travelers experience in Japan, Europe, and China’s recent elevated rail across scenic “wasteland” on the Tibet Express.

At the very least, going back in time, walking the tracks at Kelso, in the late afternoon heat of a desert day, is a remembrance that before combating "global warming" with air conditioning, the Mojave Desert was respected as a force of Nature.