From the mountains to the city, part 2
I'm being influenced by the siren-songs of Stardew Valley, The Peripheral (mostly, the closer future that takes place in Appalachian NC), and now, spending the week in the mountains. My grandma's house is close enough to other places, downtown and the shopping center, that I _could_ just (e-)bike there. I've gotten pretty familiar with the area from the last couple visits, too. The small town allure is, however, in stark contrast with my conscience, solarpunk ideals, and humanity's best interests.
Welcome back to Futurism, a gemlog about our shared future and how we can make it better by implementing solarpunk and anarchist/leftist ideas.
The Prime Video original The Peripheral has two primary settings: far-future London, and near-future Clanton (Marshall), a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. Most relevant to this post is that in the Clanton setting, the protagonist Flynne Fischer, played by the stunning and talented Chloë Grace-Moretz, takes an e-bike into town, as her primary mode of transportation. That's something I wish I could do, and around here I absolutely could. I could even go to Walmart. At home I guess I can go to Costco but I don't have a Costco card and I don't think it's worth the money (and they don't have half the things I want, either).
Up here, I'm also getting fond of the weather. I think it's closer to how the climate was at home when I was younger. Climate change is absolutely going to affect the populations of mountain towns, as more people seek cooler climates. Asheville is going to see a boom, I'm sure.
Caveat: winters are still brutal here. I'm not sure if they'll get warmer or colder. Or, like home, maybe it's both simultaneously, thanks to the destabilizing jetstream bringing Arctic air to where it's not supposed to be.
One of the places we went to was the tourist trap Tweetsie Railroad. The Story they put out says their Engine 12 was the last train left that ran the East Tennessee and West North Carolina line, ET&WNC. (The locomotive we rode with was Engine 190, which was a military engine in Alaska in World War 2.) It's a real narrow-gauge coal-fired steam locomotive, although they did a lot of retrofitting electronics into the cars it pulls (those might be new and custom made, actually). It didn't go as fast as I'd have liked but it was still loads of fun.
Aside: they used to do a cowboys-and-indians show but now they're doing a cowboys-and-bandits comedy routine. Apparently they've been doing the new show for a while; none of us have been there for maybe 10 years, when my grandma worked there for a short time.
If you're anything like me, you're thinking about how cool trains are and how useful, efficient, and all around good they are. We definitely shouldn't be using coal-fired engines anymore; even the one at Tweetsie still puffs out ash and embers, not to mention the effects of those in the atmosphere. But now we have electricity and developments in high speed rail... why the hell don't we use that at all here?!
The train was a lot narrower than I thought, and a lot more crowded than I would have liked (I should have brought a mask with me, god damn it). That's probably thanks to the narrow gauge, and how closely the train cars fit onto the track (they maybe could have been wider). The ride was still shaky, although I think that's a quality of both steam fired engines and how slow we were going.
Tweetsie Railroad is a full blown theme park, although it was the train instead of a roller coaster. One of its attractions was a little gas-powered go-kart ride. That reminded me that just before we left I had thought and read about compressed-air (pneumatic) cars. Go-karts might be a great use-case for them, and pairing them with more space-efficient vehicles like golf carts could be a pretty powerful combo. Pneumatic cycles wouldn't work, because of the heat pneumatic systems generate and the heat dissipation mechanisms they need.
We're going home soon. I don't think I'll be able to bring the "vacation high" with me if there ever was one, but I think these thoughts will stick around.
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