“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America; that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement,” wrote Thomas Wolfe. The metaphor of transportation is central to my work. I travel by rail whenever possible, watching the passing landscape, tracing the remnants of what was and how it shapes the present. One of the most thrilling moments in the American experience is, to me, on board Amtrak’s LAKE SHORE LIMITED out of Chicago on its way to New York, as it passes through the steel mills near Gary, Indiana on the southern shores of Lake Michigan each night. The exact century falls away, the industrial heartland still bellows; Vulcan is at his forge, and we see it flash past, indistinct, yet vivid.