“Just drive through the main gate of Hart Park and turn left before Hart Hall. Yes, you get off the paved road and enter a time warp – Heritage Junction.”

The SCV Historical Society has to get some better signs to direct folks “Off the Paved Road.” I’m working on that. It seems folks are really reluctant to drive on a non-paved road. Some of us remember when there were unpaved roads all around the SCV. It wasn’t that many years ago.

Since the Cowboy Festival is not going to be at Melody Ranch this year, I want you to know you can still get some of that “dirt street” feeling – and see real buildings from the Old West at the same time.

More and more of Heritage Junction’s Cowboy Festival events are on the event schedule. Make sure you check www.scvhs.org for tickets and information on what is happening.

So let’s return to those roads that used to be less paved.

When my family moved to Pico Canyon from Castaic in 1960, I had no use for a bike. It was a long way to town, and the road in Pico Canyon was a bit too rough for a bike. I used a horse. Later a tractor. We even had a contraption called a Tote Goat. It was a motorcycle affair that could carry a lot of tools and stuff around the hills. But most the time it was a horse.

The other day at Heritage Junction, a couple of ladies went riding by on some horses. I got to follow them with the shovel. That is the part they don’t teach you in the books about owning a horse … or a dog, cat or maybe even a rat. What goes in has to come out.

I’m happy that most of the shovel work involving that stuff happens next door at Hart Park and not where I work.

Another place that needs a shovel for the same type of stuff is in Sacramento, right in the big building with the big gold dome. They are creating more laws looking and smelling like what those horses left for me to shovel. And they create those laws faster than a horse on new green grass.

Those folks up in that big, gold-domed building want to add some additional gas tax to help fund the roads. And they want to add another fee of around $52 a year to help the roads, too. I’ve got a better idea to help the roads. Stop the High-Speed Rail Boondoggle.

I’m not against a high-speed train going between our cities. As a guy who works in a historic train station, I love trains. I have been a model railroader, too. I have a lot of books about the history of railroads. There is one, “Nothing Like It in the World” by Stephen Ambrose, that chronicles the building of the transcontinental railroad by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. It is a fantastic read.

In that book, it says nothing about government actually building the railroad. The government allowed bonds that were a form of loan to the railroad companies and also allowed land grants for homesteading. The railroad was a private concern and not a state-owned company like the California High Speed Rail Authority. Just so you know, those bonds were paid off in a very short time. Railroading made a lot of money.

So I have a few questions to ask the folks up in the gold-domed building that produces all of those stinkin’ laws that resemble what the aforementioned horses produce.

1. How many years will it take for us taxpayers to pay for this state-owned railroad? Will my great grandchildren be paying for it?

2. If it is such a good idea, don’t you think the existing railroads would have built it long ago? (They didn’t, because such rail systems don’t make money.)

3. Could the planners – I use that word in the broadest terms – find a route for the rails that could be even less ill-advised than the one proposed now?

4. How can the folks who are to build this railroad ever going to claim it to be “un-subsidized” when the entire planning and construction is being done on our tax dollars? And how can it be the only high-speed rail system in the world to operate without operational subsidies?

Yep. Not only do those folks in that gold-domed building up north spread a little stink around; they are also using air. I’d best not say anything about that. They’ll want to tax us for that, too.

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he serves as executive director of the SCV Historical Society. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com. His older commentaries are archived at DManzer.com; his newer commentaries can be accessed [here]. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].