Just as old masters often depicted sages and poets as tiny figures amid mountains and forests, he saw current events and players as just one more element in his vast land.
But events - even those with a comic element like the McKinley episode - continue to demonstrate what Senator Frank Lautenberg called the almost incomprehensible magnitude of trying to secure a US transport network which includes 3.9 million miles of roads, 600, 000 bridges, 361 ports and more than 5, 000 public-use airports.