Monday, August 30, 2004
Monday, August 30, 2004
Eighteen minutes out of Worcester, past a small pond in Westboro at the heart of Cedar Swamp, my soon-to-be morning transport skirts the unofficial headwaters of the Sudbury River. Downstream through a gentle valley the train runs alongside the growing stream for a time until Southboro, just before Ashland, where the rails cross to the southern riverbank in an event often witnessed from on high by great blue heron seated in their leafless rookeries, or by patrolling Canada geese from the water’s surface, or perhaps by muskrats and snapping turtles – or even from the depths by large-mouth bass, pickerel, and inland otters.
It is no straight shot down the Sudbury River Valley. Mile-thick ice sheets of the Pleistocene long ago shaped the basic topography of New England, and the resulting rubble of moraines, broken mountains, and gouged out bedrock – though no longer tall and deep – is nonetheless hardly flat. Whereas automobile roads are laid where convenient – overtopping hills and passing around abrupt turns – the ancient rivers and the newer railroads must poke and wander gently to find their way across flatter ground. The rivers obey the laws of physics, and the trains running nearby obey those same laws plus the added economics of fuel – whether in the form of 19th century firewood, 20th century coal, or late 20th and early 21st century diesel oil and electricity.
Before the railroads the river valley was already being reshaped by low-head dams built every few miles to supply rotating power for mills of the early Industrial Revolution. Just about all of those mills are long gone, but the dams mostly remain, impeding and segmenting progress of the river into a series of skinny mud filled sausage-ponds interconnected end-to-end.
Crossing into Framingham the ancient and deeply flooded central channel of the Sudbury winds away to the north seven miles downstream, reaching Saxonville where it dashes over high sluices once made to power the long-dead carpet mills.
Beyond Saxonville Falls the river narrows for a time until riding wide and slow through the vast Broadmoor marshes lying low between Wayland and the town of Sudbury – from which the river derives its name. And after the swamps, the stream narrows once more before joining the Assabet to form the medium-sized Concord River flowing north to the canals and locks of Old Industrial Lowell. From between giant brick mills and past unused water wheels, and in its final inland merger, the humble Concord drains into the majestic Merrimack. Then finally, with it’s own headwaters in the White Mountains the mighty Merrimack races to the sea – to its own conclusion 40 miles to the east where the great river refills the much grander Atlantic Ocean.
This is more than mere allegory – if not for disgorging rivers returning rainfall to the seas of the Earth, the oceans would lose an inch or more of their level each year – as can happen during an ice age.
The crucible of the commute calls my thoughts back to my own time and to my own place aboard this train. After settling into a foldout seat this morning I am facing the open common area at the end of this newer single-decker with the vestibule door at my feet in the form of two sticky pocket doors parting from the middle. The train was already mostly full at Ashland and I had a choice of this foldout seat and one on the aisle end of a three-seater further back – neither much to my liking. I did manage to squelch a temptation to turn back into aisle traffic and walk the length of the train looking for the perfect seat – but there are never any perfect seats, only those seats less imperfect than others.
Among the lesser choices I seem to have found a dandy. It is already hot outside and the double door no longer closes by itself. So at each station stop I reluctantly sample the outside weather as new passengers board until the very last of the stragglers wanders through. Then – in my impromptu role as amateur conductor-in-training – I reach out and close the door with shove. It’s either this or endure the rail noise, the blowing heat, and the interior glares of nearby passengers awaiting the performance of my unassigned task. Once reaching Wellesley Farms my assignment will end because from that point we’ll begin our daily non-stop express run into Back Bay Station – at least that is the hope!
With this resolved as much as reasonable, I again drift into faraway thoughts.
Boston was settled for nearly two centuries before anyone began driving spikes into ties along the old waterfront to start this railroad heading west. Into Newton and the wilderness beyond they dug and chiseled and heaved and hammered for an enduring purpose. Except for the slow and tedious post roads of that era, there were no land routes maintaining communication among the eastern cities, and until the railroads were laid there was no overland shipping of heavy goods at all. The very term “shipping” envisions boats – not wheels – and only once timbers, spikes, and rails took root could cargo ply the land in near-equal measure to the seas and great rivers.
Most people in New England are unaware of the railroads as a whole. Trains halt road traffic at crossings and pass above and beneath streets in almost every town and city. The lines run behind occupied houses, through factory land, and spread into multi-track rail yards filled with idle traffic for all to see. Yet we see the rails only in limited segments – a snippet here and there – never connected into lines and networks. Even in satellite imagery the greater picture is murky at best.
Even now, my memory of the old tracks running past the second story windows of my youth disappear into a fog of imagination near the northern border with Framingham and the southern bridge over the Charles River at Medfield. I still envision those rails ending in Connecticut – guessed from the encrusted spark-spewing locomotives of forty years ago painted with fading and peeling paint showing the logo of the New Haven Railroad. New Haven is a city in Connecticut – no small distance from Sherborn, so perhaps it is time to find a real railroad map to properly settle the fog of spculation.
For the moment our morning commute follows the Mass Pike – or better said – the much newer Pike runs alongside the older rail line having been built more than a hundred and thirty years after the ‘Irish’ finished their work here. And yet downhill through the flashing trees, I can see segments of the ancient Charles River – and from this it becomes clear to me how the river was here first, and before the river, a glacier that carved out its underlying form. Then I envision rifts and folds in the continental crust crushed and torn asunder to form the Atlantic Ocean – setting the pathways for the glaciers to pick their way to the spreading sea. And so it seems that our trek through the Sudbury and Charles River valleys this morning is a matter of ancient forces all working against ancient bedrock more than any sort of careful human planning and cleaver engineering.
Story tellers speak of crucibles – places where a tale is confined by time, locality, or some other limitation that helps to focus the telling of events. In one sense the crucible of this journal is the time I spend riding the rails back and forth between Ashland and Boston, five round trips and ten hours aboard every week. But there is another element to this crucible that exists apart from me and would be here even if I were not a daily observer. A train can travel only where it is allowed to go. It must follow the tracks where they are laid and where the switches and signals permit it to go – from one end of a complete and unambiguous run to the other, even if only seen in snippets from the outside world.
And then one last picture forms – one of wholeness and completeness…
Indeed the railroads are noticed in brief segments across roads, beside highways, and past bedroom windows. Yet in their continuous passage they also run behind and around and under and through spaces rarely seen from anywhere else – connected into a continuous whole even if rarely recognized this way. Truly ancient pathways are seen and unseen like this, whether running across the shallow and deeper landscapes of the earth or through the terrain of the conscious and unconscious mind.
