Tuesday, August 31, 2004, 8:17am
Tuesday, August 31, 2004, 8:17am
We are creeping eastward from Framingham Station when a westbound Amtrak train roars past my line of sight with a sudden slug of compressed air – jolting and deforming the window glass with an audible thump. Less vigorously, remnants of tropical storm Gaston have already blown through overnight drawing humid air from parts far to the south. The day is muggy, though not unduly hot.
This morning Norm is supervising the last three cars of this 8:07am train – at this very moment in new my line of sight speaking into one of the intercom microphones located in a vestibule just outside a nearby doorway.
According to a plaque on the front bulkhead, today’s passenger car is number 243. Each carriage has been given a number – as is the case for most items owned by institutions. Myself being an individual, I haven’t kept track, and during these last two years I may have ridden good ol’ number 243 fifty times.
Of course, saying that I ride aboard the ‘8:07’ is a bit provincial. This train is only the 8:07 as it departs Ashland Station. At Southboro it is the 8:03, and farther to the west, the 7:54 at Westboro and the 7:49 at Grafton. When departing Worcester for its hoped-for 88 minute run to the east, it is the 7:37am Boston Train.
This morning I can see Norm making his announcements because of how I’ve chosen the last car of the train – the one just before the backwards-facing locomotive at the very rear. From here I can see his humble headquarters – the vestibule between this sixth car and next one ahead. My own home-base is usually two cars farther up, but this morning with no air conditioning in that space I followed a few other pioneers westward until I found this three-seater in one of the newly styled cars. Here the air is pleasantly cool, the windows passable, and soon the dampness of my morning walk begins to evaporate.
There is an unwritten hierarchy of seating choices observed by most passengers of these trains. If available, a single-seat is taken first. After this, the decision matrix seems to follow this order of preference…
- the window end of a three-seat bench
- the similar position in a two-seater
- the aisle end of a three-person bench
- the aisle end of the two
- and finally – when all else is taken – the middle slot of the three-seaters.
After that, people stand or in the case of the double-deckers some will sit on the stairs. Beyond this, once all sitting and standing possibilities are filled, would-be passengers seek the next train as a final option – though so far I’ve never seen that happen.
Today, the poor quality of air conditioning throughout most of the train will affect how many passengers fill this particular cabin, but the pecking order of where people sit or when they stand will not change very much. As Donald Rumsfeld says of his armies – we travel to Boston and back aboard the train that arrives, not aboard a better train that does not yet exist. After all, these cabins are huge and even with 200 people stuffed into each car, there always seems to be a place for one more.
As with all rules, there are exceptions, and it is not completely unusual for someone to stand even when there are plenty of seats. Without listing the possible personality types and reasons why some might prefer this, it does seem well within the realm of normal human behavior. And for all I know the person standing in the aisle is simply feeling contagious and is doing us all a favor.
According to Norm, we’ve begun our express run after “the Farms” and soon the bright green of a golf course just west of Route 128 flashes between dark-leafed trees. Norm is a golfer – in fact a former country club pro and it must be killing him to ride past this view on such a grand golfing day. These past months most mornings would be fine for a round, yet I rarely see anyone out there along those vast fairways. Perhaps my view is limited more than I realize, since I can’t imagine a perfectly good golf course going to waste 12 miles from the city. Is it not a creed among golfers that work is merely what people do to kill time before the next round? Perhaps Norm squeezes tee times in between morning and afternoon trains.
Past the country club we slide into and through a dimly lit overpass bringing the Mass Pike into view on my right. Here I see lush green grass carpeting a north-leaning hillside farther up the Charles River valley crowned atop by thick leafy oak trees. Soon we crisscross back to the south side of the Pike emerging onto scenes of thickening urban landscapes, just now passing industrial buildings, apartment houses, restaurants, and a large office tower. A random version of this pattern persists until the rail yards just shy of Boston University where the Pike swerves away from the rails and through the Allston/Brighton tolls before rejoining us stacked overhead where there isn’t enough land for both rails and highway.
Out from under the Pike overpass, in another sudden change of motifs, I consider the classic brickwork of Boston townhouses and the businesslike backsides of large cinderblock and concrete buildings – the property of Boston University. Somewhere along this section we’ve already passed Nickerson Field, the BU football stadium, yet once home to the Boston Braves of the National League and a field where the ancient Red Sox once played back-to-back World Series championship baseball in 1915 and 1916 for its extra seating capacity.
Every ten seconds the scene shifts. Sparse trees flash into view replaced by stone, dirt, and concrete embankments, then a construction site, then a brief overpass, then suddenly without warning we vanish into the mile-long maw of the Back Bay/Prudential/Copley Square tunnel—and I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of all that has passed my window this morning.
Rolling to a stop inside the the tunnel I hear Norm wishing passengers a “nice day” as they disembark one-by-one into the permanent subterranean pall of Back Bay Station – not a tunnel down here really, at least not in the sense of tunneling underground. The trains and turnpike traffic remain on level ground, while one huge continuous encasement of concrete and steel has been built all around and above us – capped unseen by busy streets, stale parking lots, giant towers, urgent shops, and whatever else they could fit up there willing to pay rent and taxes. At the heart of Boston the design is both three-dimensional and mostly hidden. The more that is here, the less of it I can see, and the more I wonder about the mostly forgotten structure holding the whole mess up. The rails were present long ago, I realize, and the city has long since been built up over them like the ancient tablelands of long-dead civilizations – all except for the inevitable crumbling.
Vomited from the Back Bay tunnel we rattle across tangled and creaking and grinding and clattering rails and switches as the train seeks its path for our final platform arrival at South Station. Soon we come about to the left riding directly over the buried Massachusetts Turnpike tunnel where it passes beneath the tracks. And as the highway disappears I have two unreconcilable notions – how the Pike is gone, and how it is still there even if I can’t see it.
From here the Mass Pike pierces the Fort Point Channel mud crossing to South Boston then penetrates the dirt beyond this a half mile further before briefly exposing itself to open sky before plunging into the Ted Williams Tunnel for its long trek through the sodden bowels of Boston Harbor. Across the bay the highway emerges in its last quarter mile on approach to Logan Airport ending this series of hidden pathways and slime – all the same sets of tunnels and through all the same muck traversed at various times by 9/11 terrorists and the most recent president of the United States.
