Monday, September 27, 2004, 5:25pm
Monday, September 27, 2004, 5:25pm
Feet step past this window at elbow-level height as I wait for our departure aboard the soon-to-be 5:30 Worcester Local. These double-deckers sling the lower floor below the raised platforms at South Station leaving me in the company of blurred shoe leather sweeping through a distant gaze.
Within the great web of the rails all seems unexpectedly normal in Boston on such a messy day for Penn Station at the heart of Manhattan. Two fires raged earlier on the main Amtrak lines there – one under the East River and one in a trash pile inside the station itself. And because of this I fully expected to hear about delayed trains running down the Northeast Corridor, but see and hear nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps it’s simply old news or maybe I’ve missed the telling evidence. Either way the Acela trains are still getting underway for their three-hour treks to New York City.
As we pass the overwrought presence of the Green Monster adorned by its rack of Precambrian light towers, Fenway Park is quiet tonight. The ballpark will stay this way for at least another ten days until the playoffs begin in early October, though exactly how this will play out has yet to be decided. It’s not looking good for the Red Sox to take the division from the Yankees, but it’s also looking even less likely that anyone else will bump the Sox from the wild card slot that they can earn with a win in Florida tonight. The lack of local baseball hardly creates a quiet neighborhood though, and plenty of people are heading on foot to and from Kenmore Square this afternoon.
Leaving the limits of Boston and rolling into the City of Newton, the sky is dark enough that streetlights are already lit. Most streetlamps these days are of the high-pressure sodium vapor variety and take so long to warm up to full brightness that it’s often hard to say if the lights are getting brighter or the sky is simply dimming. Not long ago these streetlights were illumined by mercury vapor, but for reasons of toxicity the standard has switched to sodium – mercury being one of those heavy metals best kept out of the human contact. A ruptured sodium lamp would simply combine with water vapor to make sodium hydroxide and hydrogen, both of which are fairly harmless to the environment.
My dad would scoff at such matters as ‘nonsense’ – environmentalists being nothing more than a bunch of liberals out to undermine god and country. But dad isn’t around anymore to join the pro-chemical industry hecklers. And perhaps the passing of his generation is one way the world is given another chance to clean up from its previous messes and undo its willingness to ignore ominous realities.
Political dogma aside, there is always a design trade off in any technological conversion, and in the case of high-pressure sodium the down side is lousy light quality. Certain colors are simply not emitted, so at night if I happen to wear a yellow and green shirt under this sort of light it will appear as bright orange and black – because hardly any green light is made by a sodium lamp.
In many ways this is how I saw my dad. He was not evil and far from ignorant. He simply had an incomplete spectrum of ideas, and therefore could not see what was plain to see in normal light. Rather than expanding his own spectrum , he simply believed we were imagining things.
Light has one other property that I’ve always found intriguing. When light is re-radiated in a color different from the spectra received from a light source, this is called florescence. The effect of florescence is most often seen when ultraviolet “black” light is converted to visible light. In this way the surfaces can appear brighter than they should. Florescent pigments are added to all sorts of products to make colors seem brighter or whites whiter. If a scene is lit mostly a black light, it is really easily to see which surfaces contain fluorescent pigments since these will seem to glow in the dark as they convert invisible UV light to visible colors. Just because something can’t be seen hardly proves that it does not exist whether in the form of light or ideas.
At Auburndale Station the train lists heavily at a bend in the tracks tipping us in the direction of the passing turnpike. From this lower level I only have a vague sense of the leaning and I can only guess at the experience of those seated in the upper cabin. Soon the golf course at Wellesley drifts past my view and the confining feeling of the city is suddenly gone. Moments later a single-decker train passes back towards the city while we continue west. If the Sox were playing in Boston tonight that other train might be packed. But tonight the inbound train is mainly on its way to South Station to fulfill its schedule.
On approach to Wellesley Hills Station the brakes squeal for what seems like forever. The simplicity of these brakes is a terrific design – instead of a completely separate assembly, the brake pads are applied directly to the rolling surfaces of the steel wheels. Yet when the brake pads wear to expose metal rivets, the metal-on-metal screeching can raise the hair on my neck. I suspect that one failure mode is a brake that has lost its pad altogether only to weld the molten support structure to the wheel once the train stops. From that point onward the wheel won’t turn and instead the power of the locomotive drags it until some dip or turn in the rails breaks the weld. The flattened wheel then thumps until replaced. According to Norm there is a real risk that a big enough flat will jump the car right off the rails, so this isn’t something to ignore.
Everywhere look I seem to see a level of unwanted detail. Do I really care how the train stops? Does it really matter how glass is made? Is there any reason to ferret through the details of color theory and how my eyes see it or how the Moon orbits the Earth? I seem born to inhale the minutia of the Universe, yet left to my own devices to make sense of it.
As I’ve buried myself into the world of ideas I have a feeling that I’m riding atop a broken logjam with the logs spreading out and gaining speed through fast-approaching rapids. Even if I settle on just one log to make my run, the damn thing is bound to roll or tip out of control sooner or later. And if I swim for shore, I’ll be clocked by some other floating tree trunk, or pounded into the rocks underwater, or drowned in the foaming river. So whether I act now or don’t act, the outcome is still the same – I’m already out on this river of chaos and that is a fact I cannot change.
Almost home now, the area around West Natick Station is draining into deep twilight as we haul to an urgent hault. Perhaps with so many people leaving the train the rig will be lighter and easier to stop the next time as a result – just a guess, though, since the people riding a full train comprise less than 1/3 of the total mass and how fast a train stops is as much a matter of how fast the engineer wants it stopped as anything else.
Darkness has a way of closing me into a smaller space. I know there is more beyond those darkening woods, but the closest trees feel more like a temporary stage decoration with a solid dark wall behind, and even as we roll into the open spaces of downtown Framingham the view still feels more like a movie set than a real place. I suppose I normally see these places lit either by daylight or under street lights fully dark at night, and maybe this twilight scene is rare enough to seem surreal.
Ashland Station is next and then home and beyond. Out from Framingham Station the train accelerates noticeably as we roll west until the first time since before the first Newton stop we’re running at what feels like max track speed as we roll across the old stone arch across the Sudbury below Wildwood Cemetery.
