Wednesday, September 29, 2004, 5:56pm
Wednesday, September 29, 2004, 5:56pm
Beyond the visible post office building high above the unseen Fort Point Channel a rock-steady northeast wind straightens an American flag flying parallel to the post office with hardly a ripple. The same wind drives a crystalline air mass into the lingering entrails of what was once Hurricane Jeanne – the storm from hell that wandered around the Caribbean until making a beeline at the Atlantic coast of Florida before lingering too long in New England as a mere rain storm. The storm killed more than a thousand people in Haiti, and was the source of many tornados long after the storm could be located with any precision on a map. Finally with no hint of tropical humidity in the air Jeanne remains nonetheless in the form of her destructive path, muddied puddles in the road, anxious memories, and official records.
As I consider the long gone storm, the 6:05pm Worcester Train spends a final moment moored at Track 2 with tonight’s stragglers racing into the back of the train. A single-decker drifts to a stop on Track 3 just before we quickly accelerate along the boarding platform. We rarely pull away this fast, but the speed is well within reasonable and quickly levels out to a leisurely pace as the train picks its way through a ganglia of crisscrossing rails and switches that will determine our final connection to the Worcester line.
To our left a concrete postmodern building looms with purposeful stacks and random colored panels. Along the whole underground course of the Big Dig these ventilation buildings handle the most common problem of long subterranean automobile tunnels – carbon monoxide and other dangerous exhaust gasses lurking below ground.
Ventilation buildings stand as much as twenty stories tall when compared to office buildings that actually have stories, and even with a camouflage of random colored panels it is still a strain to grade any of these structures above butt ugly. Perhaps instead of colored panels they should have inserted fake windows and other architectural features. A colossal concrete monolith is still a monolith even if brightly painted.
After the Back Bay Tunnel I notice Fenway Park naturally decorated overhead with a ribbon of melting clouds and the setting sun behind. The Park has its own sort of colossal homeliness, but it is a sacred place in this city and to speak in less than glowing terms about the design and serviceability of the Red Sox home field is considered grounds for deportation. So until I’m well past the city limits I must refuse my natural urge to critique what is clearly an attempt at salvaging a notion not worth saving if viewed with any sense of aesthetic honesty.
Fenway Park is an excellent example of human irrationality – something worthy of contempt otherwise revered like the emperor wearing no clothes – a town dump for a palace that citizens are loath to criticize even as we pay fifty bucks to pass through its gates. Instead we make rational-sounding arguments attempting to defend our irrational silence on the matters of its horrendous design and gargoyle looks. Perhaps we love the ugly duckling because it is the only duckling in town.
Fenway is greatly beloved for memories that would remain intact for generations even if the building were torn down tomorrow. Yet despite my rants about the terrible seats and how the huge left field wall distorts the game, this sentimentality will keep the building safe from the wrecking ball until the place rots to the point of killing a bunch of sentimental fans.
“Tick’ts … tick’ts …’kyou… th’kou, thank you… click, click , clickity, click click, rip…” Rolling through western Newton, William is working the back of this train as usual tonight – thankfully rescuing me from my line of thought and back out into the real world. With dry air moving into the region the sunlight is no longer under the same duress as yesterday and tonight a yellow glow filters down to the tracks with enough brightness to make out the shapes of an early twilit world. In lesser light it’s easier to see the train as a fixed point where whole world passes us instead of seeing the train moving across the ethereal land itself. After all, observations have their references, and it’s a lot easier to see my seat as the zero datum point than to imagine the datum in constant motion.
Randy has been running our DnD game lately in the role of dungeon master or ‘DM.’ Tonight is likely to involve the final battle of his campaign, and since my role-playing characters are of lower rank, my main role-playing objective will involve staying alive and out of the way. Chris and I added our characters to a game series that has been played for longer than Chris has been alive and even though we are pretty high-level we can’t compete with characters who have existed in this world at various times since the 1980s. It really is true that I play DnD to hang out with friends and especially to spend time with Chris.
I see Framingham Station looming in the deepening gloom. This area of town has become a Little Brazil in many ways with lots of immigration from that country in recent years. As far as I can see it’s really made a big improvement to the vitality of South Framingham. Historically, immigration is how the United States was built and whenever new waves of immigrants arrive, once again it shows how the desire for a better life and the willingness to work for this results in the revitalization of an entire local economy.
From my datum point aboard this train Ashland Station is bearing down as we cross the Sudbury to reveal the hillsides of Wildwood Cemetery. From this view I know exactly where Jenny lies just over the crown of that hill. It is not a pleasant thought tonight or any other night.
Perhaps this is one reason I always resign myself to the winter darkness aboard these evening trains.
