Thursday, November 11, 2004, 8:14am
Thursday, November 11, 2004, 8:14am
Veterans Day
Drifting through my less-than-dingy window is a familiar scene containing Farm Pond with its two swans moored at their usual spit of shoreline this morning. Their signet is absent, though perhaps invisible to my quick scan. Until fully grown, the juvenile bird will remain brown and camouflaged.
Sitting inland from their nest a growing pile of firewood looms through thinning oaks – the word ‘pile’ sounding a bit too tame – more like an inflating lava dome of the sort growing this morning at a rate of one dump truck load per second atop Mount St. Helens. Seeing large amorphous and growing piles of anything has that volcanic feeling to it, no matter the source.
For the second time this week Norm tags my seat before I even know he’s here. I’d already met Norm face-to-face at Ashland Station perched atop the lowest rail car step as the train screeched to a halt. For efficiency most mornings I wait at that very spot – right where the doors stop – a scheme quite workable except in those rare instances when Norm or some other conductor gums up works standing in the entrance well.
At Lake Cochituate the clouds have thickened leaving only a few blue streaks accented in the fading pink of sunrise. Gray seems to be the main color of this new day, gray and the brown of fully dead leaves.
Above the massive hand-built retaining wall and through the thinning leaves at Natick Station I notice a sign for the Natick Outdoor Store in its most recent location. I know it should be right about there, but I’d never noticed the actual sign. The older location was farther south, smaller and beside a four-lane candle pin bowling ally – a storefront etched into my earliest memories as a place to buy fishing tackle and ill-fitting winter boats and various air-powered firearms and honest-to-goodness guns and ammo of the type you won’t see on display any longer in any sporting goods store in eastern Massachusetts. Even Sears in Natick once displayed hunting riffles and shotguns. Perhaps sales were not worth the paperwork or maybe an association with firearms was the wrong message to an upscale suburban clientele.
The Outdoor Store still has genuine Swiss Army knives like the one I forfeited at the airport a few weeks ago – the nicest of the two purchased years ago as mementos from a trip to Switzerland itself. I suppose I could drop by to replace it – but it wouldn’t be the same as buying from an annoyed Swiss German speaking clerk who assumed I understood her every word.
As a kid, with Natick the next town over I might have peddled my bike to the store. But with no sidewalks on the long stretch between towns the route was far too dangerous. So I rode inside the relative backseat safety of some old Ford or Oldsmobile and endured ill-fitting clothes of one sort or another for a chance to look around. I have little memory of the clothing and snow boots. Fishing tackle, lures, guns, ammo, canoes, baseball mitts, balls, bats, pocket knives – those were the things that drew me.
Natick and Wellesley are behind us now with the fast part of the express run still ahead. The acceleration of the train that begins at Route 128 is laughable by comparison to other forms of transportation, but the transition from lulling drift to purposeful speed is unmistakable nonetheless. Through West Newton we roar along at 65mph and without some effort to swivel my head and lock my eyes on some distant target the world is little more than a swift right-to-left blur.
Past the Pike crisscross I see parts of the Charles River long hidden by green leaves and beyond this view an ancient red brick smokestack standing festooned with various radio antennas. Smoke hardly flows from these sorts of stacks anymore. Instead they support a growing ganglion of cell phone transponders, fiber optic lines and microwave links.
Near the giant brick stack a portion of Watertown looms not far from where many years ago I helped design automated pizza and cookie oven computers and other elements of modern living. With some further some teasing of memory fragments, I can also remember driving along the road now snaking a dozen yards below my present view between the railroad and river beyond – a view fabricated more from memory than from the actual visible evidence mostly hidden by dormant sumac.
We arrive at Back Bay at 8:52am – the earliest arrival I can remember in my brief two years along these rails. Maybe there are no freight trains today because of the holiday. I can only guess. But one thing seems to be happening with a high degree of likelihood – the 8:07 out of Ashland actually arrived at 8:07 this morning, and there is a good chance that we may arrive at South Station on time at 8:58 in accordance with the official schedule. It will depend on whether we wait to enter or can roll right in – and it looks like there is no waiting today, so I’ll have to check my watch as we grind to a halt like how NASA measures the official end of a space shuttle mission from when the wheels finally stop.
