Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 8:24am
Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 8:24am
At six or seven miles high and 20 or 30 miles downrange I watch a stubby airline vapor trail hanging against a clear morning sky as the jet slides up from the southwest like a man-made comet. Originating at an east coast airfield farther down the coast, soon it will overfly the control tower at Logan International Airport before heading off to Europe.
Flying directly above one of the busiest airports in the country might not make sense until I realize how most of this busyness happens at much lower altitudes while at 35,000 feet the airspace is wide open and the clearest escape route heading out to sea. At nine miles per minute the airplane will fly past Cape Ann long before I finish this paragraph, and before we arrive at South Station they will be airborne well past the Newfoundland coastline. In view of pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic the first passenger trains must have felt like instantaneous travel, even as this train now feels lumbering compared to the flight of an intercontinental jet.
Past Wellesley Hills the morning sun is more behind than ahead. Once again the train swings north as we tack down the eastern edge of the last hillside before the coastal plain. Somebody had to plot this route before the railroad was hacked through the western wilderness – and the apparent happenstance of sunlight out of place is actually the consequence of careful design – as is the case for almost everything about these trains.
Passing some original stonework I am now wondering who really built the Boston and Worcester line. The vast Irish immigration wouldn’t arrive until at least six years later, and before the Irish there were no vast New England migrations except for an exodus of British loyalists after the American Revolution fleeing into the Canadian Maritime provinces or back to the hedgerows of Old England.
Yet somebody must have been here to hack into the sides of these hills. Someone hove dirt onto causeway embankments and dragged monstrous granite blocks to pile imposing stone retaining walls and bridge abutments. There were no steam shovels or bulldozers or backhoes or gimbaled road graders or steel cranes. There were only picks, hand shovels, wrought iron wedges, sledge hammers, wooden staging and ropes running through block and tackle. With so much to do and with little in the way of imported labor there must have been much family upheaval as boys and young men headed off to make their railroad laboring fortunes. Such disruptions, of course, were lightly-weighted salvos of the early Industrial Revolution. Much worse (or better – depending on one’s viewpoint) was yet to come.
The pharaohs built the pyramids with even less technology, I suppose. So the task of laying the Boston and Worcester was not at all beyond human capacity. It just would have taken a lot of laborers and I have no clue about who they were and how they found themselves working three long years all the ‘liv long day.
