Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Departing Ashland Station I follow the results of some ungodly brush-clearing machine. Rather than cut with any sort of true saw blade, the underbrush near the tracks is uniformly bashed to an even level with the rails leaving nothing more behind than shattered stalks and mangled saplings with wounds that could easily be the work of spinning sledge hammers or a giant weed whacker wielding loose chains.
Near my bedroom window as a kid I remember the results of similarly ruthless cutting machines trimming the trees along the railroad and I also remember the one time they tried a defoliant chemical at about the same time the federal government was defoliating much of South Vietnam this way. Did the railroad company actually use dioxin-based Agent Orange through the heart of a semi-rural New England town where everyone still pumps their own well water? I’ve never dared to ask that question until just now.
As we crawl through the freight yards at Framingham, William tags my seat. Today’s color is a pale yellow – or at least the tag for my seat. The voice announcing our arrival at Framingham Station is unfamiliar. Frank was on the train yesterday, so I doubt he’s been replaced – at least not without more evidence.
Waiting its turn the soon-the-be Framingham to Boston local remains rooted at Framingham Station as we slowly drift away, gaining speed. Passing empty parking lots east of the old Dennison plant I am reminded of how the company donated the building complex to the town and departed the town perhaps a dozen years ago leaving this a mostly unoccupied rambling red brick mountain-range. Sections of the larger buildings stand five stories at the center tapering down to one or two away from their higher peaks. Atop it all, the old Dennison Manufacturing sign continues to define the skyline much like the obsolete rooftop Boston Wharf sign at the Summer Street bridge into South Boston standing high above the Fort Point Channel.
Some of the Dennison brickwork includes ornate framework with European train station style arching windows filled with lead-framed glass, while at the eastern edge of the plant a giant tapering cylinder of brickwork forms a looming smokestack standing roughly 120 feet tall including an observation deck girdling its circumference about a third of the way down from the top. It probably isn’t really an observation deck, but I can imagine no other use, and it certainly would allow a 360-degree view of the whole downtown region if one were brave enough to walk its creaking perimeter.
Well past Framingham I see that we are just now crossing into Wellesley passing a ganglion of unbashed brush and leafless trees – ‘leafless’ except for stubborn oaks still clinging to a portion of their desiccated foliage – hanging on perhaps until spring when new buds finally say enough is enough.
Passing rough-cut stone at Wellesley Farms, I wonder again who built the Boston and Worcester railroad line. The cities of the Northeast had not yet begun to receive what would soon become massive immigrations from Ireland and central Europe, so I’ll have to dig a little deeper than conventional mythos to answer this particular mystery. From what I do know, by 1830 the population had hardly recovered from the effects of the American Revolution, and the brand new factories of the emerging Industrial Revolution were already absorbing what surplus labor might be found. Yet in less than five years three rail lines averaging 50 miles in length were hand-built north, west, and south of Boston, and it must have required a small army of men from somewhere.
At 65mph too many details flow past my window for proper comment – abandoned bridge supports no longer holding anything overhead, retaining walls moldering into a form of permanence almost equal to the dirt they retain. Just before the Mass Pike crisscross through a blur of naked limbs a cathedral-like stone building complete with imposing tower briefly comes into view, then farther east well beyond the river another looming red brick smokestack stands sentinel like the one at Dennison Crossing with its own observation deck a third of the way from the top.
Leafless brush between the Pike and the rails zip past quickly. A river of parked shipping containers roost atop the tracks at the Allston freight yards whizzing by my window in a streak of soulless hues; then Portland Cement cars, then more shipping containers.
For I moment I flash back more than thirty years to the site of a train wreck on the sloping hillside woods just before the railroad bridge over the Charles in Sherborn. A mile from the nearest house, the wreckage was still lying there pushed aside to permit quick repairs to what must have been a severally mangled roadbed. Most prominent were the overturned cement cars, some fully spit open spilling the silky smooth powder onto the ground. As teenagers with little interest in the dangers or the economics, for an afternoon we explored – climbing and jumping down into piles of cement powder with the texture of cake flour and the coolness of freshly dug beach sand. Rain that night hardened some of it and before long most was dragged away along with the wreckage leaving mounds of amorphous concrete here and there to this very day.
Near Boston University beneath the Mass Pike overpass a maintenance truck lingers with its pale yellow strobe light warning no one in particular about nothing clearly observable. Now on level ground, across the Pike I see the Photonics Center and then the Art Institute of Boston at Kenmore Square. Soon we pass under some nameless overpass connecting Beacon Street with Storrow drive – though how I know this is a mystery explained in the way I explain most other connections when I know something I should not know about Boston––the dreaded Sunday morning commute, though this ramp was part of the way home and today encountered with relief more than dread.
The scene conjures the flash of a specific ancient memory – a metallic bashing from behind instantly lurching me forward, then looking back to see a crumpled steel blue car hood close behind and some guy sitting behind the wheel with a bloody nose. And in particular I remember arriving at home from Boston to see that our own car had only a busted taillight, and marveled at the disparity between one car with almost no damage and the other that was probably totaled. It’s all physics – I know that much now – but still a strange memory nonetheless.
After queuing briefly below I-93 we are again underway. Beyond the pillar farm thin clouds fill the sky leaving small breaks here and there open to fleeting slivers of blue. An Amtrak Metroliner pulls out as we roll inbound along adjacent tracks. Waiting commuter trains line the South Station platforms tucked into cave-like spaces below the elevated bus station like hungry eels sunken tail-first into a polished aluminum and soot-encrusted reef – locomotive engines belching yet more black diesel smoke onto the bus station’s once-silvery façade.
