Tuesday, December 7, 2004, 8:20am
Tuesday, December 7, 2004, 8:20am
Leaving home this morning I see that freezing rain has solidified overnight, except at Ashland Station where the battle against walkway ice is continuous. Aided by copious rock salt sewn in generous handfuls across the length and breadth of station platforms and interconnected crossover towers the mixture of salt and ice is merely crusty and crunchy underfoot.
Underway just shy of Farm Pond we are rolling along behind the old concrete factory building where I notice a temporary six-inch diameter water pipe laying in the semi-frozen dirt. Similar tubing was laid last summer in this part of town while permanent underground plumbing was being replaced, so perhaps the railroad right of way is being borrowed as a bridge to the next portion of the construction project.
Moe, Larry, and Curley would have stood proudly among such improvisation.
One of the morning conductors boarding at Framingham – a ‘commuting’ conductor by my common reckoning – goes by the name of Mark. He’s the fellow I’ve seen on this train since day one, but for some reason I didn’t discover his name until yesterday. I’d been fumbling to gather my things at South Station and wound up the last passenger aboard within view, so he had to wait for me, and on the way out we discussed how things get left behind on the seats – like laptop computers no less – and before disappearing entirely I had the presence of mind to ask his name. Mark is quiet and polite, going about his work somewhere between the role of chauffeur and ghost, and I’m always glad to see him day after day aboard a train where I never know who might be there one day and gone the next.
Approaching Wellesley Square the pavement is wet with no obvious ice or scattered rock salt. Sometimes it can be winter in Ashland and still mid-autumn closer to the sea. But this does not last. With the Atlantic Ocean growing colder each night the waning reservoir of heat won’t be keeping the coastal region within a warming cocoon much longer. The ocean moderates the seasons a bit, but sea ice eventually arrives – just later than inland ice thickening atop inland ponds.
At Wellesley Farms Station the sentinel of dead oak leaves remains as before while on the ground below a dusting of snow covers patches of open earth in defiance of my coastal climate theorizing. Beyond this point we pass the backyards of ordinary homes until reaching one sample where I notice a wooded hillside long ago terraced from twenty meters above the train to ten below. The terraces are formed in layers three meters thick buttressed at each edge with thick cut granite, and beyond this, the whole yard is enclosed below a four-meter-high granite wall – built in perfect alignment as though the walls were poured into forms machined by robots. This is no Japanese rock garden seeking harmony with nature. This is decidedly the Western variety compelling a wooded hillside set beside a less than posh railroad into the marked illustration of established order.
Through Newton recent rain has ruined whatever snowfall may have fallen last night, if any fell at all. And after a few miles of routine terrain we pass a familiar building built a year ago just west of the Allston/Brighton turnpike exit hoping for tenants from an expected biotech boom. Instead it remains idle – still advertising its empty space, and as I contemplate the money they must be losing, my view is sheared by the ponderous leading edge of a half mile-long train of gray shipping containers. Soon we pass beneath the Pike overpass drifting along to where we roll beneath the Commonwealth Avenue bridge on a morning offering few clues about what lies ahead in the minutes, the hours and the months to come.
If not for the jarring of a Back Bay announcer echoing unintelligibly throughout the man made cave of this station, I might have missed how nobody aboard this train has spoken a word the whole way into Boston – no cell phones or old friends catching up on news, no voices crackling over the carriage speakers or from anywhere else. Is it the gloom of impending winter? Has the Old Man begun to spin his evil magic to freeze the once cheery souls of this commute?
They say that the tower atop the old Hancock building has a code of colored lights to predict the weather. The color today looks like faint blood red, though this may just be the color of its copper siding, or perhaps the whole color-coding notion a myth. If true, though, it is probably the least-used weather data for practical living in this city.
Until this morning I’d forgotten just how dreary the early winter can look under drizzling rain without snow or ice. Ahead, South Station looms no more glowing and inviting than if it were half buried in the earth.
