Thursday, December 16, 2004, 8:14am
Thursday, December 16, 2004, 8:14am
Through eastern Ashland along the banks of the finger lake reservoir marking the ancient bed of the Sudbury River we cruise at a leisurely pace this morning. A new skim of ice has formed across the whole surface – one soft breeze or bit of sunshine away from its comeuppance. At Farm Pond the motif continues – a thin glazing of ice more like plastic wrap over jelly than any sort of hard crust.
After a minute at Framingham Station behind my right shoulder I hear the arrival of the Boston to Framingham locomotive. Most mornings it would be here already, but we are running as near to ‘on time’ as a train can run without showing up ahead of schedule.
This morning I left the house with plenty of time to spare, but a minor walking injury has been conspiring to slow me down lately. A couple of weeks ago near South Station when changing my mind about bolting across Summer Street I stubbed a toe inside my shoe. It was either that or stub my torso against the bumper of a speeding taxi, so the sudden choice was a winner even if the lesser of two evils. As a result I’ve been favoring my right foot and this morning cramping the muscles of my right shin responsible for the modified gate.
There’s always something hurting a bit – a knee or ankle or foot or hip, and as I leave the house most mornings I ask myself “What’ll be today?” It usually wears off along Pleasent Street, but not always.
When I started commuting into Boston, walking pains were an unexpected problem. Yet I can’t stay home because of a bum toe, and paying two bucks to park my car at the station won’t help in the city with my trek to and from South Station. So as long as I can find a way to walk, I walk and hope the next day will be better.
At Lake Cochituate the surface is now mostly frozen except for one open patch near the shoreline filled with a convoy of paddling ducks taking a respite from the most physical aspect of their own commuting activities. Likely most mornings they have plenty to complain about, as well.
Rolling into Natick Station I notice the shadows of steeply pitched rooftops projected against the giant south-facing granite retaining wall of this trench-like station stop, shadows complete with silhouetted chimneys belching silhouetted smoke.
Morse Pond then follows, marking the Wellesley line, and it, too, is frozen in a late autumn glaze. The notion does not last as thoughts of ice are suddenly replaced by a ‘commuting conductor’ entering the cabin with a mission this morning. Once satisfied with a particular piece of seat tag paperwork, she removes each of the green tags placed earlier by William. As a result there are no tags at my seat or at any other three-seater holding just two passengers. Usually the tags aren’t pulled until after Wellesley Farms, the last of our local stops, so she must be converting the paperwork to her own particular style of seat-tracking.
Into our express run at Newton, we roll into the ‘blur-time’ of the commute – seated here with the world streaking past in details presented faster than I can absorb before new details push into view to obliterate my unfocused attention. At this speed, projected against the low granite retaining walls throughout Newton, there is one constant – the shadowed silhouette of this old-style single-decker passenger car itself – riding with us at a constant speed and staying put long enough for closer inspection.
At the top of these sorts of carriages a giant metal eyelet perhaps eight inches in diameter is welded at each end of the car roof. I suppose the whole car could be cable-hoisted off the tracks at some repair yard and considering the need to access all sorts of belly-mounted hardware and other systems hanging from these cars, a big fish hook at either end would solve all kinds of problems. Thinking still like the driver of an automobile, I’ve often envisioned using these eyelets to spin a trainload of cars around end-to-end to face correctly for some return trip. Yet the cars are made to run in both directions – and for logistics, at least, this is not necessary.
With so many ways to look at the world, and with trains being one of the odder manifestations of human activity on the planet, the railroads offer endless opportunities for misconception.
At the Allston freight yards almost no shipping containers are parked here today leaving the sky wide open to the horizon. From my satellite view, north of the yards past the Pike I see nothing but open land, then the Charles River beyond, and then more than a mile after that a low scrub of buildings and telephone wires. So it seems there is a good reason for the sense of wide-openness.
Further inbound, the taller buildings feel too perfectly formed this morning – like inside some computerized model before weather and atmospherics are applied. Even a mile away the shadowed sides of lightly-colored buildings are crisply dark and there is little to suggest that a single photon of morning light is being diffused along its pathway other than into the baby blue scattering of the blue sky itself, scattered by real atmospheric oxygen and real atmospheric nitrogen arriving overnight to blanket metro-Boston express from some arctic dessert.
Today the day is clearer in ways almost never seen outside the bitter confines of deepest winter.
