Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 8:14am
Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 8:14am
My noise canceling headphones squawk to life as William stabs a tag into the seat strap ahead of me. The electronics of these headphones tries to suppress the roar and rumble of the train yet they are designed for airplanes.
Active noise cancellation won’t block the higher pitch of the human voice or the scraping of dirty shoe leather across sandy aisle flooring or the clanging of metal on metal as the train gets underway. As though to prove my point, a tinny cell phone speaker blares to life from across the aisle producing a furious symphony – The Marriage of Figaro. By the time the guy digs the phone from his coat, the piece has worked its way through measure upon measure – rousing much unwanted attention and the smoldering ire of an entire passenger carriage.
What exactly is my complaint? – it is a similar complaint to one uttered by Emperor Joseph II – “Too many notes, Mozart!” Except in this case, it is not the music itself, it is the location and source that presents too many notes. A cell phone so prodigiously cacophonous should be reprogrammed to better announce its owner’s truer condition – “I am an asshole…” it should repeat at a fever pitch with no shut-off button until the battery dies or its owner is pitched bodily overboard.
I hear that ten percent of all cell phone owners pay an extra 10 bucks every month for the privilege – and annoyance – of a custom cell phone ring, adding around 200 million dollars in vacuous profit to companies smart enough to run a business model based upon the unvarnished vanity and unbridled hubris of my fellow Americans.
Above Natick Station the Old Man slumbers as a thin overcast part to reveal hazy patches of warm blue sky. Expecting this sort of weather, by the window beside me I’ve hung my springtime windbreaker on a metal hook instead of a wintertime mountaineering coat.
I remember just now when local perspectives once shifted the other way – the winter I once traveled to Arizona along Interstate 17. During my northbound drive out of Phoenix, in appalling nonconformity to local expectations, it was snowing in the southwest desert.
As a New Englander, the notion of blowing flurries across an otherwise clear and dry super highway is no cause for alarm. Here, though, I was obviously elsewhere – evidenced by local white-knuckled steering-wheel-huggers crawling at speeds normally reserved for a crowded parking lot.
Like today, by the next morning in Flagstaff the ground was still soft below a downy new-fallen blanket – for a time hovering in a state not quite melting and not quite frozen either. At Wellesley Farms across this landscape I watch a beefy guy perhaps in his 60’s makes a run for the train starting from the parking lot across the tracks. Over a nearby road bridge he runs and just as the train gets underway I see his face peering into our cabin through a vestibule door window before turning to seek a different destiny in the carriage trailing one car back.
Perhaps it doesn’t snow very often in Flagstaff – I have no idea. But I do remember hearing how snow was a big deal farther south in Phoenix – something like the first time in 40 years they’d seen a measurable amount.
Just so I wouldn’t blow past those drivers on the Arizona interstate I took to the high-speed lane at around 50 – still 25 MPH below the limit – marveling at how a bit of driving experience can obliterate unwarranted fear. In Massachusetts the problem is just the opposite – people who, for the sake overconfidence in their overpriced SUVs, plow ahead no matter the weather.
On my way south I decided to cut through the mountains surrounding Prescott and just south of town on Route 89 I found myself staring into a giant impromptu hand-painted road sign warning drivers without chains and four wheel drives to turn back. I’d never read a sign quite like that, at least not to the level of detail where I wouldn’t have been surprised to read a list of bones I might fracture should I fail to heed their advice.
After a lengthy and conscious debate I decided to proceed with the self-imposed rule that I would navigate point-to-point like a riverboat captain. If I saw anything ahead that seemed even remotely beyond my skill or the caliber of my rented front-wheel drive Nissan Altima, I would turn back. For about an hour I navigated twenty miles of switchbacks around the lips of small ravines offering majestic views of snow-covered desert cactus. Emerging on the other side of the mountain pass I realized that I’d not once plowed through more than four inches of light powdery snow.
The warning sign, I have to assume, must have been written for conditions a lot worse than what I saw that afternoon, and even though I normally heed clearly presented advice handed out by those in a position to know better, I’m glad I took the risk and embarked on that journey.
In the long run, no matter how clearly-written the rules, we must make our own call – to agree that a rule makes sense and obey it or otherwise defy the rule maker and accept the consequences. In this one way the criminal and the saint are the same – because they both choose.
It is the sniveling worm who forgets why rules are written and abjectly and fearfully obeys without another thought.
This is a train journal, and the Arizona of that day is many years in the past and 2,500 miles distant – so enough of that.
I know that our New England version of winter hardly ever fails to deliver, and the weather is thus far unusually gentle for mid-January, and I expect next week or the one after will have me crossing the 1899 Summer Street Bridge in a howling artic gale.
So as we pass the open river water of the Charles I will enjoy the day for what it is right now.
