Monday, January 17, 2005
Monday, January 17, 2005
Martin Luther King Holliday
The nearly empty commuter rail parking lot at Ashland Station was my first reminder today of the holiday. Other clues include a mere half dozen would-be passengers strewn the length of a platform normally accommodating dozens.
The 8:07am train rolls into Ashland at around 8:14 – early, given the message board that warned to expect more like 8:17 or 8:22. These trains can make up time if there are few would-be passengers queuing to keep trains waiting long at each station stop. The train also came barreling in from Southboro, slowing and braking at the last possible instant. By maximizing track speed like this the engineer is making up time as well. No problem for me as long as he doesn’t overshoot his mark. I have my boarding ritual, even without the usual seat-selection advantage of being first aboard.
This morning I’m riding aboard a 133-passenger single-decker car carrying perhaps 20 souls, and because of the luxury of the empty seats, I’ve wandered a little farther forward to the luxury of a seat facing inbound instead of facing where I’ve been. On very rare mornings when a double-decker train rolls into town at 8:07am or I take an earlier train where double-deckers are the norm I’ll relinquish my board ritual, grabbing what seems like the best seat aboard whatever car presents itself.
Rituals are only useful in a world that does not change – which I suppose is also saying that unless rituals evolve alongside the actual world, they lose their practical value – since the world is always changing, even if we aren’t noticing. Perhaps one of the reasons for the detail of this journal is to reveal the changes by recording similar spaces and events day after day. Likely, of the elements in this drama, I am the most changing feature of all, and likely also because of this, I may not be the most reliable scribe. Yet I am the only scribe willing, so far as I know, so I’ll do what I can.
Past Lake Cochituate the water is still mostly open – though utterly uninviting. The open places have a colorless dark gray tone of winter where a slushy ice has almost formed to collect last night’s dusting. I also notice how smaller ponds are mostly frozen over now, but this is harder to see as we gain speed to where the train kicks up a wake of freshly fallen snow blasting past my window in a continuous blizzard.
In the endless battle to retain human dignity in the face of the Old Man, rock salt tossed onto the platform at Wellesley Square has created shallow saltwater puddles, and except for these platforms and the sidewalks leading to them and the pavement of the streets beyond, all else is frosted in a thin white confection as though the whole world were now one frozen sugarcoated treat.
There must have been no wind last night when the snow fell because at every overhanging outcrop of stone or beneath each twisting shrub I can see a snow-shadow of bare earth where no straight-falling snow could reach. On the crags of retaining walls and across rough-hewn stone embankments snow has been caught by the smallest surface irregularities accenting textures as though the sun were standing exactly at the zenith straight overhead – which never happens this far north.
Into the express portion of our holiday ride the blowing snow blizzard has returned, though because of clean windows throughout the near-empty carriage and the freedom to look about without staring across someone else’s line of sight I can see better than usual. I sit face-forward. The train turns and weaves. I seem to have a better sense for our locality. Or perhaps I simply know where I am right now because we’ve just barreled through the Pike crisscross and I would have noticed that in my sleep!
The run from Wellesley Farms to Boston seems shorter every day. From my face-forward perspective I see the approaching Back Bay Tunnel lights for the Mass Pike portion of this linear tomb and then in less than a second the windows of our car fades into total blackness.
Soon we rumble to a halt inside a false subterranean pall that deserves no more descriptions. Upstairs at ground level adjacent to Copley Plaza the station is bright and colorful, and it is only down here where the lifelessness seems to lurk. With all sorts of fancy lighting and artful tile work most city subway stations are far more inviting than this. Perhaps someone will feel inclined to improve the lifeless commuter rail stations. I suspect the walls will have to crumble first.
Leaving our brief pause beneath I-93 most of my commuting is done for today with only a cold jaunt across the 1899 Bridge Summer Street Bridge remaining plus a more pleasant angled shortcut through South Boston between buildings to reach Farnsworth Street.
Not just clamoring aboard the trains – the whole thing is my ritual.
