Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 8:17am
Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 8:17am
The 8:07 train arrived on time this morning and not a minute too soon. In compensation for last week’s balmy temperatures the Old Man has finally awakened with air 5-degrees-above-zero and a brisk in-my-face wind out of the west all the way up Pleasant Street to the station. Added over my downy coat I wore my Gore-Tex windbreaker and beneath both a heavy wool sweater. The trick for staying warm in a minus-20-degree wind-chill is setting my scarf in such a way that my exhale is directed as an air blanket over my nose and eyes. If it’s this cold tomorrow I may dig out my mountaineering face shield, or perhaps search eBay for a used spacesuit.
Across the Sudbury River we roll, soon arriving at the lower end of Farm Pond. Here I notice only a slight change in what was once dark snowless open water. The water has been flash-frozen into a deceptively black ice, a transparent window without windowpanes resting atop the still waters. No wind blew overnight to disturb this process. At Lake Cochituate further inbound I notice splotches of open water refusing the Old Man’s persuasion, unfrozen with cresting waves growing to life under newly arriving gusts.
On a morning like this I have the most compelling sense for how the lake must be nearly fathomless to resist such a deep freeze considering how even the Sudbury River is frozen shore to shore, and normally rivers are the last bodies of water to freeze in winter, save the deep oceans. Yet short of an epic arctic blast or mind-boggling blizzard, no lake will freeze over completely until every drop of water has fallen below forty degrees Fahrenheit.
The density properties of water are some of the oddest among ordinary substances. Above forty degrees the coldest water sinks to the bottom leaving the warmest water on-duty at the surface to prevent all but localized ice formation. Below that temperature the coldest water floats on the surface allowing ice to form across the entire lake in matter of hours, easily freezing to a foot thick or more after a week at temperatures like we’re seeing today.
Evidently Lake Cochituate hasn’t reach the temperature inversion point yet. Eventually this will happen.
The train is comfortable compared to the wintry outside. Here my scarf and hat are receiving arid convection heating from vent holes along the window sill at my side rendering them warm, dry, and ready to don come my next confrontation with the Old Man – the crossing of the 1899 Bridge. The northwest wind should be at my back, but with tall buildings on either side of the channel there is no predicting the swirls and eddies and other localized effects.
At Wellesley Hills, the morning sunlight streams at me from across the aisle on my left before exiting via my dingy window. We are beginning our turn to the north where sunlight creeps and inches ever farther back until this nominally eastbound train is running away from the rising sun. Soon the shadows return as we sink below average grade until reaching Wellesley Farms Station where the scene opens and the sunshine returns, streaming through barren trees, reflecting from the tiny and frozen frog pond beside the equally tiny and frozen parking area.
In contrast to the white snow dusted onto the ground the trunks and tree limbs of the eastern Wellesley forest are painted yellow with morning light. Looking again, the white of the snow is steadfastly not a color. It is a state of existence where all visible light is reflected and refracted. It’s as though the Old Man invented the perfect bedding for himself – a substance that abhors light and heat and does whatever it can to send such on their way.
On approach to the freight yards long after hurtling through the Mass Pike crisscross we continue to gain on the fast moving auto traffic. The cars slow. Our train then slows, and in this slower state we part ways with the highway slipping through the Allston freight yards under a bright streaming sun. I watch the passing snow-dusted shipping containers and notice how they are briefly betrayed by the same pure white snow into revealing a faint greenish hue within their normally gray appearance.
Then the containers are gone.
We roll farther into the city with its glinting reflections of glass and metal highlighting buildings ranging in design from the truly inspired in their classical and modern forms to those occasionally appalling parking garages and postmodern failures that were eyesores the day they were built.
Near the end of our excursion, entombed within the bowels of the city at Back Bay Station a mass exodus of would-be pedestrians is replaced by the cold grimy underworld-air of this above-ground tunnel filling the interior cabin with a lingering remembrance of abysmally cold weather blanketing the greater outside world. During my six-minute walk from South Station I am not looking forward any of this firsthand.
But I suppose I can endure just about any sort of weather for six minutes.
