Thursday, January 20, 2005, 4:03pm
Thursday, January 20, 2005, 4:03pm
I seem to do a lot of window-staring, though very often lost in thought seeing little of what there is to notice.
Tonight, in the reflection of this window – instead of the details of the train station outside – I am casually observing would-be passengers seeking their seating fortunes behind me wandering toward the head of the train along the carriage aisle. It will be another five minutes or more before we are underway. There is almost nothing new to see or do.
As a practical activity I try jamming my rail pass into the seat strap ahead of me. It won’t go in far enough to stay with any reasonable certainty, even with the trick of inserting it from the opposite side of the loop. Drawing the attention of that seat’s window-side occupant I quit the enterprise with one last decisive shove, then returned to my proper personal space staring out my own window.
“Mano-Manischewitz!” I almost say aloud, as I realize how I’ve wrapped myself around a wheel axle over a stupid seat strap.
We’re underway, and as though right on queue, the lead conductor announces his intention to collect. Rather than chafe at the misuse of the word I accept his use of the term ‘collect’ for what it has become — inspecting and approving and selling rather than collecting much of anything tangible beyond a few dollars here and there.
I can be flexible if I want. After all, most transportation terminology borrows heavily from ocean-going passenger ship traffic. It has to come from somewhere. If we had to create a word for everything new that comes our way, we might end up with a host of head-scratchers like the verb form of google – pointing at one of the more grating examples of the decade.
Reuse is a little more gentle on the ears.
Transport, literally means traveling between ports.
A ‘bark’ is a boat – embark means to get into a boat.
When disembarking, I reverse that process.
I climb aboard the train, where – in the time of the word’s creation – all boat decking consisted of wooden boards and I couldn’t very well have climbed onto much of anything else.
I suspect there are references to horses and carts as well, and my point here is only say how older words are easily reshaped and pressed into an updated function.
At Back Bay Station I power up my noise-canceling headphones, removing something akin to the distant whooshing of a deep-wooded wind or distorted echoes leaking from the insides of a giant conch shell. The headphones help with the overall noise level, but once again I notice how they fail to filter human voices.
If what people had to say were a bit more interesting or entertaining or informative, I might enjoy the chatter. Yet into this journal I’ve collected and written almost everything rising to the level of ‘quotable’ – and as can be seen – there aren’t many nuggets.
Bigger and heavier aviation-caliber noise canceling headphones are available that would do the job a lot better, but can’t justify a thousand bucks for a casual-use headset, so drivel it is except on those nights when everybody mysteriously shuts up for the whole ride home.
Underway from Back Bay we roll through the western end of the blackened tunnel before emerging into robust daylight. Hovering in the southwest the sun still lingers just above a distant horizon, and from this place it continues to illuminate the tops of the taller apartment buildings especially highlighting rooftops festooned with countless appendages – air conditioning units, chimney’s, elevator mechanism sheds, and a myriad of imposing billboards – all under the watchful gaze of the historically-preserved and arguably-hideous Citco sign perched like Zeus overlooking Kenmore Square.
Perhaps, for the sake of illustration, a classic episode from MASH could be played from that same roof-top location for all to see whether they want to or not over-and-over day-after-day. Even Gone With the Wind would become unwatchable after several weeks of that.
Then imagine forcing people to endure this for decades.
That is the unspoken situation with the great and mighty Citco sign.
Completely riven into the rigid psyche of the city, no one can imagine the sign gone and melted into scrap – as though the city has somehow defined an appendage of itself by this monstrosity, and tearing it down would be akin to demolishing Faneuil Hall.
Across a large open parking area the sunlight reaches us at Yawkey Station, and as soon as I notice, the flash of light is gone. We pass ancient warehouses and the backs of other buildings all gradually choking off my view to the west before the Pike overpass puts a lid on the sky.
We cruise through the freight yards at perhaps 40mph. Shipping containers streak past my window at arms-reach until we regain the Pike after the tolls. We slow down to change rails and then for a half mile we drift along before picking up speed again.
Past Allston, where the train briefly rises above grade, the sun peeks directly into my face until a minor hill rises to block this view just before the crisscross.
Into Newtonville the sun still touches the upper portions of one-story shops passing well above the grade of the tracks. The light is spotty, and after a half-minute of this we roll back into shadows where twilight is already lurking. When I disembark only 25 minutes from now, I’m pretty sure I’ll still see some of this twilight, and if so, it will be my first walk home along Pleasant Street since November beneath any sort of natural light except the moon and stars.
Perhaps then I’ll have something more to consider beyond the simple trudging atop the snowy footsteps of those who have trudged ahead of me.
Based on my experience from this morning, some of these footsteps might include those from Bigfoot, who for two winters remained a mystery with his 38-inch strides and the particular size and angle of his foot placement in the snow. Then one evening at the end of last winter I was following a guy perhaps six foot six inches pulling away from me with each step as he kicked up small tufts of powder in his size-14 walking shoes. This was Bigfoot in the flesh. So now I can imagine his giant gate whenever I see these telltale foot prints in the snow.
It is still bright outside as we cross from Wellesley into Natick, made even brighter and cheerier by the still clean and widely distributed snow upon solid ground and frozen ice, including all visible sections of the sprawling inland sea known as Lake Cochituate.
Why do I do this? Why do I write about the train mile after mile? It seems like a very strange way to spend my time, and as far as I can see there isn’t much reason to bother. I want to it give up. But I’ve got little else better to do, and maybe a hundred years from now someone might find this journal entertaining in the way most by-gone descriptions can be entertaining if filled with unvarnished detail.
