Wednesday January 26, 2005, 5:56pm

Wednesday January 26, 2005, 5:56pm

The third car from the last is quite a bit farther up the platform from where I normally reside. I didn’t expect to find most doors of the train frozen shut. So with few choices in the matter I kept on walking until I found a doorway into this tomb.

As far as walks are experienced in the city, mine today have been unusual. First off, snow banks along the main thoroughfares of Congress and Summer Streets are piled 20 feet wide and four feet deep – half on the roads and half overtopping the sidewalks. This has left only a single-file footpath close by to stores and other buildings where once four people could easily walk abreast. Crossing through these man made ice-shelves requires openings carved during the storm. As far as I can tell, these gullies were opened by local store owners and later maintained by the grim determination of those out-and-about as the snow continued to fall, leaving deep v-shaped channels barely wide enough to pass.

As predicted snowfall happened again today. Just four inches – yet when there is no space left for any new snow, even a few inches adds considerably to our pedestrian adventures, filling the snowbank channels and powdering all the other places no longer reachable by equipment.

Once atop the 1899 Bridge a blasting wind out of the north kept me from any sort of careful study of the frozen channel where sea ice is an amazing concept I have yet to fully grasp. Isn’t salt supposed to keep this from happening? I once believed open oceans only froze in places like Alaska and the Barents Sea. But the ice atop the Fort Point Channel today is at least a foot thick in places where it hasn’t broken by the rise and fall of the tides.

Underway now, the desperate fist-pounding of the damned has stopped that I took to imply hopeless effort in freeing up the frozen doors of this train. To leave most doors immovable could be a serious safety hazard should we need to abandon this space in any sort of hurry. A little more pounding erupts. To what effect I cannot tell. Perhaps I should suggest boiled water followed by compressed air to dry out the works before they can refreeze. It is one of those proletarian ideas that has no voice, and I quickly abandon it alongside all hope of routine safety.

Although I have mentioned passenger train wrecks to illustrate various points, in reality these are rare events in this country – except for today where three thousand miles from here one of the most bizarre train wrecks of all time took the lives of at least ten commuter rail passengers riding a double-decker train very much like this one.

Apparently, a 26-year-old guy in California decided to end his life in an SUV stopped atop a railroad crossing directly in front of a fast-moving commuter train. That event in itself is an astounding circumstance, yet in this case it was only the start of a terrible and cruel chain of events.

The passenger train struck the SUV, derailed, and because of that sideswiped a second passenger train heading the other way on adjacent tracks. Even more rail cars then jumped the rails with some crashing onto their sides leaving at least 200 injured and killing at least the ten already counted.

The cruel part is how the would-be suicide victim chickened out at the last second by jumping from his truck – finding out at the very last second how he really did not want to die as much as he wanted to live. Yet now a whole bunch of other people are dead – those who had to die in order to force his decision to live. This 26-year-old nutcase will spend at least the next 20 years locked away – or at least I hope he lives that long to think about it.

I’m nearly as annoyed by this guy’s incompetence and selfishness as saddened by the horrendous tragedy suffered by those who had plans for their lives and did not need to tempt death in order to prove this the case. It is one thing to do something inept and thoughtless that has no effect on others. It’s quite another when somebody doesn’t consider those who might be endangered as a result.

Perhaps this opens the question of measuring risks not just for how I might try to keep myself safe but also to what extent my own risk-avoidance might affect other people. For example, I could park in the last available handicapped spot under the presumption that these spaces are hardly ever used. Here I would be trading the potential inconvenience of parking ticket for improved convenience as a pedestrian.

Here, I would be an inconsiderate moron since someone with a valid need might now be forced to hobble the length of the parking lot. I personally would have gained a tiny bit of personal convenience at the price to somebody now facing a severe inconvenience. So perhaps that sort of equation is what bothers me most about the abuse of power. The infinitesimal gain to the abuser is often at great cost to those abused, manipulated, and cheated in the process. An even trade would be unfair. AN imbalanced trade of this sort is diabolical, even if poorly observed and of-hidden.

For example, who suffers most from the Iraq war these days? – a National Guardsman from Iowa leaving his wife and children for a third tour of duty? – or a president who sends him to a war with trumped up justification and a cushy bed at night? The president has his way. But what about the loyal Americans killed and the thousands maimed so far? Is control of Iraq by those who will never face any direct personal risk in the adventure worth those lives (along with a hundred thousand Iraqis) ended in the process?

This may sound like a partisan line of questioning, but is nonetheless a valid inquiry given how so many lives are at stake and how the situation on the ground is more ominous than ever, less likely to be resolved soon, and thus far a complete failure with respect to quelling the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism – and I can only hope that when our government finally dives from the driver’s seat of the SUV they’ve parked atop Iraq, that they won’t be leaving an utter train wreck in the making.