Tuesday February 1, 2005, 8:23am
February 2005
Tuesday February 1, 2005, 8:23am
A cold morning grinds to a halt past my window as we roll to a stop at West Natick Station. The relatively warm clear and crisp air of yesterday is still crisp and clear but no longer warm by conventional definitions except perhaps to a resident above the Arctic Circle. Last Friday no amount of warm clothing seemed to be enough in the of face a double-digit below-zero blast. This morning I left the house to meet a gentler plus 5-degree breeze blowing straight into my face and decided to call this a ‘warm’ day in perhaps a feeble attempt at ‘positive thinking‘.
By February even the coldest days don’t seem quite so cold anymore, or at least not so painfully cold. At the end of September human summertime adaptation renders a 30-degree morning highly unpleasant whereas the same 30-degree morning at the end of winter seems downright balmy. Perhaps these are my Nordic genes in action, or maybe just the more generalized activities of human acquiescence in the face of the undeniable.
Another subtle change is taking hold beyond thickening blood. Apart from minor quibbles over exact details, the sun today has risen earlier and will go overhead just about the same way it does in mid-November. Already we have left the twelve darkest weeks of the year behind and even though temperatures will lag, the lengthening daylight is also undeniable.
In Boston snowbanks that once covered half the roads and most of the sidewalks are being hauled away each night so that in the morning I see a little bit more of this moldering city returning to its native concrete and asphalt motif. It is not an elegant process this business of city snow removal, where not a few parking meters along Congress Street have been bodily uprooted leaving mangled stumps behind.
In Allston we plunge into the freight yards with blurry steel containers and traditional boxcars streaming past both sides of our train. Someday I will write about the containerized shipping industry and how a simple yet powerful idea was able to change an entire way of doing a very big job.
We penetrate the Back Bay tunnel maw now as I watch cars and trucks stalled along the parallel-running Mass Pike tunnel barely inching ahead. Last week I’d seriously harbored the notion that perhaps a few of these road warriors might stick with the trains after a healthy taste in those days when street parking in the city was nearly nonexistent. Yet it seems to be another part of human nature to drive if driving is at all possible.
