Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 8:18am
Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 8:18am
Ah the clockwork mechanism of the MBTA. We roll out of Framingham this morning just as the Boston to Framingham local pulls into the station from the east.
Preserving the usual dance, we are late and they are later.
Frank is again collecting tickets back here in the fourth carriage – so I decide to comment…
“Keeping you busy I see.”
There’s no good reason he ever works this far back except for when a second conductor can’t make it out of bed and into Union Station before 7:30am.
Expecting a scowl, Frank instead seems quite pleased. “New guy – today’s his first day,” he says, shooting a quick look at the fifth car then back to his work.
Frank, never to waste words, is taking the front four cars himself while breaking the kid in aboard the last two.
At Natick Station, would-be passengers step gingerly down rickety wooden steps in an obvious strain between urgency and caution. I follow with my eyes as they reach the station’s multi-tiered concrete loading platform before carefully making their way up the steel steps of our carriage and into the doorways of this very cabin.
The steps must be icy, since most days people are up to full city sidewalk speed with a train waiting in the station. Today, I suppose nobody wants to be the first one going ass over teakettles. If only they knew the situation with a newbie conductor at this end of this train who wouldn’t dare leave anyone behind, and how there’s no real urgency in boarding this particular train on this exact morning.
The newest crowd piling in at Wellesley Square has very few seating choices remaining. I see an older gentleman with a choice putting him next to me in this two-seater or into the seat ahead of me beside a young woman – judging by the very top of her head. The woman squirms toward the window without making any real progress as the older guy sits. Realizing the futility, she then sinks from view while her newly acquired seat companion fidgets for a proper spot just inches away.
Sharing seats aboard these trains is an odd exercise in personal space management. I’ve found that objects of one sort or another can help. For instance, with a book or laptop computer it’s pretty easy to create an agreed upon bubble where all attention appears directed straight ahead and where I need not acknowledge the person sitting inches to my right or left unless for a noteworthy reason. The seats are not like subway benches with their low backs against the wall made for quick entry and exits. They are more like the confining seats aboard an airplane or long-distance bus, where a certain sort of unspoken permission is needed to insert oneself into an already partly occupied slot.
Passing BU the characteristic sandstone motif fills the cabin with a yellow light. Soon we are again crossing the neck of old Boston running partially against the grain of the city’s well-established traffic grid, rolling past dead-end streets and beneath angled bridges. The railroad was laid down years ahead of most roads with many acres all around added more recently as real estate slowly replaced the Charles River estuary.
A city not only holds its past; it –is– its past, with a meticulous record of events etched deeply into the foundations and rubble of the present-day. The decision to cut this rail line diagonally across the old Boston peninsula was made in 1830 and remains in force today – reinforced by the Pike following alongside 130 years later. Nothing fundamental in that decision can be erased without removing the tracks and the highway plus plowing under the scar tissue of nearby buildings that have formed around the earlier incision. And even after all of this, the distortions in the grid would likely remain visible to the discerning eye for another thousand years.
