Thursday, February 10, 2005, 8:16am
Thursday, February 10, 2005, 8:16am
For the third morning in a week, Frank is collecting this far back. William has been here other mornings, and I can only guess about the scheduling shuffle. Last night on my way home walking past the last door of the 4:58pm train Norm was standing atop the Ashland platform. I asked if riding this particular train got him home a little earlier – remembering his days aboard the 6:05pm and his description of the hour-long drive after that. Preoccupied with his duties the question made little sense to him.
“Yeah, a little bit…” he said mechanically.
Out of West Natick Station we lurch with a slight periodic thump from a wheel no longer quite round. Indeed, trains don’t get flat tires, but they do have ‘flats’ of a sort from time to time.
The mural painting at Natick an amazing feat. A backdrop at least a hundred feet long and twenty feet high it overlooks nearly the entire south side platform. Murals like this are common in other parts of the world, but I can think of nothing quite like it in all of New England. Such unnatural colors survive on rainy and dreary days like this, unlike so much in the natural world this time of year that seems to melt into gray silhouettes against a backdrop of old snow and wet bark and dark super-saturated mud.
At Wellesley Square a loudmouth from New York comes waltzing onto the train already complaining…
“Don’t no one move on these trains? I’m from New York and people on the train move out of their seat to make room without asking. I mean unless you expect us to stand in the aisle it’s not like you can’t tell that people need a seat! A guy the other day had an epileptic fit right on the train and nobody moved until I yelled to see if there was a doctor. Then everyone jumps out of their seats like a jack in the box to help. If this was American Airlines we’d all crash into the White House before anyone lifted a finger.”
He stands in the aisle lecturing us while stalled in his wake a column of displeased aisle-dwellers fumes with each new syllable. It doesn’t help his cause that he’s from New York, and he’d have his seat a lot sooner if he’d a least grunt his request like everyone else around here, instead of waiting for the mind-readers aboard to gift-wrap an invitation to his liking.
Soon the guy has his seat – right next to me, settles, and quickly opens his briefcase to study its contents. Inside I can’t help but notice giant slices of rye bread forming a sandwich with salami hanging out the edges. The train now smells like a New York deli.
Through the slow curve that sets up for our crisscross passage beneath the Pike we roll at max track speed past the Newton YMCA. From what I now understand from maps – once leaving Newton the rail line passes directly into the Allston section of Boston without clipping Watertown or any other town along the way. Allston is an an older village annexed long ago by Boston – a ‘neighborhood’ in the vernacular I hear on the news – neither a town nor a city in the normal sense. Instead it is a carpet of humble homes and light industrial areas. At beginnings of Back Bay, Allston comes to an end where we pass through BU – a nearly indistinguishable part of the city proper more than any sort of distinct campus in the regular sense.
It was at this border somewhere along the tracks of the freight yards that those two BU students were struck yesterday morning. According to the newspaper their names were Andrew Voluck from Pennsylvania and Molly Shattuck from Ipswich – a town along the coast north of Boston. No details of why they were there were reported, only how the possibility of students walking the tracks behind Nickerson Field has not been a reason for concern in the past.
At Back Bay “Mr. New York City” is the picture of civility as he exits the train along with the woman he had been haranguing – more than charitable about the whole thing seeing perhaps – as I did – how this guy’s yakking was far more about his own internal anxieties about traveling in a foreign environment than any real attempt at educating or intimidating the uninformed passengers of the ancient Boston and Worcester Line.
Mist shrouds the city as we roll into South Station. Smoke and steam exit stacks at the clearly marked “World Shaving Headquarters” of Gillette. The mist lingers in the air, neither moving upward nor dissipating into the super saturated atmosphere. Nearby the concrete is soaked. The brickwork is drenched. The air is thick with gloom.
