Friday, March 11, 2005, 6:00pm
Friday, March 11, 2005, 6:00pm
The ‘oh-and-by-the-way’ track announcement finally trickles through South Station’s command and control system. At the trailing end of this process an obvious conclusion is stated — telling us how the train parked the last 20 minutes on this track is indeed destined to become the 6:05pm Worcester Express.
Other than trains already departed there were no other likely candidates. This one last train remained. The rest drifted off leaving only their fading ghosts. Perhaps I might concentrate enough to conjure the image of a station full of trains and waiting passengers properly directed with plenty of information in plenty of time. Yet all the imagining and conjuring in the world was unable to produce a timely answer on the official whereabouts of 6:05 Worcester Express, even though sitting here the whole time.
That is my complaint for the night and for the week. It is the consternation of conductors and passengers alike all trying to operate under a fixed timetable. Absent timely information the clueless hordes have no other choice but to flood the station concourse and pour along the most likely platform at the very last moment. We jostle at each carriage doorway. We trickle aboard like a mountain stream through loose rocks after a quick springtime melt. The young and the old, office workers and recent visitors to the children’s museum pushing strollers, blind people tapping with long white canes, citizens riding in motorized wheel chairs — all of us reduced to the common denominator of the quick or the dead.
I once rode a packed Yugoslavian train from Austria to Munich with just this sort of compressed feeling. Today there are no window sills laden with green-tinted liquor bottles, nor an early morning concourse filled with German-speaking drunks asking for a mark or two. But in the manner of dehumanization it is a fair comparison nonetheless.
Passengers are not a horde to be shoveled aboard a train like an ant colony on a last minute whim. Beyond the fixed institutional mindset of South Station operations the least of us are – in fact – the equals of those running the railroad in all human respects.
And even if we weren’t their equal in status or stature, there is no added efficiency to spreading havoc across the entire concourse.
Five hundred passengers are kept from the train until the very last second. Without any solid information five hundred passengers rush the train they feel is about to leave. Why? — so in this conjured darkness terrorists can’t decide which train to attack? Yet in reality there is no increased security, not with mass confusion the most conformable traveling companion of malfeasance.
Nonetheless at 6:06pm without a horn blast and nary a boo from any on-board announcement we sneak into a gathering night. For all I know phantom conductors this evening were left behind as this ghost train made its way out of the station. But then a live shadow passes from the aisle, and it is not a ghost but rather a uniformed fill-in conductor.
At Back Bay Station the rush is on for the last of the decent seats before the center-seat dregs of the three-seaters are all that remain. It must be a demoralizing experience to race aboard each evening at Back Bay knowing so few decent seats remain — if any. Perhaps this is why some passengers prefer to stand. Sometimes I suppose it’s just easier not to look.
From the Back Bay Tunnel we reemerge into the night of a late winter’s eve. Light snow had been falling on the way to South Station, but as far as I can tell from within this train with its bright florescent tubes, the snow has stopped. Predicted rain has not started either, nor is this likely to happen from the most recent reports.
Through Allston we roll fast with a blur of streaking orange colored security lights mounted to the backsides of buildings abutting the tracks. Only the operation of the human mind can reconstruct a three-dimensional world from so little data, and even at this, only from how I’ve seen this same world so many times under so many conditions.
I’ve written about this in many ways, but it’s pretty clear how I construct a sense of reality in my mind from whatever data I can collect. Where I lack data I supply memories and other filler to the point where nothing more is available from past and present experience. Then I fill the remaining gaps with faith and hope – or else abide the uncertainty of the uncertainty itself. If not for this thought process along these lines I’d never feel safe enough to ride any train or fly aboard any airplane or drive across town on a foggy night. I use what I have for information and beyond that point I say to myself on –some– level ‘enough!’ At each point in life I have only two basic choices going forward. I can accept the present odds and persevere or I can crawl into a hole to await an absolute certainty that will never arrive.
A rare few say that we can be 100% certain about everything – not by faith, not by hope, not through statistical likelihood, but simply because they feel they have human nature and the laws of physics all figured out.
Others are certain that God will fill the gaps to protect them in uncertain moments because God, they believe, looks out for those looking to him for help no matter the danger. They are certain that believing in God is the same thing as being protected by him; They are certain that God punishes the sinners and sustains those who pray; and they are certain that being on the winning team of the righteous is the only safe way through life – even when confronted by those also on the winning team in the form of starving orphans who pray to this very same God right down to their last breath while God and his angels lie asleep at the switch.
If there is one almost universal human trait it is our ability to pat ourselves on the back believing that we have things under control no matter how much good or evil we may be rendering upon other human beings in the process. Doesn’t the torture chamber attendant have those ‘good’ days as well — when the ratio of useful confessions recorded to hideous screams rendered is better than average? Does he not walk home to his wife and kids on those mornings feeling that he’s somehow made his corner of the world a safer place?
Almost everyone believes their actions to be justified – from dictators to common thieves, from street vendors selling spoiled meat to CEOs selling tainted pharmaceuticals — simply by choosing not to consider how they might be completely self-deceived in however they justify these actions.
How we fill the gaps of uncertainty says a lot about who we are as people.
“West Natick!”
Thank goodness. Sometimes the blind hypocrisy of human nature works its way under my skin like this, and I just can’t ignore it – and it’s good to have myself jolted back to the train where few great decisions are made and where simply getting home is the point. When it is light again, maybe I’ll get back to observing the passing world. But until these 6:05pm trains run west through the daylight, I will be confronted with an inner experience that is not always as comfortable as the events of a mundane world passing outside these windows.
“Framingham!”
“Framingham. Station stop is Framingham.”
Okay. That’s enough for one week. It’s time to pack up for my dark trudge home.
