Amtrak #2159
On a train to the city. It’s a familiar route, and one I take regularly. I need these long weekends every so often: they remind me that Boston is only temporary, that what sometimes seems like an oppressive permanence can be remedied with just a train ticket, and—most importantly, for me—that I am still a New Yorker.
As accustomed as I’ve become to this route something about this ride feels markedly different—the train coach has been sterilized. It’s a new car, it seems, a recent upgrade. Its seats are freshly upholstered with some charcoal grey synthetic leather substitute, still smelling of their protective shrink wrap. Each seat is outfitted with a radio in the armrest, and call buttons and personal fans above the passengers, set inside an enclosure bearing digital readouts of the seats’ reservation status; the screens all read “*EMPTY*” in a heavily pixellated typeface. Halogen lights run above the overhead storage compartments and LEDs along the floor. The train has been thoroughly modernized.
It all plays tricks on the eye as each of these coaches shares the same greatest common factor: each row of seating, these 48-inch segments, they all repeat themselves along the aisle, converging at a vanishing point at the end of the car which is uninterrupted by any differentiation save for the tops of the passengers’ heads just barely peeking out above the headrests. There is nothing to see here but sameness, manufactured industrial consistency.
To look outside through the windows that are each like every other is a reminder that a train ride along the Northeast Corridor is nothing like you imagine a train ride to be, that this isn’t Hans Castorp winding through a Swiss mountainside on his way to The Magic Mountain and that there are no landscapes or vast expanses, no quaint locomotives and bright red kabooses, and that your route appears a constant interruption in whichever place you’re passing through at that moment. The signs of civilization are everywhere, and everything along the way seems to be in media res, and looking out of these windows for long enough will cause the eyes to strain: there is nowhere for them to rest as this constant flow of imagery races past at high speeds and close distances. Inside and outside the train alike the eye finds little sanctuary.
But it’s a fitting way for me to make these trips, the way it mirrors a life that is always busy, always business, always work and side projects and never any chance to slow down and stop to think and be saddened that your body’s stuck in Boston while your heart’s in New York because everything is always so busy and moving so quickly and whenever it does all finally slow down and your eyes can finally settle on something and your mind can finally catch up with its thoughts it’s only because your train is pulling into Penn Station and you’re finally home.
