Seven: Morning Commute (07-15-2022)
Part One
For the average, working-age, middle class, office-employed man in the present United States of America, there are 3 distinct phases of the day, 3 distinct localities that he will occupy on each weekday, predictably and ad infinitum. The first is home, where he sleeps, bathes, and eats one or two meals a day. The second is the commute, be it a car, a train, a bus, rarely a boat or airplane, and hopefully a bike or the bare outdoors by foot. The third is the office.
For purposes of demonstration, we will observe a single man, a prototypical commuter, on his brief journey between home and office. The experience a man faces on the train is a far cry from the luxurious cross-country transit of the height of America's passenger rail network, and a further cry from the epic journeys of the Age of Exploration and Antiquity. For this man, nameless and faceless, his trip of many miles by marvelous machine is a mere moment in his life, its banality apparent, and yet it represents for this man a great sum of his time. His commute imparts upon him a repetitive stream of incidents that contribute to his worldview beyond those which occur at home or work.
To commute solely by train, this man must first endure a short commute by foot. One of very few Americans with the privilege and luxury to be within American walking distance of a train station (that is, less than a mile), he opts to walk to, wait for, and ride the train out of a feeling of obligation to do so almost as much as his consideration of its economic, social, and environmental benefits. Walking is a pleasant experience, as it always would be, giving the man a moment every morning to look ahead, gather his thoughts about the day to come, organizing mentally what he must accomplish and what is required of him. His mind does not exclusively reflect or wander during this time, as on some days he chooses to actively engage with the environment around him. His walk passes through a quiet neighborhood, the bulk of its noise occurring at the few daily intervals when trains run through, but its proximity to this source of noise drives down its property values, leaving it affordable. This is a pleasant relationship for the man, it means he can afford to live nearby, with the only true detriment to living here being an occasional choo choo. He sidesteps to avoid a fly-encrusted mound of dog feces.
The station itself is simple. An unraised platform of concrete, a metal-and-glass-block pavilion for cover, a 10 space parking lot, and a few card terminals for transit payment. A single set of rails, servicing both incoming and outgoing trains, services this neighborhood stop. The man knows that this is not ideal, that it means any conflict of inbound and outbound will result in one train, with possibly hundreds of passengers, waiting for the other before proceeding. He balances this inadequacy by believing to himself that expansions and improvements will soon come, and that his ridership has a direct impact on those changes. The tree cover around the station breaks the morning light into patches of light and dark on the ground, the platform, and the rails. The same patches must cover the man's face, although he cannot see them.
A ray of light stabs into his eye as a breeze shakes the limbs above him, and he steps back into the shaded area provided by the platform's pavilion. The late summer is unkind to this station, it has little shade accommodation, and the heat has baked the contents of the station's complimentary trash bag into a stew of preposterous stench. The quiet thunder of steel on steel in the distance grows louder, and an announcement begins to play from a nearby pole, in the cadence of artificial language with the recording quality of HAM radio, "Train Approaching. Do Not Cross Tracks."
The train's arrival, the silent all-aboard glare of its disinterested conductor, marks the first rest of the man's day. For 20 minutes he will sit, only interrupted from his cell phone playtime by the same disinterested conductor's condescending request for his transit card, which he presents to a scuff and dismissal. Riding a regional heavy rail train for the first leg of his journey to, the second leg of his journey from, is a luxury granted to near-suburbanites like him, who are serviced by a spider-web network of regional lines connected to the intracity subway network at central downtown hubs. A few rows of seats away, a flustered mother struggles to quiet her adult son with severely special needs. The man looks to the Quiet-Ride Car sign, explaining that this car is restricted to silence, confirming that he very much was on the first car of the train, the one that is always restricted to silence.
After a few stops, an elderly couple boards the train, rolling luggage in tow. This train is destined for the airport after it passes through the city center. By this stop every row is accounted for, and the 2-seater the man chose only 10 minutes before has one of the few remaining open seats on the train. For the final 10 minutes of his trip, he will have the plastic-and-oil scent of the train superseded by mothballs-and-adult diapers. On arrival to his destination station, he must loudly announce his intent to disembark, once as a valiant effort at courtesy, and again with strained politeness to overpower the low setting of his seat companion's hearing aid.
The man's jaunt across his destination station in the city center presents a series of thresholds for him to pass through. First is the turnstile to exit the regional train platform. In the city center, turnstiles prevent desperate wannabe train passengers from stealing a free ride home, or using the system within the city center. The next threshold is a passageway hastily converted from lifeless throughway to an attempt at an indoor shopping mall. In the morning, most of the gates to potential retail space are closed. At night they are closed. No one shops in this train station. The last threshold is a set of double doors that separate the pleasant conditioned air of the regional train station from the unfiltered, cigarette laden air of the subway. The man conveniently scans his all-purpose transit card and passes through to the platform to wait for his next railcar rendezvous. Unfortunately, his subway trip is short, only 3 stops, preventing him from becoming knowledgeable of the farthest stretches of the subway line, where it services more than downtown urbanites, but also its many less fortunate passengers.
The train is late, although not exceedingly so. The man steps forward from his usual standing point only a few feet from the station's back wall. He would lean, but the wall is thoroughly coated in years' worth of underground air muck and nicotine. He would stand closer to the edge of the platform, somewhere where he could see the approaching train, but he knows that if you can see it coming, you're liable to be forcibly placed in front of it. He enters the car, and for the same reasons he does not lean, he does not sit.
The subway train storms ahead, screeching and lurching, its acceleration so rapid and so uneven that the man is forced to break his no-touching subway policy to grip a stainless steel pole, and remark to himself, as he does every day, that the metal surfaces within the train are also just so slightly greasy as to dissuade extended contact. The acceleration switches to deceleration, the screeching and lurching continues, and the train halts at its next stop. The similarly greasy parlor doors opposite the man open, a few people exit, and for a single moment, hardly a second, the man is returned to an appropriate serving of personal space. Several more people board, the last of them being one of the less fortunate passengers the man so often sees riding, but today, there is not enough room for him to move or allow the new passenger to pass through. The parlor doors close.
The train begins its acceleration again, but this time its metallic begs for forgiveness are unnoticed by the man. His senses cannot overcome the abject disgust he is experiencing as he stands mere inches from one of society's forgotten, who provides him a multi-sensory assault greater than that which the multi-ton train can.