Closer to Home
January 20, 2013 / The Inauguration: Getting There
So, being dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, we went to the inauguration. Besides, I love public spectacle.
Our train left very early. A rising sun poured deep yellow over the not-yet-stirring Sunday landscape. I drank my coffee and watched while the messy backs of businesses and houses gave way—surprisingly quickly--to fields and frozen wetlands. Once I thought I saw a deer at the edge of some woods, but it was only a bush. Tall feathery Phragmites grass, pretty but invasive, filled the wetlands.
Trains always have run at the bottoms of towns, the low flat places at the bottoms of town hills, and so very often, as the train hurries through some little station, your view is Up. All the streets come down here, to Railroad Ave., it’s called, like as not.
Along the railroad right-of-way march lines of red-brick factories, once sources of objects and jobs, now broken, empty, and vaguely menacing. A very few carry hopeful signs: “Lofts for Rent.” “36,000 sq. ft. Will Build To Suit Tenant.” Graffiti artists have left their unintelligible but exuberant warning spoor along lichened walls, just so high, like giraffe-browsed trees in Africa. Grass tufts fur long-unused parking lots.
Clapboard houses give way to caterpillars of brick ones, narrow bands of two-storied, wall-sharing dwellings, some of them with boarded-up or gaping empty windows, their tiny back yards filled by rusted bicycles, dead potted plants, and junked refrigerators. Some of them, at least. Others have curtains at the windows and new paint. It must be hard to live here, really hard.
The train begins to fill up in New Haven. The conductor adjures us: “This is going to be a completely full train! Make all seats available.” He comes down the aisle, speaks to the woman across from us, several shopping bags at her feet. Was she going to the Inauguration? he asks. No, no, she’s on her way to Miami, and has to change trains in Washington.
“We’re going to the Inauguration!” I tell him. He stops to talk, and surprises me by asking if I am going to write about it. Well, yes, I tell him, and I explain how I wrote a long piece about being at the 2009 Inauguration. Here, he says, I’ll give you my business card and you send it to me. “I have a kind of business card,” he chuckles, and hands me a seat check on which he has written his name and email address. I promise him I will, and I will. Hello, Mr. Russ C., here you are in my piece!
Cold-looking mallards and swans paddle the ponds on one side, and slickly-sealed pleasure boats squat motionless on the other, the ocean beyond (all the way to Portugal, you know!). The birds do fine in the icy water, but nobody wants to take the boats out, so they shrink-wrap them in white plastic for their winter rest.
Tracks pass between hundred-year old granite walls and aside battered little woodlands, in which trees are strangled by swaths of invasive bittersweet vine. There is so much of it that sometimes if it doesn’t kill the tree by preventing photosynthesis in the summer, it does it in by its sheer weight, and one good storm will bring down the tree and its loathsome freight.
The train’s full now and here we come to New York City! Like angels we ride high over the neat rowhouses of Long Island City and look down into people’s back yards and the round swimming pools that fill them and the neat stoops in the front.
The skyline! The skyline! The great city! What would the Lenape Indians make of it, of the weight of its great buildings, the noise and babel of its millions?
IS IT NOTHING TO YOU, ALL YOU THAT PASS BY? admonishes the sign on the mission building, just before we drop into the tunnel under the city.
What is there to say to that?
And then Baltimore, city of my birth, with its terrible trackside decrepitude, and a single narrow house standing alone in an emptied dirt expanse, two rooms front to back and up and down, too narrow, too lonely to breathe in.
Union Station, Washington, D. C. Visible in narrow spaces between buildings beyond the station, the plain white shaft of the Washington Monument. We are here. To behold it, tomorrow, we are here.
Comments
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bree 12:20pm, 03/24/2013
just testing