Every morning and evening for the length of a summer, I traversed the tree-lined corridor of the New England coastline, passing through the towns between Westport and Manhattan, each a bead on a ribbon of railroad track and light, woven together by the MTA New Haven Line. Depending on the daily demands of that summer’s long internship, I alternated between the 6:37, 7:27 and 8:26 trains in the morning, while frequenting the 5:48 and 6:12 on the return trip. The suburban ritual proved trying after a year of rolling out of bed, five minutes before class began, and the conductors’ gruff announcements interrupted my fragmented dreams: South Norwalk, Stamford, Old Greenwich, Cos Cob. However, by mid-June, after calibrating my circadian rhythms to the Metro North timetables, I grew to appreciate the transience of momentary stopovers in nameless stations—lucid moments on the gossamer edge of sunrise, followed by the promise of a bookend journey at dusk to anchor each day in place.
Yet the most captivating parts of the commute were not the swathes of daybreak on the Long Island Sound or the tawdry lights of Sin City in late afternoon but the culture of the train and the characters who ride it. Until my stint as a Metro North commuter, I was unaware that New England stirs before 9 o’clock—evidently, investment bankers and traders awaken before nature itself—and that the pin-stripe-clad movers and shakers of the United States economy also doze, read paperbacks and nurse Fosters’ Lagers—all while reviewing legal briefings and market returns, of course. I learned that standard protocol dictates never to take the middle seat on a hot day, and that small talk is prohibited. But secretly, or perhaps rather shamelessly, I peered past the demilitarized zone where red vinyl meets blue, searching the different breeds of commuters for visions of my future self, only to detect the phantom touch of humanity, as our lives brush against one another’s with the rock and sway, never actually making contact.
Awaiting the 6:37, the early birds of Wall Street congregate on the platform in clusters, brandishing copies of the Wall Street Journal and BlackBerrys, wireless umbilical cords for the middle-aged. They banter with their platform mates about last night’s baseball scores, this weekend’s weather and other platitudes, reserved for strangers who see each other every day. When the train pulls into the station, before the doors open, a graying man in chinos christens the morning with the verbal equivalent of the opening bell. Waving his Wall Street Journal skyward, he proclaims, “Another day!” and pushes his way into the vestibule.
Passing through Stamford and Greenwich, men board and disembark, re-establishing equilibrium with each stop. One morning, a balding man takes the seat next to me, curling into the commuter fetal position, feet up, knees propped against the back of the seat ahead. He wedges his steaming, medium black coffee between his legs, dangerously close to his crotch, and leafs through the New York Times, pausing to read the article on antiquarian lifestyles in the Homes section. When the train reaches Old Greenwich, he reaches into the silk-lined pockets of his leather briefcase and pulls out a hardback copy of The Faerie Queene. It’s not the latest Sports Illustrated edition but the 16th century Sir Edmund Spenser epic, complete with personalized bookplate—a bit of light reading in the morning. “CWL” is a regular on this train, and every time I see him, he whips out the book in the middle of the ride, escaping into imagination, in which his secretary is Gloriana; he Arthur. To the rest of the world, he is merely Braggadocio, but at least for the thirty-five minutes between Old Greenwich and Grand Central, he can be his own Renaissance Man.
By the evening return trip, ties are undone and top buttons popped. The energy of the commuters, palpable on the morning ride, has gone flaccid with their collars, and when the doors open at each stop, the train car exhales. The commuters come unbuttoned as well, sipping beers and imbibing Zaro’s popcorn from paper cones. There are brawls in the bar car, and blue-collar swindlers offering sob stories in return for the fare to New Haven. I encounter my first Gold Coast redneck in the vestibule of the 5:48. He wears corduroys and carries a can of Coors in each hand, dashing in just as the doors shut. After draping the New York Post on the hand rail and swigging the first beer, he extracts a case of chewing tobacco from his pocket and wads a brown gob between his lower lip and gums. “Christ,” hisses as the train lurches forward after every jerk, and he polishes off the first beer by 125th Street and spits the tobacco into the empty can. I contemplate finding a seat in another car, but curiosity gets the better of me as he dials a phone number into his BlackBerry and waits for the voice on the other end. His wife is probably a Jersey girl, a gum-snapping bar maid turned housewife. But he answers, “I’m on the train now, Mom.”
Sometimes children join the legions of MTA riders, en route to daycare centers and relatives’ houses, while their parents continue on to the backrooms and mailrooms of corporate America, repairing the sports cars and estates of the executives seated across the aisle. One evening, a woman boards at Stamford, trailed by her four-year-old son. Standing in the vestibule, the woman straightens the boy’s baseball hat and cradles the apples of his cheeks in the palms of her hands. He watches the passengers, fumbling for monthly passes and Metro Cards as the conductor makes his rounds. When the conductor punches a smiling face into the boy’s ticket stub, the boy gazes up at the conductor’s whiskers and cap, and his mother reminds him to say “thank you.” At once, the tired eyes of women wearing Ferragamo and pearls shift from laptop screens and paperbacks. Their faces brim with tenderness for the brown-skinned boy with angelic eyes, while his mother straightens her back under the rumpled Donuts Delight uniform, savoring the momentary admiration of women with 401Ks and bottom lines, who disembark at Westport and Fairfield, while she and her son ride on, past sunset, towards New Haven.
On rides like these, the silence of each crowded train car sent my mind wandering. The regularity of the commute accelerated my sense of familiarity with the paunchy barons of the post-gilded age, allowing me to connect myself to them, if only by the observation of a shared idiosyncrasy or a passing glance, just to make the isolation bearable. Though I’ve since settled back into the habit of awakening and arriving, the anonymity of otherwise intimate moments still fascinates me, as does the convergence of ennui and anticipation; wealth and yearning; and yearning and satisfaction. Though I could not, at the time, distinguish the gradation between boredom and eagerness in Chairman Westport’s sunrise benediction, I detected in the others an outlet for alternate lives, for things lost somewhere on the Manhattan-bound trajectory: a bibliophile’s obsession, a cowboy’s joie de vivre, an inkling of pride. The berth is where they reclaim these personae for a few hours each day, seeking solitude from the inertia of the outside world.
Yet what is most remarkable about the daily journey is how unremarkable it all is. Despite the fragments of unfulfilled dreams and moments of seclusion left on the third rail, the tableau disappears once the train leaves the station. As I line up in the vestibule, car keys in hand and dinner on my mind, the ride is already a memory, in which the destination takes precedence over the journey. On the platform, I stride to the parking lot in the final sliver of daylight, inhaling the breeze, which smells faintly like the sea, a briny whiff of freedom and home. Behind me, the train fades into a metallic point on the horizon, bound for the next station, where it will arrive on time, I am sure.
