Lost in Thought

Looking east on Springfield Avenue, down Springfield from the Lackawanna trestle, for the first time I saw Briant 's Pond from the train -- a first sight of something I grew up beside, had seen 1000 times or more, a place that had sheltered me and given sanctuary and somehow sanctified me as it gave protection. Woods are so much bigger and more expansive as a child, or perhaps the built world really has encroached farther, pushing the boundaries in.

Today I saw Briant's Pond from a distance -- the Spring Lake, Summit's Spring Lake, as it was once known -- it sparkled and shimmered silver in the clear March morning sun -- bejeweled, and visible probably only due to the lack of leaves. And because of the conductive power, the thinned air, vacuum-like grace of a frosted March dawn. Wondering what harm may come to the daffodils, and the not yet tulips. The apple crop upstate. The budded realm.

All the ascendant women of Short Hills and Millburn are lovely, climbing the platform and stairs, on paths through debris, stepping past ivy glen. Like Bradford Pears outside the East Orange Fire Department training ground.

Higher, Later Now

Tonight's sky was especially golden, honey-soaked, bright with ochre, spotted and framed with flowering trees, Bradford pears even, and the rushing Secaucus water tower. The platform clearance outside my window at Secaucus Transfer is less than six inches.

The bell chimes, the horn whines, and drifts past the Hackensack. Beyond the brownfields, over the plank road, sweeping the tall, dirty reeds. And the sun, higher, later now.

The God of Small Things

Unlike the world of the multiple-unit (MU) cars in the early and mid 1970s, I seldom have the experience any longer of  looking down to the platform -- or up to the coaches. With elevated platforms, windows are at knee height on the single-level Arrows or else at ankle-or-head height on the double deckers.

Either way, I lose the sensation both boarding in Summit or leaving at Penn Station of climbing up or descending down from the carriage.

Not every platform has been raised, of course. I recently boarded in Murray Hill and still enjoyed the ascension, albeit with no descent in Summit. And in Hoboken and Short Hills too.

But the clean sterility and seamlessness of the raised platform, which also allows for mid-car entrances and exits, reminds me of the ordered structure found in Singapore and Tokyo. Many obviously prefer that, but to me it detracts from the railway experience, taking away from the 19th century roots.

Shades of Millet

The light on the 6:54 westbound as it emerges from the Pennsy tunnel in late March is golden, like a Millet, and in a moment I see why the swamplands of the meadows remind me of rural France. There is a disc of setting sun, it could be Key West if there were the Caribbean -- there could be applause and beer and wine and tequila as it sinks below the horizon, just west of Secaucus Junction and the Turnpike, looking out over the expanse of Spring and Summer.

I think of Jean Francois and the Gleaners and the Angelus and heroic peasants and I don't have to force myself to see, I only have to imagine and wander.

4:50 Express

"After Newark Broad Street, this train will express to Summit"

Perhaps NJ Transit engineers are formulating a new breast milk delivery system.

This is a common NJ Transit usage. A train won't go express, or travel express, become an express or make express stops. Instead, it "will express" to Dover or wherever the "final" destination. If the train was actually saying something, somehow expressing its inner identity as a transportation vehicle of the early 21st century, I might not mind so much. Perhaps train number 6643 should express itself to Summit. What might it say?

Neighborhood Found, Neighborhood Lost

It is a happy thing, a joyous thing, and a sad thing, an unfair thing. For me to walk five minutes to drop off my oldest at Brayton, the neighborhood school, to deposit him in second grade, and to look forward to his next three years, not to mention my youngest's five full years (1-5) of enrollment. The four crossing guards I know -- Diana and Claudia in one direction and Ariel and Mike in the other.

But walking east along Myrtle, headed toward the intersection with Mountain Avenue, I can't help but think of the walk farther east, past Morris and Overlook, to my old neighborhood, where there is no more local school, and the walk to Jefferson is probably so long and arduous that few children undertake it, and are driven instead. As Summit shrank its primary schools  to five from seven, think of the companionship missed, the encounter with the neighborhood not made -- the connection obscured -- while seated behind tempered glass.

It is a class travail, and always has been. Except that once, a school came with the streets -- John, North, Clark, Broad, Chapel -- for almost exactly 70 years. But not for almost 40. Now Roosevelt's a name on a condo, and playing fields that were themselves once coal yards, where I played in a sandbox, are now town houses on Summit's "Park Avenue."

Rhythmic Whistles, Siren Frequencies

The whistle, or is it the horn, is prominent and joyful from the first car (7282) on my 6:54 on a Friday. And so too a little more than a half a mile away, at home. Ms. S. says she can hear my train arriving. I  love the rhythmic clickety-clack -- the pleasant, half-drunken playful dance of sway.

Or perhaps it's just the 16-oz. Bud kicking in.

Over the weekend, I mentioned aloud how Summit used to have a 12 o'clock and a 5 o'clock whistle, which was really a war-like siren exhaled at the fire house and heard all across town. In my kitchen we had a blue, civil defense placard on the knotty-pine wainscotting that told us what the different siren frequencies signaled  in the event of an emergency.

Gin Mills and Dive Bars

Union Place used to boast not one, but two, dive bars, one at each end; Summit House to the west and Blue Door to the east. Caves, with dim lights and worn linoleum and 35-cent, 6-7-ounce drafts. Today? Never. The liquor licenses have always been scarce as hen's teeth in towns like Summit, which fixed their number since Prohibition was repealed. So the licenses were always valuable. But especially after 1982 there was a ready supply of buyers prepared to snap them up at unheard of multiples and invest, hope, pray, speculate, launder, who knows? See, passim, The Summit House, The Blue Door Tavern, Uncle Mike's.

Missing Monday Morning

What's missing, apart from the commerce, the hustle of above-ground, out-in-the-open, licit business? Look at the rows of houses, the dwindling stock of brick apartment buildings, the scarce tenements. Behind all of them, no clotheslines, no Monday morning wash hanging and swinging in the bracing, birdsong-choked air of early March.