Trains and Tunnels
I was recently invited by my friend Robin Willis, editor of the Cooper Pioneer, to pen a piece for the Valentine’s Day issue of the paper. Jaded and overworked Cooper Union students love reading about sex, and it’s exactly what I deal in writing.
I’m often told that love is transient in New York City.
I think that is a gross generalization, only because it is much easier to get lost here.
The MTA is North America’s largest transportation network, sprawling over and under New York City, Long Island, parts of New York State, and Connecticut. There are over two thousand miles of tracks running under eighty-six hundred rail and subway cars. An average of seven and a half million passengers ride these trains on a weekday.
In more ways than one, the trains are a source of sustenance for all New Yorkers. Commuters who ride the train daily know it better than those who ride it on occasion. I have been riding the train for almost four years, but it was only about two years ago that I began to derive pleasure from train trips. I started to really pay attention to them.
You can tell by the way someone limbers in through the doors if they share the same familiar love for the train. For passengers who are entirely comfortable, the subway car becomes a silent confessional. As for me, my body often quickly succumbs to the undulations of the train. Heady vibrations, born out of the friction between the wheels and tracks, find their way into train seats and trembling window panes. This persistent quaking often lulls and seduces me on my trips, but occasionally is something I feel compelled to fight.
A variety of light sources in the tunnels throw off wispy blooms of light over the tracks. They are neat sets of glistening, petrified snakes, winding patiently and quietly underground. Train cars are the antithesis of the tracks. They groan and rumble, one after another—always impatient, always anxious to come and go. The trains and tunnels in New York City are sets of weathered vacancies shifting and grinding past one another.
On a few daily commutes, it is possible to share a trip with hundreds of passengers who come and go, but who converge for a limited amount of time in a small train car. The permeating sense of transience couldn’t be more evident than these small spaces.
For many passengers, this isolated time and space is part of a frequent routine. Predetermined points of departure and arrival are bridged with a comforting kind of order and familiarity. One or two train lines may serve as the main artery of routine. To an experienced commuter, however, other subway lines may be boarded with a seasoned sensitivity and efficiency that unfolds the entire network to their access. Traveling to and from end points becomes a meaningful urban space in and of itself.
It is not the same for other passengers. Visitors and inhabitants new to the city often lose themselves within the intricate network of trains and tracks. Local trains carry them away, in the opposite direction, from their intended destination. Express trains rush them past stations where they should have gotten off. These passengers’ faces are often tight with the refusal to betray any kind of confusion or anxiety that possesses them.
And then there is the rare breed of passengers who ride the train purely for pleasure. Forgetting where they had come from, unconcerned about where it may take them. The train car is a destination, albeit a momentary one. Transience, when hard-pressed and confronted by these needy passengers, has little to offer. Their trips become hazardous ones when they forget the final, eventual destination—that the train must stop somewhere for them. Will they simply return, regress to where they had departed? The train car, and the station where they will finally arrive, houses their bodies. The city, and its many shadowed corners, informs their gestures. Where will they be? Who will they be then?
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