Untitled Document

21 May 2004

The Locust Song

I woke to the great rhythmic humming of the cicadas. It was a like the background music to a science fiction movie. I had left the windows open and the rich humid air flowed through them with the wave of sound.

Their song will continue while they live and mate and burrow to ground once more. It happens once every seventeen years, this plague of locusts.

The authorities tell us not to mind the grotesque visitors, big as the tip of you index finger. Let them have their vibrant thrumming time among us and do not fear. They do not bite and are neither portents, nor omens, regardless of how thing look in the wide world.

But you could easily have convinced me otherwise when the conductor told me I had boarded the train to Harrisburg from Newark, not the one that went to Washington, and then when the next conductor threw me off the train at Wilmington, and then finally when the reading lights on Train 189 went out north of Baltimore, and the engine grew silent, and the train whispered to a stop on the main line.

If I could have opened the window against the oppressive heat, I would have heard the locusts sing to me.

I am a creature of habit, like you. I fly places, I rent cars, I do business, give the car back, go home.

This trip I was to visit the corporate headquarters and the renowned laboratory of the company that now employs me. They are located in New Jersey, which is a state not far to the north of the Nation's capital.

The only profitable link the national rail system connects the dots between Washington and the gleaming cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Well, I presume they gleam somewhere. The tracks run through the parts of those cities that are forlorn and disintegrating.

Riding the train is a history lesson of sorts, appropriate on the anniversary of Lucky Charles Lindbergh's flight across the gray Atlantic. But all I wanted was a way to travel that did not include airplanes in the thunderstorm season.

With the arrival of summer the great warm air masses from the Gulf collide with the chill jets from the northwest.

Each afternoon the storms begin in the breadbasket of the country, and lines of them thunder eastward. Since our air transport system is on the verge of collapse on a good day, it is prone to cascading failure in times of adversity. Which is to say, in layman's terms, if anything gets screwed up anywhere, it makes everything else come undone.

I do not fear air travel. But I fear chaos, and that is what the storms bring. The Vice President of our unit went to New Jersey for a meeting on Monday and was stranded on a jet for three hours before it taxied for the 45 minute flight. Add the hour in advance you have to be there, and the time to check in the car, it was the day complete. He was beside himself.

I figured to eliminate the storms from the equation and take the train.

I tried due diligence. I asked all the right questions. I found what was purported to be the fastest train with the closest stop to the labs. There is no rental car network to support the train, so my plan was to take cabs to connect the dots from Big Pink to train to lab to hotel to headquarters to train and finally home again.

I got a call in the night from my fiancee. She had to go to the hospital, internal pain too great to bear.

There was nothing I could do. She was far away, and had a plan to get to the Emergency Room. I should have flown west, but instead, when the alarm went off my nose was running and my eyes wept. I was sick as a dog. I ate a handful of vitamins and anti-histamines to dry me up, and, dressed for success in my Brooks Brothers suit, fashionable pumps and rep tie, stopped briefly to puke before I left.

When I arrived at the station and stopped for a smoke, I had an opportunity to chat with the homeless about the indignity of life, fever sweat soaking me to the skin. The lap-top computer I was lugging would not log on when I fired it up on the train. The cab at the station charged me $65 for the trip to the lab, or more precisely for a long scenic ride in the rain. He did not have a map, and having assured me he knew where he was going, blamed me for not having been there before.

It required a stop at the ATM to ransom myself from his clutches.

I managed to leave the headset to my cell phone in the cab. The meeting at the lab was fine, once I got there, and the lunch was only $5. It was $45 for the next cab ride to the hotel, where I collapsed. The next morning it was a bargain $22 to get from the hotel to the headquarters, and the meetings were good. I thought perhaps the trip was salvaged.

Another $65 and I was with the homeless once more at Newark Pennsylvania Station, Track Five. Under a sign that clearly identified this platform as the delayed regional to Washington, I boarded the jam-packed train to Harrisonburg.

The conductor assured me that I could switch at Philadelphia and get back on track, and did so on the fly, after visiting Princeton and Trenton and other fine municipalities in the Garden State. Miraculously, the sleek Acela express glided into Track Three as I hit the bottom of the stairs and I plunged into the Business Class compartment and happily sat down for the first time since Newark.

The Conductor looked at my ticket and told me I could not be there. I was a three-time loser. Wrong train, wrong fare. No reservation.

"What would you like me to do, Sir?" I pleaded. I was painfully correct in my manner. In these trying times, problem passengers can wind up in jail. "It is at least the correct destination," I tried hopefully.

He was adamant and implacable and had no means to sell tickets. Hence, no amount of money could sway him from his judgement. Thus, I was detrained at Wilmington. I watched the train disappear to the south with dismay and listened to the locust serenade.

Another train, a local, came along presently. Later, standing in the deepening dusk on track-bed next to silent and immobile Train 189, I heard a roar that drowned out the insects.

It was the rush of traffic on I-95, the great concrete sewer that drains the East Coast from Maine to Florida.

I crushed out the cigarette on the cinder ballast.

Shoot, I thought. Even with the cost of gas, I should have just driven.