Newark

I watched the lush greenness of the state of New Jersey roll by a variety of windows yesterday. It was a day of looking out windows. The first was from the Metroliner, square cars pulled by a boxy old engine. Amtrak had to scour the country for trains like these to put on the lucrative route up the Northeast Corridor after the brake systems failed on all their sleek new Italian high-speed trains.

Not that they run any faster than the boxy ones The only advantage the sleek trains have is priority routing. To go fast they would have to put down new track bed, and new rails.

I’m not sure that the people who live along the track are ready for that, and the rail company is just about broke anyway. Baltimore , Wilmington , Philadelphia and Newark are the places we visit on the way to visit headquarters, and the back end of those cities where the trash is thrown down the embankments, and the concrete is cracked and shattered and the old tires lean against walls covered with graffiti.

Then Newark . I don’t know why the Metroliner dropped us off where it did. It was a clean platform, no cigarette butts or trash, but I did not recognize it. The limo was supposed to meet us in front of Pennsylvania Station and whisk us off into the countryside. But I did not even recognize the station.

I had that disoriented feeling. The name “ Newark ” sounds to me uncomfortably close to “ New York ,” the next stop up the line. I had the horrible feeling that our ride might be sitting in a snarl outside the station in Mid-town, and we would miss the meeting to which we had been summoned.

Steve Canyon knew why we were going to travel all day to attend a one hour meeting. He said it was calculated to re-enforce the view that we worked for the people in New Jersey , and not the other way around. Even if our offices were in Washington , the imperial city. So we spent the day looking out windows.

As it turned out, we were at the proper station, just an unfamiliar platform, and the limo was there, in a tangle of construction out front. They are doing their best to save crumbling old Newark .

Our driver was a beefy young man named Glenn. He was a local, and he piloted the Lincoln Town Car with crisp efficiency and a nasal Jersey twang in his voice. He knew our company from the days before things went to hell, and that is what started the conversation. He knew we were rebounding, just like the city.

Steve went into a reverie as we passed auto-parts stores and vacant lots as we bumped our way out of the downtown.

He had been a child here, and rode the buses fifty years ago to the Summer camp at the YMCA. He could see things that were no longer there, five-and-dime stores, and the features of a real city that were long gone. We passed the park where he had played, home of the second best cherry-blossoms festival on the East Coast, and the pond where his father would rent a row-boat and take his children out on a summer weekend. The little postage stamp of dark water seemed like the whole world then.

On the expressway headed for Exit 10, Steve pointed out the former Pabst Blue Ribbon Brewing Company. Nothing is the same as it was, and the sprawling complex is on hard times. They have painted the gigantic beer bottle that serves as a water tower a plain and anonymous brown. The famous PBR logo of red, white and blue is gone along with everything else.

Steve had stacked kegs of beer in the bowels of trucks on the loading dock there as summer help. It was hard, backbreaking work for a teenager. The company was generous, though, and paid union scale and offered free beer to the employees on their morning and afternoon breaks.

Maybe that was the problem.

The plant slid behind us, and soon enough we were in the circle in front of the massive ornamental façade of the Headquarters. We had lunch from the steam-table buffet in the cafeteria. It is big enough to handle the work-force that once labored here, loading technology from the laboratories into trucks like kegs of beer.

We walked through the museum on our way to the meeting. I’m always impressed by what our company did, back in the day, and hope we can return to something like our old pride of place. The stockholders would appreciate it. The meeting gave me some hope in that regard, and standing out in front in the circle, we got into another Town Car exactly two hours after we arrived.

Our pilot this time was Al, and he was an ironic fellow with a keen ear for action. As we rolled through the greenery back to Interstate-82 he told us things were busy back home. The Congress was eager to get on vacation and spend the month of August back home.

If there seemed to be more babble from the capitol than usual it was precisely because of that. The Senate agreed to shield gun manufacturers and dealers from liability lawsuits if their weapons were used in the commission of a crime. The Energy and Transportation Bills broke loose, which is surprising. The Energy bill has been pending since Mr. Bush’s first term. Transportation gets nearly three-hundred billion dollars to do an astonishing six thousand special projects. The sheer number of them had delayed passage for two years.

Senator McCain fulminated for a half hour on the floor, decrying the waste. Improvements to the Bronx Zoo were included, he said, and why was there not more money for security?

It seemed like some of it was. Al dropped us in front of Penn Station and then roared off into the traffic. There was the deafening noise of jack-hammers at work, constructing new barriers to keep vehicles away from the entrance. Newark cops in crisp gray shirts were everywhere. I felt sorry for one stocky young officer, who was supervising the removal of a deranged woman and her shopping cart from the interior concourse, designed a hundred years ago by the famed New York architectures McKim, Mead and White.

McKim spent three years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris , and it shows in the elegant lines of the building, and the human touch of the long deli counter between the stairs to tracks three and five. Behind the glass were the best looking chocolate éclairs we had ever seen. We each bought one, gooey chocolate on the outside, a pleasing crispy pastry and rich sweet cream filling.

Steve bought a copy of the New York Times for the ride south. There was a picture of the nose of the space shuttle above the fold, and two damaged heat tiles on the main gear door. I wondered how they would get the crew back from space if they had to throw the thing away.

We waited under the big mechanical status board as the panels spun and clacked and informed us that the High Speed train to Washington was only a minute late, and would be arriving on Track Three. CNN was blaring from a TV monitor near by. The Senate renewed the Patriot Act, apparently without some of the more onerous provisions. The terrorists can be assured that the FBI will not be looking at the records of the Public Libraries.

The rest of the act is renewed, and the erosion of our rights appears to be cemented in place, assisted by the news of bombings overseas, and the gloomy conclusion that it will be happening here, too, unless the police are given more intrusive powers. I took that news with grim fatalism and a bite of éclair. There was chocolate all over my hand. The cream filling was to die for.

And besides, I thought, the attacks will probably happen anyway.

We went up to wait on the platform, armed with things to read. The sleek Acela train whistled as it pulled into the station. It was one of the first ones that were returned to service, and I assumed the brakes were going to work.

It appears that Congress has cleared the decks for September. When they get back they are going to sink their teeth into Judge Roberts, and the Supreme Court succession issue. Hearings are already scheduled.

The train rolled smoothly across the green countryside, and past the waters of the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay . We were back in the capital in time to catch the back-end of the rush hour. The station was jammed with people trying to get out of town.

Walking to our cars in the structure over Union Station, we passed black-clad troops placed strategically, watching the crowd. They wore black armor and had an impressive array of weapons. The look on their faces was imperturbable.

From the top of the parking structure I looked west. It seemed like I could reach out and touch the dome of the Capitol. I turned the key in the ignition on the truck. I looked at the clock on the dash.

Even if the traffic was heavy, it was Friday. I smiled. The pool at Big Pink was still going to be open for hours .

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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