Taking the train there and back April 17, 2024
I took the train to Bayonne yesterday to cover an event at
the community museum.
I tend to drive as little as possible since the train
station (light rail) is a block from my house, and though it does not go
everywhere I need it to go (nor in a timely fashion), the trip tends to be less
hectic than the drive.
For years after I got assigned the Bayonne beat in early
2004, I drove from upper Jersey City to Bayonne each day, going as early as
possible to avoid the inevitable rush, until management hired an editor for the
community news who had to take buses and trains to get to the office each day,
always arriving late because public transportation connections suck, when at
their best.
Since I drove passed her apartment building each day to get
to the same place, I took to picking her up, condemning us to the maddening
backups of rush hour – especially in an attempt to get through the tangle of
streets near the Holland Tunnel.
When she resigned (due largely because of the slave wages she
was being paid and management’s refusal to give her a raise, and the fact she
was being forced to relocate to the main office where she lost all autonomy), I
once again had transportation choices, especially when we moved to a home near
the light rail station.
This proved a godsend until COVID hit, when we all had to
mask up or get busted, (everybody taking the word of the CDC that we would die
if we didn’t’), yet even through all that, the train proved a more pleasant mode
than driving. I get to write poetry and other stuff while being transported,
and do not have to deal with road rage (mine and others), a good thing in this
era of constant tension.
Fortunately, the weather was good, no rain (obviously no
snow) and a bearable temperature (for which I was actually overdressed. The
real problems with the train comes at those hours after rush hour when you
could wait up to an hour to get a train out of Bayonne, and then struggle to
make the change to another train up to where I live.
In winter, this is brutal, deep chills against which there
is almost no defense, and this isolation of standing on dark platforms, often forcing
me to take a train in the opposite direction in order to stay warm and in a
lighted train car.
Yesterday, after I covered the event, I took a walk up
Broadway from the area of the last train stop, stopped at the pharmacy before
making my way home again to write up what I had collected.
We technically have an office – a we work space – but I
rarely go there, but really should, because since being dumped out of my
original job and the closing of the last office for the old company, I’ve
become more isolated and more dependent on phone and email contacts, so that
even traveling with a train full of strangers there and back feels comforting.
I’m due to make the same trek by train today to cover a council
meeting. With the arrival of spring and the change that starts meetings
earlier, I’ll be traveling more in daylight than during the worst winter so it
may still be light out by the time I get home.
Hopefully anyway.
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