The Millennial Pedestrian

The essay below ran on the op-ed page of the Sept. 10 Providence Journal. I post it here because most of you are not Projo subscribers, so you probably missed it. Even if you’re not a train buff, you should make a point of riding the rails between New York and Boston the next time you have a chance.

The World’s Most Beautiful Train Ride
By John Schenck

Normally when I travel to New York City from Providence I drive. I leave the car parked in our old Manhattan neighborhood, and then I use public transportation to get around town. When I’m ready to return home to RI, there’s the car, perched in the East 90s close to the Triboro Bridge. If I-95 is having a good day, I’m back in Providence three hours and fifteen minutes later or less.

But my last visit was just for lunch in midtown, so I decided to take the train. Even though it’s expensive and not that much faster than Amtrak’s Regional trains, I chose the Acela because I wanted to try it out. I’m glad I did.

I left at 7:50 AM on a mid-August morning. The ride was smooth and quiet and after making short work of the outskirts of Providence we were ripping through the wooded midsection of Rhode Island toward Westerly at an exhilarating pace. On this stretch, at least, the Amtrak flyer is really, really fast. I sat on the left-hand side of the car by the window so I could admire the shoreline. Still, even my prior trips did not prepare me for the sheer, almost shocking beauty of the sights that went flying past. This is a ride you CANNOT get bored with.

You get a preview of what’s to come as the tracks skirt marinas and coves on Greenwich Bay and in East Greenwich. Then you have to wait until Westerly. From that point on, all the way to New Haven, the water, beach and wetlands views just keep coming.

Connoisseurs rave about the beauty of the Hudson Valley between New York and Albany. It is certainly majestic. But to me, there is no more beautiful train ride on earth than this one, at least early in the morning and late in the afternoon, when the light is right. It’s the combination of the awesome and the intimate that makes foreground and background alike compelling. Even at 125 mph, the vistas are so expansive that you have time to absorb them before they are behind you. And then there’s another. On this particular morning, the sky, clouds and sun created a vast second landscape above the horizon. The still water held the ripples moving across its surface almost frozen. And then every now and then I’d see a skiff with a drowsy fisherman in its stern seat floating over its reflection, green marsh grass tall above.

Ospreys, cormorants, gulls, herons and egrets in profusion paid no attention as the Acela rushed past. There’s a lovely-looking observation walk that extends under the Old Saybrook Connecticut River railroad bridge into the wetlands there, and morning birders turned to wave at us as we rattled overhead. At Black Point a regatta was forming off the beach and the colorful sails glowed in the clear sunlight like the illuminations in medieval manuscripts. The green of the shoreline foliage was astonishingly intense for August, rich and cool, just as the water looked a dark and purplish blue, then black as hematite in the shadows of the passing clouds.

At Waterford, just beyond the beach looms the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, but it is an anomaly. For most of the ride to New Haven, the sights are timeless: a kid holding a parent’s hand in shallow water, bucket in the other hand to store the morning’s haul of clams; an early sunbather stretching out on a towel, finding her place in a summer paperback; a motionless heron, peering intently into the glossy water; the “V” of a motorboat’s wake on an inlet as it makes its way to open water; a little girl on a boardwalk jumping up and down in excitement as the train flashes by; a utility crew riding a cherry-picker to the top of a trackside power pole; the church steeple at the center of every shoreline town, reflecting the rising sun above the trees that surround it.

And there is something about the speed of the Acela as it passes by these scenes that makes you focus on them all the more intently. You can’t take a picture of them – not a good one, anyway. Your brain has to make its own record, and as it does so, your emotions become intensely absorbed. I tried to find the saltbox house on Leete’s Island Road in Guilford where my godfather lived, years ago, and to get a glimpse of the golf course at Pine Orchard where I caddied for my father. Glimpses are what I got – glimpses out of my own past and glimpses of summer New England, 2006, and all the glimpses were too beautiful for me to describe to you. You must ride this train.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006.
It's part of the Prose category.
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