over the third rail over the ocean

the band low's song 'over the ocean' is running through my head and my speakers as i type this, drawn from a trip i took yesterday on the A train.

like most of low's songs, and a lot of good songs in general, to see it all spelled out in just a few repeated phrases, a few simple words, belies the power of the words and music together. i wrote the other day about how ‘constellation’ hits me like that, and much of what low's ever done gets me in the same way. parts and process accumulate. you're left with something more than you'd bargained for.

i only realize now how well the song fit:

---

‘over the ocean’

i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
over the hills
over the dell
over the fireline
over the sand
over the land
over the empire
and if i belong, then i'll be longer than expected
and if i'm wrong, the mighty and strong will be rejected
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean

---

unless you’re going to the airport or to visit friends in fort greene, there’s really little reason i’ve found to take the A train past jay street. take it to rope or gideon’s and you’re off at clinton-washington. even jfk doesn’t begin to consitute the end of the line on the train i’d sometimes use to venture up to inwood. it’s not to say there’s nothing past fort greene, of course, and god knows there’s more than a little to be said for getting off at random subway stops to explore, but i’ve really become terribly provincial about the areas where i spend my time. it’s easy to do.

with that in mind, and because everytime you look at a map on the subway you can’t help but notice that the same train that touches the northernmost tip of manhattan also takes the narrowest of paths out to the beaches of the rockaways, i decided to do just that. i really did it for the water.

the trains to coney island are, for me at least, not so much trains to the water as they are trains to hot dogs and cheap beer and attractive people from brooklyn wearing beat up converse and ratty t-shirts, trying to remember not to get their ipods wet if they happen into the waves. not so with the A train. most of the ride is predictible enough, as the familiar stops just out of manhattan give way to neighborhoods you can’t quite see yourself living in -- until it’s too late and they become the next place you’d consider living but now can’t afford. people who look too much like you give way to a mix of familiar and not, a reminder that this city is more than beer gardens and pointy shoes and other music.

it’s an express train, and so a dozen or more stops you’ve never heard of flash by, stations with names of people and ideas hard to define -- we pass liberty avenue and i think how strange it must be to live on a street called that these days.

awhile longer and then it’s the always disorienting -- and unless you’re to some degree not alive, always exhilerating -- feeling of being one moment underground and the next climbing steadily into the light of the morning / noon / evening. maybe it changes if you do it all the time, i suppose, but it shouldn’t.

above, the streets and traffic and people and backyards now, clear to the airport, and on my way there’s part of the vast majority of the city you never see, so near your neighborhood and so not a part of it. the train snakes across intersections and between apartment houses, backyards littered with the same toys people have everywhere, the same junked cars i’d find on cinder blocks on drives through pennsylvania. few people are actually out, but i strain my neck to see a kid tearing around a corner on inline skates, trying not to hold on to the fence next to him, but knowing he has to.

we’re way out now, and those occasional other people out, a janitor emptying trash into a dumpster, a teenage girl walking wherever, actually look up and wave to the train. i’m reminded of how, as kids, we’d try to get truckers to honk their horns on the interstate -- thinking it was for us, unaware then that hours on the road probably made them look forward to that -- to the chance to make a kid’s day, to have someone not on a c.b. make contact. i wonder if it’s not the same for all involved in this situation, as the people below wave and, i’m half-certain, the engineer in the front does the same, happy to be noticed after hours and hours of a day spent largely underground.

we pass a school. the sunlight beginning to look the way it does when autumn sets in, it sets the bricks of the schoolyard a kind of red and orange i can try to describe but you can only really know or not know. ribbons are tied in the chainlink fence that surrounds the basketball and kickball courts. what it spells out, in words that must be 30 feet long and in letters as tall as the kids who helped put them up is this: “VICTORY OVER VIOLENCE.”

it’s beautiful, and i curse myself again for not having a camera on me. always have a camera.

the train has nearly emptied out, and we reach the stop for the airport. an ocean of empty parking lots, nearly full parking lots, full parking lots, people’s cars exchanged for departures or awaiting return flights home. i knew this would be the last stop before the reason for my trip out here materialized, and it more or less was.

monday was declared a day off at my new job, and this trip declared an opportunity to clear a mind - mine - i found very clouded lately. the sun was brilliant all day; the sky clear, but with enough clouds to remind you it was, after all, sky. i got on the train partly for this, to see the sky open up as the skyline of manhattan receeded the way only manhattan’s has any business doing, both more striking and more sad the further you get from it. it was the water i really wanted to see, though.

i’m nearly five years in this city, and at least two have been spent bemoaning the fact that i’d never taken the train all the way out. here’s why: you look at the map and you see that shorly after the airport station the A train cuts across the water, more or less on its own, for what i thought would be, and what feels like the first time, forever. JFK is on your left, and if you are me, you look out to see a jet - enormous, weightless, and close - climbing toward, then over, what is now a completely empty train car, itself streaking across the water.

it’s surreal, to be in this thing with so many wheels and tons, so much association with the dirt and dark of the city, now coasting above the ocean, which now fills the view from every window, the sunlight streaming in, glinting off the ocean below.

well, maybe it's the bay, but that doesn't really matter. it was exactly how i’d hoped it would seem, exactly what i needed.