Harrumph!

So, now it snows. Getting off the commuter rail a few minutes before 5 this afternoon, I felt and saw some promising snow and wind.

Bummer.

Knowing we were to have blizzard conditions by broad meteorologist consensus from about 1 p.m. through 6 and continuing through midnight, my most steadfast drinking buddy and I were set to be fools or heroes today. Instead, we had a good chat and a couple of long ales, but left unwounded and not at all brave.

This so far has been the H1N1 of blizzards.

John’s wife asked incredulously why he would even consider going for our usual 2:30 meeting time, allegedly the start of the worst part. We were promised (threatened with?) 10 or more inches at 1 to 2 inches per hour from 2 or 3 p.m. on. The evening commute would be impassable and impossible.

So we were ready to be old-man brave, Abe Simpson brave, by meeting from opposite ends of Boston Beer Works on Canal Street. We had the pretense of perhaps tasting the annual tapping of the Hercules Strong Ale. I had even foraged in my t-shirt collection for a 16-year-old purple rag with Herc on it, back when BBW had worthy shirts.

Alas and lackaday, they are not yet ready to distribute their best ale of the year and we didn’t even get to play beer explorers. Our consolation is that two other regulars did not show and did not even respond to the invitation (dare?).

I can’t seem to single-task, so I also got a fix on the local Fairmount Line of the commuter rail.  There’s a history there as in the link, but the MBTA makes it pretty hard to get much from the most local transit transit.

In the very bottom of the Hyde Park neighborhood, we should have fast, easy, inexpensive access to public transit. Instead, I tend to ride my bike because getting downtown would require:

• a walk of a mile to the bus, then a ride to the subway (an hour plus and $3.20 at cheapest)
• a short walk to a bus, transfer to another bus, and ride on a subway (about 90 minutes and $3.20 at cheapest)
• one of the very few commuter rail trains — effectively inbound in morning and outbound in evening commute hours and next to nothing most of the day — then a long walk or another subway ride in town ($4.25 cheapest and effectively $5.95)

It’s really MBTA amateur hour, but at least the sked should be better when they finish a few more train stations in the next year or so. Nonetheless, I have been meaning to use this train more because it’s about a half-mile away and I love trains.

That part was better than I expected. There was one mid-day train, at 1:06. It got me at South Station an hour before ale hour, but I figured I could walk and buy a Valentine’s card at Urban Outfitters and some worthy kitchen-towel hooks at Crate & Barrel, both at Quincy Market. Double hah there. UO is more into sleazy student girl clothes than ever and devoid of cards and C&B is OOB at the Market — they’d have me visit them on Boylston Street.

OK, boys and girls. Newbury Comics had a good hologram card of candy hearts and Salem Street Hardware served up a choice of hooks. But where was the snow?

The time line was like:

• 9:45 a.m. leave Y and see the air full of flakes the size of dimes
• 10:30 a.m. no snow
• 11:40 a.m. big old flakes again
• 12:34 p.m. change to heavy, small flakes. Walking to the train station reminded me of coming home in high school in New Jersey after swimming practice, in the dark with hair freezing and driving sleet biting into my cheeks
• 1:08 p.m. the train was only two minutes late. The snow had eased off and seemed less gelid. I was one of two loading at Fairmount. The other fellow was an Ironweed sort, in dirty Patriots baseball-style cap and a ragged and torn fake leather bomber jacket. As Tracy Chapman sings, “…a day away from a bum on the street.”
• On the scheduled 24-minute ride, which took 20, putting us into the station two minutes ahead of sked, I gawked. I did get the sense of the activists who forced the new stations pending on this line that it zipped past neighborhoods like a Hot Wheels track above and not stopping. Most of the Mattapan and Dorchester areas were triple deckers and single-families jumbled with small warehouses and factories. Remarkable were the amazing rubble of recreation in storage on the back decks and yards next to the track — plastic pools, lawn chairs and other instruments of summer play with no roofed storage.
• 1:29 p.m. I left South Station feeling cheated of storm and adventure. Yes, there was a driving wind pushing the icy rain off vertical, but no blizzard.
• 2:16 p.m. John was already on a stool lamenting the lack of Herc. I asked the brewmaster, who said it was done at Fenway this year. The best he could say was within a week or two, he’d have a cask. Plus this time half of it was aged in Scotch barrels for extra smokiness. I flashed my purple shirt at him and the tap puller, who appreciated the concept but could offer no Strong Ale.
• We watched the windows but saw little snow and several periods where people passed without umbrellas or any covering up at all.
• 4:15 p.m. on the walk to South Station for the 4:30, I did begin to see steadier snow, but blizzard…?
• 4:31 p.m. The ride back was remarkable only for its ordinariness. This could be an American version of a salaryman’s commute, except there were few passengers so early. I was on a double-deck train, but we had only about a dozen on top and 15 on the lower level. The train crept from the station. It was odd to think that the 24 minutes allowed was much faster than the subway or bus combinations; it felt like we could have run along side the train as fast.
• A couple of us had a simultaneous bad thrill when the announcer called after Morton Street that the next stop was Readville — one past our station in the same neighborhood. I asked the conductor, who affirmed we’d stop at Fairmount and we did.
•  5:56 p.m. only two minutes late and some reality of snow when we left in the dark. A woman leaving at Fairmount had the definitive smell of a urinal cake — unctuous and unidentifiable fruitiness that she surely thought was pleasant and associated with some boffo label.

On the walk up the absurdly steep Fairmount Hill, I felt the icy slipping. That had its own connotations, being only 367 days since I fell on ice and snapped two leg bones. Coming home, I was mildly heartened to see steady, hard snow. Perhaps I had not moved three shovels and the ice pellets from the garage in vain earlier.

John and I had figured to be arctic sorts, laughing into the wind and sheets of snow. Alas, it was only a good winter day for a couple of ales. We may yet have another occasion this winter to display our yeasty courage. Today was not that time.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, blizzard, beer, train