Looking forward

The best seat on the subway is not a seat at all, but the view out the front window. It combines the best of the funhouse railcar rolling experience with the mysterious darkened cavern dread of the unknown.There are green lights and red lights and something bobbing up and down off to the left, the train rushs forward towards what looks like a vicious right turn only to slow suddenly and gracefully click click click through a slight curve before zooming into the bright lights of the next station. Bordered by the safety yellow line, the platform is crowded with people, some leaning out over the tracks, some holding the hands of children, knots of faces waiting for the train. You can try and see some of them but the train is moving at sixty miles per hour and, though you see the colors of some of their clothes, it's impossible to pick out anyone. By the time you start to get a focus on a shape, it's a flash gone by.

All through the tunnels you catch glimpses of the graffiti taggers work. The deeper the tunnel the more likely you are to see the whirls and swirls that are the modern equivalent of "D. Crocket kilt a bar". How they get down to the depths, armed with spray cans and a sense of their own personal history is anybody's guess. I always hope it's more difficult for them now with the greater security but I doubt it.

The window view above is from the A train. I always sit in the first car on the way home.