A SEPTA Suicide

   Recently I boarded the Market-Frankford El at Front and Girard with the intention of taking it to Second Street to meet friend at a coffee house. It’s a humdrum route I take all the time. Most days, no matter what time you take the train, there is standing room only. That’s how crowded the city is now. But on this day I found a seat and opened two books, Thomas Devaney’s ‘Getting to Philadelphia, New and Selected Poems,’ and Brian Selznick’s Walt Whitman: Live Oak, With Moss.

  Devaney’s book was just published by Brooklyn’s Hanging Loose Press. Before the train pulled into the Spring Garden Street station, I had read his poem, ‘Memory Corkscrews So You Can’t Remember It’:

   I make my prayers in another part of the city,

   but they keep blowing back:

                   Philly makes, Philly breaks –

   What the hell are you looking at?

    At the end of the year something

    called Sneaker Day,

    Swedish Fish and tail pipes in the breeze.

      After the train pulled into the Spring Garden station, it remained there for a considerable time, passenger doors open, with no explanation from the crew as to why the train wasn’t moving. This gave me time to delve into the second book, Live Oak, With Moss “In the 1850’s Whitman had written a cycle of twelve poems called ‘Live Oak , with Moss,’ which Maurice Sendak had described  as a love story between two men who eventually part.” Selznick goes on to say that Whitman never published the cycle but cut the poems up and rearranged them in the ‘Calamus’ poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. They remained completely unknown for a hundred years until their discovery in the 1950s.  

   Meanwhile, there was no official word from SEPTA about the stalled train. We were still at the station, stuck in a situation that would very likely get worse, a parallel situation to the two men in Whitman’s poem:

   I new suspect there is something terrible in you,

         Ready to break forth  

  Finally there was an announcement on the train’s public address system but the words came across as garbled and static ridden. The speaker was also talking so fast that, combined with the static, the message was a blur. What was the poor man saying? By now the children on the train were getting rambunctious, running from one passenger car to the next, screaming with delight that something different was happening in their lives, an event to break the boredom of the day.

  Devaney:

  Children have their own music; and the owls,

  The Snow Owl: always five beats off the blink.

  Miracle of miracles, an audible SEPTA announcement indicated that the train would be moving in a few minutes. I kicked back and resumed my reading and waited for the “doors are closing” recording. Soon it became obvious that this was not going to happen. When a train going in the opposite direction also stalled at the station, I knew an emergency was in the works.  

  This came in the form of a second garbled announcement about a passenger incident at the Huntingdon station way up beyond Gerard where I boarded the train.

   ‘Passenger incident’ is often SEPTA code for suicide, though of course it could also mean the arrest of someone or a group of individuals. SEPTA is rarely forthcoming when it comes to specific information. The word suicide is still on the Index of Forbidden Words, regarded by many as offensive.  While the word may be offensive for some, an honest attitude regarding what happened always works to make passengers more understanding when it comes to protracted delays. People are less likely to swear or become disgruntled if they know that someone just lost their life on the tracks.  

   Minutes after the ‘passenger incident’ announcement passengers from both trains began to swarm onto the Spring Garden platform. General confusion reigned.  Would the trains be starting up again? Was it still true that the train would return to normal “in a few minutes?” And why, as some passengers asked, was our train, the train that had long ago passed Huntingdon station, being required to stop as if the passenger incident had occurred at Spring Garden?  

   Sometimes crowds in emergency situations like this have a kind of sixth sense and know when they have to move in a certain direction. A trickle of people began to take the exit stairs to Spring Garden Street minutes before another announcement-- sans static and garble-- that shuttle buses would be made available at street level. Some passengers still sat in the trains because it was never made clear if the trains would be up and running again. Was the shuttle only for impatient passengers who needed to be someplace quick?  The guessing game continued until at last a yellow vested SEPTA employee visited each train car with an order to evacuate.

  The evacuation call was made in harsh corrective tones as if the ‘left behind’ passengers should have known better and evacuated the train a while ago.

  On the stairs leading to Spring Garden Street a woman who did not speak English was crying because she didn’t know where she was. She looked fairly distraught but nobody spoke her language. She came to her senses and began following the crowd. 

  The street level crowd was your average mass exodus B movie scene, shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow. Did SEPTA say shuttle buses? People stepped out into the street dodging traffic in hopes of catching sight of a fleet of those shuttle buses. The scene became Waiting for Godot; it was the same on the other side of the station; crowds watching and waiting. Only the regular Spring Garden route buses appeared, leading to more confusion. The minutes turned into a half hour, and still no shuttle buses. People were starting to walk away. Many who were headed downtown took 2^nd Street and began their trek into Old City. The remaining crowd was now a shadow of its former self, so those shuttle buses, if they showed up, would only have to pick up a few people.

  I was one of the walkers who took 2^nd Street.

   Two hours later the Market-Frankford El was back on track.

     I was never able to ascertain who jumped onto the tracks at Huntingdon station. That will always remain a mystery, since rarely are names or pictures of track jumpers published so the person’s death winds up in the annals of the forgotten.   

    Huntingdon station is a hang out for many of the synthetic opioid fentanyl homeless crowd. Men and women, but mostly men, line the sidewalks there watching and waiting, carrying signs or slumping over in half body postures. The station is just around the corner from Episcopal Hospital and its bullet proof plastic ER. From the station all you have to do is walk a straight line under the tracks and you come to Kenisngton and Allegheny, so avenue is filled with the opioid vagabonds moving up and down the street.

  

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor       

  

                

Three Days in North Carolina's Outer Banks

   It’s a bright late morning in early fall and I’m packed in a large open-air Hummer with fourteen or so sightseers. This is a real safari, complete with a little man driver in an Australian bush hat who looks a little bit like a character out of Monty Python. What can be better? The Corolla (North Carolina) Wild Horse Tour guide promises not to do too much talking as he drives the Hummer along the northern most tip of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. These horses—wild Colonial Spanish Mustangs-- are the descendents of a herd brought here in the 1520s, and as such they are a protected, living treasure besides being the state horse of North Carolina.  

   Elbow-to- elbow in the Hummer, we race along the vast stretch of Corolla beach in search of the ferals. “I can’t promise you’ll see a horse,” our guide says, “Sometimes they go off and hide. They may be grazing somewhere. So, no promises…. And you don’t get your money back if we don’t spot any!”  A little comedy goes a long way though most of the paying tourists want to see something besides seagulls.

  Although we were constantly told not to expect to see any horses, in the end we were wildly—horsefully-- successful. The military style Hummer had barely gotten onto the beach, when we spotted a swaggering stallion: elegant, muscled, tail swaying triumphantly as his harem of 13 “wives” followed behind him in a single file line like brainwashed Stepford Wives, only in this case there’s no brainwashing at all just Mother Nature being Mother Nature (which is to say, politically incorrect) because, obviously, feminism has yet to hit the animal kingdom. The fact is, the stallion’s personal harem doesn’t have to stay put at 13 but can continue to grow as the stallion chooses. The only caveat is that he’ll be forced to challenge many other stallions who will want to steal his mares.

       When stallions fight it’s almost never to the death but involves biting and charging. The losing stallion is smart enough to know when to back down although serious injuries can result from these encounters. We were told about a legendary stallion who suffered the loss of an eye in a fight. “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us,” as Virginia Woolf once said.   

  The Hummer becomes a cornucopia of clicking I Phones and cameras as it stops alongside the horses making their slow trek up the beach. The sight really is beautiful. The horses are headed for the grazing lands and the small fresh water ponds beyond the dunes and near clusters of sea weathered wooden residencies. The horses come to the beach anywhere from fifteen minutes to 3 hours a day, our guide informs us. They stand by the ocean but do not swim or frolic in the waves. They come to the water to get away from the stinging flies in the grasslands. A thousand bites from flies can result in a severe body itch, so to alleviate themselves from this discomfort the horses will roll around in the sand rather than let the ocean breakers wash them clean.

  So yes, the Hummer tourists are happy because they have seen the light of feral horses. Not only horses, mind you, but uncountable large seagulls and even a few pelicans in a massive cluster that might be a tail feather convention. Nature is happy, but our guide decides we need to see another part of the beach and rams the Hummer’s speed up a notch so that we are pulled into the wind. We bump over small sand dunes so that those of us sitting in the back of the vehicle bounce in the air like paper dolls. Mr. Monty Python is on a mission, so much so that one of the tourists loses his baseball cap. He was warned to hold onto his cap but who can keep rules when surrounded by so much raw nature and uncontrolled polygamy?

   But some rules have to kept, especially when it comes to the horses. We were instructed that no one is to get closer than 50 feet to them. Feeding them will net you a costly fine although we were told that people have attempted everything from braiding their tails to teaching them how to drink beer.

   There was a lot of talk about the dead horses on the Outer Banks’ Cedar Island after Hurricane Dorian hit. During my stay on the Outer Banks I witnessed one person come close to tears when talking about the tragedy.

  A September 25, 2019 AP release stated:

A North Carolina wild horse manager says more than half of one herd is thought to be dead after Hurricane Dorian storm surge slammed their island home. Manager Woody Hancock told the Charlotte Observer that 28 of the 49 horses on Cedar Island, between the Outer Banks and the mainland, are suspected dead.

  Our guide now has the Hummer deep into the grazing grasslands. We see solitary horses wandering among the wooden houses there. Some have been known to walk up to or linger under car ports, while others walk nonchalantly down the middle of sandy unpaved roads, rider less phantoms that seem so out of place in today’s world. We spot a lone horse nudging its way through a clump of bushes looking for a meal of persimmons.

    As we speed up the beach on the return trip—the beach is registered as  US highway 12—we’re informed that the big wooden mansion in front of us was once rented by Taylor Swift. After that we’re told that Tom Cruise once owned the multi-tiered mountain posing as a house (“To your right, ladies and gents”) during the filming of “Risky Business.”

  “Yes, he was inside there jumping around in his underwear,” our guide says, giving us more comedy.  

    The other journalist on this safari was a woman who hailed from Greensboro, North Carolina. After she and I were met at the Northfolk airport by Michelle Ellis, PR Coordinator, Currituck County Travel & Tourism Department, we headed straight to a wine tasting at Sanctuary Vineyards in Jarvisburg, an auspicious beginning to be sure. Of course, when you are assigned to hang out with another writer there are no guarantees that you will get along.

   I very soon decided that we would all be on a harmonious playing field. Michelle, who brought along a valued co-worker for the duration of the trip, was our Uber Mistress/ driver (sans the Australian bush hat). Effortless conversation evolved out of thin air and with three southern accents ‘floating around’ the effect was like a harmonious little Currituck symphony to go along with the waves on the beach. 

  As for that wine tasting, I liked it when the Greensboro writer kept pushing for another tap of Sanctuary’s Coastal Collage 2017, a red blend, or having another go at Aglianico 2017, an explosion of cedar, pomegranate, dried cherry and ripe fruit preserves. We were both rewarded for all our hard work with keepsake quality big red glasses.

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor