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