David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

New Lives for Old Rail Stations

Orphaned Rail Stations
Orphaned railroad stations are transformers, changelings. If not, they don’t survive. Designed with a specific purpose in particular locations, new uses after railroad days are over may require inventive, even inspired redesign. When visiting an old rail depot reborn as something else you never know what you’ll  find.

From the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century these buildings were the principal portal to places large and small, lifelines to the outside world. Raw materials came in by rail and finished products were shipped out. Trains brought people from far away speaking myriad languages, bringing vibrant diversity and hands and minds to labor on farms and in factories, as well as visitors eager to see new places. Tracks are long gone in many smaller communities, and even where trains still run the stations are often vestigial structures in an age where there are no longer station masters, ticket counters, and baggage handlers.

A Piddling About Puddles

when the world is puddle-wonderful
    e. e. cummings

I delight in puddles. Even a macadam pothole or a muddy wheel rut in a dirt road holds bewitching fascination. Vernal or tide pools fill me with the vibrancy of unfamiliar and strange lives teeming in their waters. No puddle is the same. They can be reflective, transparent, opaque or turbid. Each has its own time  span of ephemeral existence. Many are subject to the vagaries of rainfall. Vernal pools are on an annual cycle, and tide pools emerge from the deep twice daily.

My Webster’s defines “puddle” as a shallow depression full of water, especially muddy or dirty water. It’s also “a little pool of any kind.” But a puddle is an elastic concept. It can be said to be a surface accumulation of water shallow enough to walk through, but not deep enough to float a boat. Limits on puddle size seem to be in the imagination of the beholder.

Looking at Lichens

The beauty of lichens . . . How they flourish! I sympathize with their growth.
        H. D. Thoreau

There’s a lot to like about lichens. Found in wild and urban places, from the arctic to the tropics, in deserts and on mountaintops, affixed to buildings and monuments, they are tenacious organisms unlike any other. Even on my quarter acre house-lot I come across lichens on tree trunks, the stone foundation of my home, brick walkways, fences, and the old cedar shake roof of my woodshed. Under our feet, out of sight, often fading to background, they can serve as reminders of remarkable and subtle natural forces all around us. They create mosaics of incidental and accidental beauty where least expected.

Combinations of funguses and green algae or cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), lichens are the essence of symbiotic cooperation. The fungus encloses the algae and supplies water, organics, and minerals from its surroundings, while the algae manufacture carbohydrates by photosynthesis. This self-reliant relationship withstands extreme temperature changes and can completely dry out without dying.

A Revered and Reviled Bird

Frequently encountered in urban areas, pigeons (Columba livia) evoke polar opposite passions in people who live among them. Called doves, they have an image of purity, harmony and tranquility. As pigeons (a French synonym for dove), they are often pejoratively characterized as dirty, stooges (as in stoolpigeon), and feebly passive. So common we hardly notice them in any detail, the birds generally fade to background.

As doves, pigeons are revered symbols of peace, like the white dove that brought Noah an olive branch sustaining his faith in a subsiding flood. Reviled as filthy pests, they are “rats with wings” as Woody Allen observed in his 1980 film Stardust Memories. City pigeons are fed by devoted fanciers in parks. But they are also poisoned and frightened away by governments and building owners because the average pigeon produces more than twenty-five pounds of droppings a year, and the acidic dung is both unsightly and corrosive. But love them or hate them, with a close look it’s hard not to marvel at their beauty and engaging behaviors.

Closed Openings

As they age, buildings tell stories about change. They may lack a mouth, tongue and vocal chords, but they speak in a kind of sign language, in hieroglyphs of structural and decorative alterations over time. A house may gain additions with the growth of successive families, or get new doors, exterior stairways, and   other features when market forces dictate that it be broken up into apartments. A church with a dwindled congregation may see new windows or ornamentation as it transforms into a mosque, office, or retail store. Old factories become apartments or commercial space dictating a variety of changes. “Age plus adaptivity,” wrote Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, “is what makes a building come to be loved.” But loved or not, change is necessary for survival.

Getting a Grip on Doorknobs

Grasp with your palm and fingers and twist. Turning a doorknob is as close as you can come to shaking hands with a building. Handled most every day without a second thought, there is no part of a house or other structure with which people are regularly more physically intimate. Made in various shapes and   materials, they can be strictly utilitarian or functional works of art. Noticing doorknobs may seem a silly pastime, but in addition to the eye-and-hand-satisfying beauty of well crafted ones, they can lead a curious mind into a universe of tangents about mechanics, history, patents, technology, craft, and security.

My fascination naturally began at my Connecticut home, a modest nineteenth century Greek revival sporting seven different kinds of doorknobs. The fanciest of them belongs to the front door, a Victorian Eastlake design of faded brass in a complex floral and geometric design. A couple other outside doors have similar, if simpler designs. But most of the remaining doorknobs are made of shiny brown ceramic or cut glass. Installed on both interior and exterior doors, there doesn’t seem to be any logic to their placement. The only ones consistently installed are in an addition of the 1990s where plain bright brass plated knobs pop out of the doors like glowing golden mushrooms.

Loquacious Stones: The Dead Speak

Words from the Dead
You don’t need a séance to get a message from beyond. A walk through most cemeteries will do. “Going, but know not where,” reads Phineas G. Wright’s monument, a large granite block incised with his face in a slight frown and eyes suggesting worry. Buried in 1918 in Putnam, Connecticut’s Grove Street Cemetery, he’s dressed in a formal suit, a bald man with a long chin beard. “Gone, but hope not lost,” is a similar but less uncertain message carved into a small, simple brownstone slab memorializing William Allin who died in Windsor in 1701. “Not my will, but thine be done,” reads the great impresario P.T. Barnum’s 1891 marker in Bridgeport’s Mountain Grove Cemetery, perhaps expressing a bit of resistance and resignation. Carved in stone during three different centuries is ambivalence over final departure, probably a common feeling then, now, and for eternity. I can almost hear their voices fading in a last gasp.

Cemeteries are three dimensional storybooks. Sure, they are dominated by stone from humble tablets to grand mausoleums, but they are also filled with words. These are stones that talk. Although most are a sort of account book or registry of names and dates, often with a few clichéd words about mortality and heaven, many contain messages from the dead or a biographical snippet that conjures an image, a wisp of personality, or a moment in history. As time goes on and memories fade, bodies below ground come to matter less than the words above.

Cemeteries may be solemn, somber, even tragic places. They are filled with beautiful sculpture, architecture, and inscribed artwork from colonial death angels to contemporary laser images of everything from boats to animals. But, it’s the words that move me most, that at times almost seem to make the dead come alive. Walk through most cemeteries and you will find poetry, humor, preaching, tales of good deeds and misdeeds, mystery, and history. And you don’t have to adventure far to find wonderful stories literally written in stone. Those below are but a tiny sampling from my small home state of Connecticut. There is so much more to explore, even nearby.

Giants Among Us

There are giants among us. We like to celebrate things oversized, larger than life. It doesn’t matter that they’re not real. We like things big. They come in the form of statues of people, animal totems, or commonplace objects that would be unremarkable but for their prodigious size. Often they’re designed to draw trade to commercial enterprises, but may also be civic monuments. Some are just pure whimsy.

For years, hungry patrons of the Big Boy restaurant chain have been greeted by the statue of a smiling overlarge youngster in red and white check overalls holding a hamburger aloft in his left hand. Another restaurant, not far from where I live, features a large figure in the form of a paper cone of French fries with a befuddled human face, arms and legs. Surplus Unlimited in Norwich, Connecticut, which sells everything from furniture to health and beauty products, is watched over by a serious looking man in a blue cowboy hat who stands about three stories tall.