Let us now praise ... the Orange Line
These are hard times on America’s oldest subway system. In the parched T stations you can feel it: death-grip debt. Service cuts, job cuts. And along with an economic squeeze, as we’re all beginning to learn, comes that other squeeze, less measurable but no less certain - a contraction in enjoyment, a recession in spirits. I was on the Green Line the other day: an uncomfortably full carriage was listening stone-faced to the voice of a single man, who in the manner of a public service announcement was repeating, “You drink your whiskey with WATER. That way you don’t get no HANGOVER. You drink your whiskey with WATER{hellip}” Beneath his voice we could hear the MBTA’s heartbeat, a steady thrum of glumness pierced intermittently by the howl of expiring machinery.
Need a lift, lonely T traveler? A bit of a boost? Two words for you: Orange Line.
The Red Line might be smoother, the Green more metropolitan. And the Blue has its nice beaches. But get on the Orange Line and ride it, brother. Ride it, sister; ride, boldly ride. Ride without destination. Ride for glory. Why the Orange Line? Because it’s orange, spiritually orange, the orange of the Dunkin’ in Dunkin’ Donuts. Because the seat covers, with their drifting multicolored scimitars, are a study in the design style known as Hallucinogenic Airport Carpet. And because, in its shape-shifting variety, it will recharge your local patriotism: the southern section, from Forest Hills to Back Bay, cuts through the city like some sort of clandestine corridor, while the northern, from Back Bay out to Oak Grove, is a flight to the ends of experience.
Are you liable, on the Orange Line, to get aesthetically disrupted - flash-mobbed, or mimed at, or caught up in some piece of guerrilla choreography, or confronted (as happened last year on the Red Line) by a bunch of people wearing no pants? The answer is no. Not a whimsical line, the Orange. Here the passenger sits unmolested in his depression, or glowers with a dangerous private joy.
Begin, if you can, at Forest Hills. I recommend a pint or two at the Dogwood Café as a preliminary, to aid in that certain desirable softening of the imagination. The southern Orange has its own mind, its own angle: your Boston, the city you have driven and walked, seems to repattern itself around the moving train. You’re yards away from the railway line, running parallel - the Acela approaches like a singing in the nerves and then buffets you with displaced air. Darkness now: smell that Back Bay soot. And then you’re barreling up from North Station and into the Vulcanic under-regions of Route 1, a clash of light and shadow, past the looming legendary mounds of Boston Sand & Gravel, and there’s the Bunker Hill Monument, and there’s the red-brick chimney saying HOODS MILK, and now you’re in a landscape out of an early Auden poem: factories, dikes, depots, lots, cinder-colored waste ground where the seagull guards his puddle. “Who stands, the crux left of the watershed/ On the wet road between the chafing grass{hellip}”
To Oak Grove! What a place. Defying the druidic poetry of its name, it is perhaps the most spectacularly ugly station in the entire system - a terminal fortress of stained concrete and chainlink fence that looks like it was assembled from leftover lumps of the Big Dig. But it’s the end of the line, and therefore magical. “We feel it is epical,” proclaims the poet/secret agent Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” “when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station?” Also, if you’re fairly mobile, you’ll be able to nip upstairs, buy yourself a doughnut, and make it down again to catch the same train going back into town. I did this once in the dead of winter, remarking blandly to the laconic vendor that it was rather a cold day. “What are you talking about?” he replied as he handed me my old-fashioned. “I’m going to the beach later.”
Sunday afternoon, in my experience, is the optimal time to go Orange Line voyaging. On a Sunday afternoon, with the car ecclesiastically almost-empty, one is relieved of that fatigued and weekday suspicion of one’s fellow man. No cellphones, no aggro. Perfect strangers, seats apart, traveling in dignity over the steely Mystic River: a large woman in a purple T-shirt with a toilet roll on it and the words “That’s how I roll”; two heavily tattooed young men cherishing a tiny dog. Light changes like a mood above the receding city.
And here’s the beauty part: you can do the whole thing, end to end - have the whole adventure - in less than the time it takes to watch a “Seinfeld” rerun. Be proud, citizen: only Boston offers these gifts. Accept them. Make the trip. And then, doughnut in hand, make it backwards.
James Parker writes regularly for Ideas and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. 
