Pulled from an old notebook, here’s a “Time Tunnel” account of a random train ride from Lowell to Boston about 30 years ago. — PM

Lowell Line (1994)

A long train slides through the Thorndike Street station as I wait for the 9:07 a.m. run to Boston. Doing an errand for former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas, I’m on my way to meet the art appraiser who evaluated Ralph Fasanella’s pro-worker oil painting of a Merrimack Valley textile mill that hangs in O’Leary Library on the South Campus of UMass Lowell. Fasanella’s life in the 20th century is a fascinating story of a radical free-thinker who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, with the anti-fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade, did labor union organizing, and took up art when arthritis cramped his hands. Cultural recognition came late. One of his “Bread and Roses” paintings from Lawrence, Mass., gained widespread praise.

I’ve been thinking about preparing a book manuscript in two parts: Lowell poems, Dracut poems. The Dracut material would be collected under the title “A Place in the Woods: Augumtoocooke,” from the name the area was known by before the English pressed into the wilderness north of the Merrimack River in the 1600s. The Lowell work would come under the title “Lowell Poems”—like Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems.” Passengers behind me are laughing about last night’s episode of Seinfeld on TV. All week I’ve been typing Kerouac’s early stories for the manuscript of Atop an Underwood, which I’ve been compiling for a while. Next week I may write to poet and critic John Yau and his collaborators about their book Lowell Connector—I should invite them to read at this fall’s Kerouac festival.

The chatty conductor looks at my ICA baseball cap (Institute for Contemporary Art) and says, “Too bad it doesn’t say CIA, then you could scare people.” Icicles like fierce jewelry on the iron bridge at Hale Street that’s closed for repair. Rail cars: Canadian Pacific, Burlington Northern, Milwaukee, Springfield Terminal. Rail yards, pre-cast concrete forms, Concord River railroad bridge, the river along Billerica Street in South Lowell. Geese in the half-frozen Concord. The first stop is North Billerica (“Not Burr-RICAH,” in the uniformed ticket-taker’s voice) where the car lot is nearly full. Gray trees, bright crusty snow, wet snow clumped in the vees of trees, the heavy snow of a recent storm weighs down branches. I’m looking east, out the left side of the train on its way south. The crinkled brown tags of oak leaves hang on till spring. A homemade hockey net on a small pond. Fenced-in back yards. Fir trees and hardwoods. All the lots backed up against the tracks. Who lives in these woodsy suburbs? I used to live in one. What are their stories? Who are these people? I’m looking for that book.

Second stop is Wilmington. The town center, business district, the getting and giving. All I know of Wilmington is 1970s sports history from my days at Dracut High when the team bus would take us on a long ride to play baseball and at other times yelled for classmates at football games. In those days, Wilmington’s superstar runner Mike Esposito rambled through the Merrimack Valley Conference but after Boston College barely made a dent in the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons. Last I heard he was back home working as a coach.

On thru wetlands and fields. Graffiti on a bridge. Light industry. A fence line of cheek-by-jowl shrubs. More concrete forms, curved shapes this time. Next stop is Mishawum, with a covered waiting area on the platform. Susse Chalet lodging and marshes and a truck depot. All the things you can name. The blank-backed cemetery stones like an audience from the rear. Winchester High School and Winchester Center, the fourth stop. An elevated platform. Baseball field snowed-in. Then Wedgemere at Mystic Valley Parkway—upscale, townhouses, condos, another ball-field. Next to last station is West Medford, the old brick and stick downtown. Another spray-painted message: I will always love you.

And on to North Station, where I had hollered like crazy upstairs in the Garden the night the Bruins’ Phil Esposito (no relation to Mike E. above) became the first hockey god to score 100 points in a season. For years these trains have taken me to high level encounters in the bigger city—Robert Lowell and Gary Snyder reading their poems at Harvard, Carl Yastrzemski pounding homers at Fenway, Julie Harris revealing the Belle of Amherst on stage, political philosopher Hannah Arendt decrying the banality of evil in a lecture at the New England Life building, Mikhail Baryshnikov rigged with gadgets for his heart monitor dance in the theater district.

The Boston & Lowell Railroad was the first steam railway in the state—there’s a monument to the railroad in Lucy Larcom Park in downtown Lowell—a marker near the only Douglas fir tree in the park. Across the street is Old City Hall, where Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the Whig Party presidential candidate Zachary Taylor in 1848 (he won). The old train depot stood on the other corner. In no time I’m up and out of my seat, heading for Newbury Street and the appraiser’s office.

Paul Marion (c) 1994, 2025