Mitt liv som Tobin

Last night I went to the loft to watch the lightning storm. With the storm in the distance I stood in the wind on the roof and watched the distant lightning and felt the storm's arrival. Then, in the loft, battened the hatches while the storm moved through. I had excellent vantage of the city's highest points, the skyscrapers, the radio towers, the lighting tower at the train yard. Disappointingly there were no strikes there, only cloud-to-cloud and far away.

View from the as-yet-unnamed Loft. February 27, 2006.

My room at the co-op is on the second floor of an old farmhouse at the top of a hill. The hill is nearly imperceptible. In California, we would not call this a hill. I'd lived here for several weeks, in fact, before I even noticed the hill, and even then someone had to point it out. I thought about it and realized that, yes, it's uphill as I bike home, no matter from which direction. There is a little street here called "Mount Pleasant," so I imagine that's the name of this hill. Mt. Pleasant. Literally feet in height. You can imagine this little brick house sitting here on top of this little hill a century and a half ago, in the middle of a farm, looking north to the nascient town growing from its epicenter two miles north.

The upshot of living on the second floor of this house on this little hill in the middle of the city is that I can hear the freight trains. I hear the rumble in the distance, I hear them enter one side of the city, rumble on through, disappear in the other direction. That rumble is a siren song, a call to adventure, and a calming lullaby in the night. I read something nice on the Internet once by some train hopper up in Modoc County who wrote about what he called Pappy's Hypothesis, how trains weren't really controlled by the engineers and the operators and the switchmen and everyone else who works for the railroad, but are more a force of nature, being pulled to and fro by the tidal forces of national economies. Every ear of corn you buy in California is a tug on a train from Chicago, and so forth.

My latest boondoggle of a project (along with hypostatization) is to rent this loft in an old industrial building in the heart of the city. The trains will not be a rumble in the distance from this vantage. Even inside, behind the windows, you can catch a faint scent of incinerated kerosine in your nostrils, take in the whine of the diesel turbines. Through the windows you can take in as much of the secret life of trains as is possible from a fixed location. The place overlooks this city's principal railroad switching yard and I think that's my main attraction to it. My grandparents have a rustic cabin out in the California high desert. My landlords here in New York have a cabin out in the country, forty miles south of Rochester in a place called Springwater. The loft is to be my Urban Springwater.

A loft has a call all of its own, too. In high school we had an impossible dream for a studio space that we'd outfit as a hacker's paradise, with tools and components a plenty, where we'd build tesla coils and robots and lasers. Then there was the l0pht near MIT who seemed to do just that, with the tagline, "forging machines to build your dreams." I don't know if this loft will work out, for how long we will keep it, but for now it is ours. Dream: Urban Springwater, electric violin practice area, art gallery, discotheque, hacker's paradise, and crash pad all rolled into one. That, and a duckblind from which to surveil the secret lives of trains, of course.

Goodman Street Yard. Rochester, New York. February 12, 2006.

I think this photo is pretty spectacular, especially the larger versions. Here's another shot with the city skyline in the background. (I stole four's camera for a bit...)