Transportation

Room to expand. This is all we want. A seat by the window, a stretch of wall, three cool inches for a grip on the metal bar. Below, massive concrete rings squat in an oily trench below the Beltway-I66 interchange. Something is always being built here. This city is forever becoming.

As a child, I rode the orange line from New Carrollton into the city with my family on holiday weekends. Always, we were headed to the museums. The Burghers of Calais huddled in the Hirshhorn sculpture garden in hushed anticipation of our curious stares. Eager rivers poured from the pyramids into the National Gallery’s underground fountain.  Calder’s airborne iron waited around every corner. We rode the clacking train over miles of tired tracks. My father played word games with us. My mother brought books.

The train is the same as it was then. I am back after so long away, gazing at the same directional obelisks. I do not even need to read them now; the flat capillaries of the system map are etched into the navigational center of my brain. My feet cruise over the same hexagonal tiles. Perched atop stained, orange vinyl, I rock to the same rhythm that carried me into my young adulthood here.

Except that it is not the same train. Someone sold those cars for scrap, gutted them for replacement parts. Workers who were not even born when I was first riding have ripped up every foot of track and laid down new steel. Acts of Congress have added stations and endless streams of syllables to the names. Everything – from the ping of the door announcement to the color of the signal lights to the pass I use to move through the turnstile – is new. Not a single thing remains, yet I am still riding the an unchanging, brown-and-orange metro.

I am the same little girl, but you would never know it. Shed and replaced several times over, even the cells of my skeletal scaffolding have been made anew. What remains but the idea of the thing? The pieces bow and rust. We rivet flashing and deepen foundations. We age by necessity. We improve by intention. Each of us, like the city itself, is forever reborn. Somehow, we are meeting here all over again, beating traffic, riding home.