the rix mix

Sunday night, I caught the 8:03 train from Elizabeth. It was a few minutes late. This put me in Newark Penn Station about 8:15. The connecting PATH train to Jersey City hadn't pulled in, so I walked downstairs & picked up a train schedule at the info booth. I went back upstairs, through the PATH turnstiles, & after a couple of minutes the train came. I enjoy this part of the trip, & usually sit in the first car with an engineer's view out the front window. The train goes over the Passaic River, stops at Harrison, then across the Meadowlands, paralleling the Passaic for some distance, the scenery includes Pulaski Skyway angling in from the south. After crossing the Hackensack River the train stops at Journal Square before it drops underground. But as I was sitting on the PATH train in Newark waiting for it move, I felt very uneasy, even anxious about the trip. I flashed on a tragic accident decades ago when part of a commuter train rode off an open lift bridge over Newark Bay, & recalled news photos of the dangling cars. The unusual feeling was so strong that I actually considered getting off & waiting for the next train. But it was a Sunday night schedule, & since I'm a fairly rational person I reasoned my way through it & the trip was uneventful, except for the fog & an unsettling feeling that didn't fade away until after I arrived at the familiar & insular WFMU building (even the reliable Exchange Place station elevator scared me when the doors closed & it didn't ride up right away).

Back home Monday morning, I learned that at about the time I got on the train in Newark Station, two Jersey City police officers were driving to their deaths off a Hackensack River bridge they didn't know had opened for a tugboat.