Connecticut

Our train came into Hartford at about one o’clock. The Vermonter eased into Union Station, and we deboarded after the ticket collector shouted, “Hartford, Connecticut!”

The station is built of brownstone and gracious glass windows. It’s a trip backward in time. Like visiting the 1880s.

No sooner had I deboarded than I met an old man, struggling with his heavy baggage. He was using a walker, limping. I helped him into the station. Soon we were seated on oaken pews in the old depot. He was breathing heavily from exertion. I was breathing heavier.

“Thanks for the help,” he said. “Sometimes I forget I’m an old fart.”

“No problem,” said I.

Hartford Union Station is just a giant room. Because that’s all train stations were, long ago. Big rooms. This particular room housed thousands who would embark and disembark for parts unknown.

There’s an adventurous feeling you get inside old train stations. A feeling you don’t get in, say, LaGuardia’s Fifth Circle of Hell.

Long ago, you could have come to Hartford Union Station to travel anywhere you wanted to go. North to Montreal. West, to Santa Fe. Or south, to the Big Easy.

The old man looks around the station. He’s overcome with nostalgia. My granddaddy always said nostalgia was a crippling narcotic.

“We came to this station all the time when I was a kid.”

He grew up in Hartford. He visited this station with his mother. Each year, as a boy, he would take a solo trip to his aunt’s Pennsylvania. His mother would pin a strip of paper inside his little coat. The paper was labeled with his home address.

The note would read: “IF THIS CHILD IS LOST, PLEASE RETURN TO…” Then, his mother would tuck five dollars into his shoe.

“Everybody’s mom did that back then. People were very trusting.”

The old man points to the ticket booth and rifles through the last 100 years as though thumbing through the Yellow Pages.

“Mark Twain bought his train tickets right there. He lived in Hartford. He rode these trains all the time.”

So did multitudes of American soldiers. During the War to End All Wars, this station would have been filled with young men in tweed suits and spats, kissing their mothers’ foreheads, heading for basic training.

This town also saw the Spanish Flu, which hit Connecticut like a sack of hammers. In three months, 9,000 died in Connecticut.

“My grandmother died of Spanish Flu,” he said.

Then: Prohibition. America’s worst idea. Some trains which came through Hartford Union were nicknamed “The Boot.” Because passengers often carried liquor bottles in their boots.

There was a lot of booze flowing through The Constitution State. Namely, because in Connecticut, nearly anyone could get a prescription for alcohol from the local doctor.

“This station would’ve been crawling with Feds.”

Then came a Great Depression. Then, the flood of ‘36, which inundated the streets of Hartford. Then, the Great New England Hurricane of ‘38, which punched Connecticut right in the mouth.

Then Pearl Harbor. Once again, this station was filled with an aquarium of soldiers. Teenage boys, clad in olive drab, wearing peaked caps and golden eagles. Young women, with rolled hair and candy-apple lipstick, kissing G.I. Joes goodbye.

And time plunged forward, locomotive-like. Because that’s what time does.

We built hydrogen bombs, launched men into outer space, and sang Rock and Roll. We had Modernism. Mccarthyism. The Korean War. Civil Rights. We lost two Kennedys and a King.

“I came to Hartford Station when I left for Vietnam,” the man said.

We put a man on the moon. Hello, Lyndon Johnson. Goodbye, Nixon. A peanut farmer’s son from Georgia became president and rode the rails through these train sheds.

The Space Shuttle “Challenger” exploded, killing seven crewmembers. Iraq invaded Kuwait. Y2K was a flop. The World Trade Center towers fell. The space shuttle “Columbia” exploded, killing seven crewmembers.

More wars. More death. More senseless acts of pop music.

“But, hell,” the old guy says, “Look at us. We’re still here, Americans are still riding trains, still sitting in Hartford Station. I’m 81 years old, but inside I’m still that little boy with his address pinned inside his jacket.”

And for a brief moment this afternoon, so was I.