The Perfect Foam

Eerie

I was riding on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) yesterday on my way into San Francisco from Oakland. BART is the above/below ground rail system servicing the San Francisco metropolitan area. I have ridden on countless forms of public transportation in my life, from buses, to trams, to trains, and to rail systems. And I am sure that at some point I must have had a similar experience, but for some reason I was shocked by it yesterday.

By “it”, I mean the absolute silence in the rail car I was in. It was standing room only, though we weren’t completely packed in like sardines, and I was waiting for a seat to open up so that I could read. We had just finished passing through an especially noisy section of underground tunnel (the screeching of the rail cars on the rails is terrible). As the noise quieted down, I suddenly noticed that everyone was silent. I mean, no one was talking.

I was actually startled. I just couldn’t believe my ears. I looked down both ends of the car, and couldn’t find any moving lips. People were either sleeping, reading, listening to music, using their computers, or simply sitting/standing. As I previously mentioned, at some point in my life I must have been in a silent bus, train, tram car, etc., but never before was I aware of silence like I was in this rail car. Aren’t there usually at least a couple of people carrying on a conversation in a packed rail car?

Why were we all so quiet? There was no sign that said “No Talking, Punishable by Death”. It wasn’t as if we were under martial law and were afraid to say the wrong thing. There are so many situations in life where it is completely impossible to get people to be quiet. But here I was in a rail car and all of us were voluntarily being silent.

I don’t have anything terribly insightful to say about this experience. Mostly just that it surprised me so much, I was almost scared by it. One thought did come to me, though. A defining characteristic of the human species is our ability to speak. Isn’t that what many of us love to do for a large part of each day? And here no one was speaking…

I just couldn’t get over that fact for a minute or so, and finally I shook it off, and turned my thoughts elsewhere.  Soon it was time to get off.