I work in glorious Montauk as a web and graphic designer. Where I work is around the bend from Duryea's Lobster Deck. There is so much beauty around me every day that it truly takes my breath away. After passing the glistening water surrounding every turn, I pass by the Montauk train station. I think I saw a train stop there once, years ago.
Montauk has a lovely fog every morning and in the early evenings, I didn't know this until I began working there. Everything looks almost staged and with the Hamptons' famous saturated light, the environs have an effect worthy of a photography filter on Instagram.
I'd been thinking all day about the passing of Anna Mirabai the previous week. I still can't wrap my head around it, and my heart still breaks for her mother, a friend and the heartbeat of the Springs community. With the heaviness in my heart, I couldn't resist the call. The fog rose in the early evening as always, and although I had to get home to my son and start dinner, I decided to park the car to take some photos. I knew that the train station would haunt me and I'd want to remember the way it looked at that moment with Anna's spirit so vivid in my mind.
So I parked at the auto repair place and hopped out with my new camera.
Is it train stations in general or just Montauk's? There is an overwhelming sense of loneliness and of the spirits who had come and gone over the tracks. I walk along the track as I had done countless times as a child in Jersey. Not a car around. Certainly not a train. I actually thought it had been abandoned but there was the blinking light, as if it were expecting a train at any moment. Though you'd never imagine one rolling in.
I sat on the tracks, the lines curved like old rusted snakes; the gothic-styled platform looks more like a set design for the Adams Family. The sense that men and women in black hats and bustles are all around. There is a child, maybe three, with an engineers hat and suspenders holding his mother's hand who met my eyes. Had anything happened there? Were these ghosts, vignettes that hover invisibly at the station powered by the essence of the souls that never left?
The fog is extra dense at this station and the hustle and bustle is palpable. Maybe it's where Anna goes sometimes so that we may feel her presence because there is definitely the blur of existentialism that comes and goes on those tracks. I dunno. It's a beautiful place. It's a lonely place.
If you miss or mourn or dream of someone, it's the place to go to be with them.
EDIT: I stand corrected! A train showed up and has been sitting there for three or so days! :D
