Hark! It’s that moment in February when the elements play tricks on sun-starved New Englanders by temporarily cranking up the heat to the low 60s; daring us to throw our down booties back into the closet. We know it won’t last—that this fleeting reverie of balmy afternoons and moist dusk will be succeeded by more hoarfrost, road salt, and angst. But you might as well enjoy this cruel mirage. I’ve decided to take advantage of the moment by plumping for a $10 MBTA weekend commuter rail pass and indulging in a self-started urban/suburban hiking challenge that I’ve called “Racing The Trains.”
Whenever I send out the annual Mind The Moss reader survey, in order to find out what all of you are digging and what you’d like to see more of in the newsletter, public transit-accessible hikes are always at the top of the list. Usually a transit-accessible trail is one that’s within short walking distance of a single train or bus stop. But in the Greater Boston metro area, there are several trails which allow you to hike between multiple transit stops on a single route. You hop off the train, crunch and crack your way through deciduous woods and wetlands for a couple of hours, and you emerge at the edge of a town where you can climb back onto another train, and head back in the direction from whence you came! That’s easy enough to pull off, but the race element comes down to the reality that in New England, the commuter rails sometimes run on more limited schedules: especially on the weekends, when most of us are free to hike.
This introduces some risk to your station-to-station hike. If you get to the second train station too early, you might find yourself bored, kicking an empty Dunks cup around the tracks, and listening for the brassy sound of the whistle. But if you get there too late and you miss the train, not only could you be stuck on some desolate station platform for an hour or two, but you might be stuck there altogether, if the train you missed was the last train home! So if you lose the race against the trains, your penalty might be a pricier Uber ride back home. It’s a bit silly, yes, but this form of gambling at least offers physiological benefits that you won’t experience on DraftKings. And unlike the exposure of climbing a scary mountain or paddling some river of frothing rapids, losing a race against trains will not put you in a dire, life-threatening situation. It’s an exercise in controlled nerve-jangling, and every proud transit hiker should try it.