While we lived in Boston, here’s how I got to and from work in Providence: the MBTA Commuter Rail Providence / Stoughton line. My schedule options were as follows:

• Depart by bike, 6:18 AM -> Ruggles Station, Boston at 6:33 AM -> Providence Station at 7:25 AM -> bike to office by 7:55 AM
• Depart by bike, 8:23 AM -> Ruggles Station, Boston at 8:38 AM -> Providence Station at 9:30 AM -> bike to office by 10:00 AM

The return home:

• Depart by bike, 4:40 PM -> Providence Station at 5:10 PM -> Back Bay Station, Boston at 6:20 PM -> bike home by 6:48 PM (bikes not allowed on the subway at this time)
• Depart by bike, 5:30 PM -> Providence Station at 6:00 PM -> Back Bay Station, Boston at 6:58 PM -> subway to Jackson Square by 7:10 PM -> bike home by 7:17 PM

Doing the math, it was roughly 3 hours of commute round-trip per day, 2 hours of which were spent on the Commuter Rail. And it was miserable – at least it was miserable when I first started doing it. The vast majority of commuters are commuting in the opposite direction (live in Providence, work in Boston), so mine was a reverse commute. This would have been a good thing if I commuted by car, but commuting by train, it meant the schedules were spotty and if I wanted to be in the office before 9:00 AM, I had to get on a train at 6:33. This meant I had to start my commute before the sun comes up in New England – even in standard time.

The worst was when I missed a train (often happened when I got a flat tire) and I had to wait 1 – 3 hours for the next train. This meant I would miss a meeting and have to call my boss and tell him that I missed the 8:38 train and the soonest I could be in to the office is by noon. That happened once. I felt like a giant douche.

But somehow it had become familiar. I had a tendency to want to use up every last minute I had at work to finish up a project and try to compress my bike ride to get myself to the station in 20 minutes rather than the safe estimate of 30 minutes. Then there was a mad dash through traffic, a brisk walk through the station, a sprint along the platform, and (this happened twice) a jump with a bicycle in hand into a train that had just started to move.

There’s a story about a neighborhood around a loud train line. The people who lived there got so habituated to the noise, it was strange when it was gone. The police department was suddenly getting calls from people there saying they heard strange sounds at night. When the police came to investigate, they found nothing. It turns out that the train line was under repair, and when that usual racket was gone, people were disturbed by the absence of the usual noise.

That’s what the commute became to me. A familiar misery that grew into an almost-comfortable routine in some ways.

There was the time I spent on the train. The hour buffer between work and home. The Commuter Rail trains all have Wi-Fi, which is incredible. It means I got this one hour on each ride to research a question that’s been in my mind, shop on eBay, answer some e-mails, or write a blog post, even.

Like any commute, it was such a repetitive regimen that I started to notice subtleties that made it interesting. It was always clearly apparent when there was a sporting event that evening because the train was packed full of boisterous fans in Celtics or Red Sox gear, which I tried my best to tune out (quite a challenge). I got to know some of the regular commuters. One of them was my good friend Al who also did the commute from Jamaica Plain to Providence. And there were four or five regular bike commuters, many also with folding bikes. I shared one or two hours every day with these people, but for the most part, we never shared a word of conversation. Nevertheless, they were familiar faces on what would have otherwise been a lonely ride.

I got to know the conductors. They had a tendency to epitomize the stereotype of the abrasive New Englander. Once though, one saw me changing a flat tire on the train, and he asked me about it and watched raptly through the entire process, kind of like a kid. He said something about how it was clear that I had done it before. I suppose it doesn’t take much to make someone’s day when that someone sees the same thing every day.

On my last commute back from Providence to Boston, I was in a lousy mood since I missed the 5:10 train and had to wait another hour or so for the next one. As I was settling in to my usual seat at the end of the car, where I have room to store my bike and an outlet to plug in my laptop, some middle-aged woman I had never seen asked me how my day was – quite an unusual occurrence in New England. I said it was not that great. Then she smiled and said something to the extent of “sorry to hear about that”. As she was leaving, she said she hoped my day got better. I left at the next stop and nodded goodbye to the conductor. He nodded back. He was saying “see you tomorrow”. I was saying goodbye to this routine and to all the friends I’ve never really spoken with but I’ve seen five days a week.