Postcard from New York: Little Neck’s Scala Coeli
Above: “The Shortcut,” as it’s locally known. It is on the property of the Long Island Railroad, behind the fence (the one with the hole cut in it), on the shoulder of the train tracks, and technically in Nassau County.
I know. It’s a little snooty to use the Latin, but the day I had to translate a piece called “Scala Coeli” in my Medieval Latin class, and realized it meant “Stairway to Heaven,” I decided I would use that phrase every chance I got, at the drop of a hat, if possible.
Anyway, having dropped that hat, I’d like to direct you to the polaroid above: it was taken long ago, sometime before the year 2000. What you are looking at is the handiwork of my eccentrically resourceful father. Before this stairway existed, the commuters of our neighborhood used to clamber up this little hill in their good shoes and business suits up to the train tracks, walk along them for about twenty feet, then climb up the emergency ladder to the platform. All this to avoid walking the long way around, which would have taken five extra minutes.
You may think that’s very lazy and petty of them, but when your commute is more than an hour and a half door to door, every minute that ticks by while you’re not being paid feels like one more hack into the liver of Prometheus by that giant eagle, you being a commuting, 9 to 5, Prometheus. You can see how five more minutes to sit at their breakfast table reading The Post would be very important to them, burdened as they were with the bitterness of the gainfully employed.
My father used to mow the grass that led to this slope, as a matter of commuter hygiene. But one day he must have got tired of slipping on wet leaves or loose gravel. He improvised a stairway, deploying some discarded railroad ties he found near the tracks. Slapped on a coat of reflective paint, for higher visibility in the dark of early winter mornings and weary overtime nights. The LIRR soon discovered the precursors to the stairs in the photo above and ripped them out. My father put them back. They ripped them out again. He put them back again, this time with deep piles embedding them into the side of the slope. They ripped them out again and caused a landslide that nearly displaced the tracks above. They also removed the emergency ladder from the platform, to further discourage sleepyheaded commuters from walking along the train tracks and causing the conductors of oncoming express trains to suffer daily morning rush hour panic attacks (and perhaps the occasional nightmare).
Most of the commuters continued to clamber up through the rubble, having evolved to wear black Reeboks instead of nice work shoes. Deprived of the emergency ladder, they crossed the tracks instead, in complete defiance (or perhaps in fed-up death-wish mode) of the third rail, then used the overpass to get to their desired platform. My dad, not one to risk his life for an extra five minutes of anything, got a rope ladder. Eventually he found the rope ladder a little heavy to bring to work and back. He put abrasive tape on the metal supports of a billboard anchored to the train platform’s handrails, and got some well-treaded sneakers…
Every morning till he retired he performed an incongruously Spiderman-like stunt (not bad for a near senior citizen with a danish in his bag), occasionally startling a newspaper-absorbed, coffee-slurping woman by calling out a very businesslike, “excuse me!” from below to make sure she’d understand he was not interested in gazing at her panties but only impatient to climb up under the handrails and on to the platform.
For the walk home, he kept a stash of long, thin branches for his private use by the base of the billboard, and they served the purpose of waving away spider webs that had formed in his path during the day.
Nothing worse than spider web in your face in the middle of the night.
