We Are Pack Animals: Train Behavior

 

An Amtrak Keystone train at Lancaster Station       

Since 1994, the Amtrak Keystone trains between Lancaster to Philadelphia have been my primary commute method to work at several jobs and volunteer work after I retired.  Since I travel on trains to other places and in other countries, I have probably taken more than 4,000 train trips in the last two decades.  

Which means I see a lot of passengers on the train and on the platform.  

Watching my fellow passengers for two decades confirmed for me that people are pack animals.  Everywhere. 

Almost anywhere long trains pick up passengers, one or two stairways lead down to the tracks.  At the base of the stairway passengers cluster, even on very long platforms.  If I could take an aerial photo of passengers on a platform it would look like a normal distribution curve--the "pig-in-the-snake" curve  or Bell Curve that describes how members of a population act.

Trains vary in length. But Keystone trains always have five cars unless there is a maintenance problem.  Each car is 85 feet long and seats 82 passengers. When the trains are nearly full people walk to the ends looking for seats.

On a mid-day or late-night train when fewer than 100 passengers ride the train, the middle car will have nearly half the passengers. Those passengers move from being clustered in the middle of the platform to clustering in the middle of the train.

I am aware of this because I have always walked to the end of the train.  I like to read on the train and the car at the far end of the train is most likely to be nearly empty.  

Before Covid, I simply thought of this behavior as what people do. And it was fun to think a statistics teacher could use the train and the platform to illustrate the Bell Curve. 

But since Covid, the pack behavior has some strange dimensions.  I was traveling back and forth to Philadelphia on the train in 2020 when the trains stated running again in July.  We were all masked. There were few passengers. Sometimes a dozen of us would board the train in Lancaster, the busiest station on the line where 200 might board a peak commuter train before Covid.  

Of that dozen passengers, nine would sit in the middle car. I would walk to the end of the train and often have an entire car to myself. 

Since the end of the pandemic, there are still people masking.  Whatever their reason for masking, it would seem they would want to be away from other people. Last week, I boarded a train in Lancaster and walked to the end car. The middle car had one passenger in every seat and two in many others.  I counted four people who were masked out of the 50 passengers.  When I got the the last car, I sat at the end of the car. Only six people sat in that car.  Why would someone wearing a mask sit among 50 passengers instead of six?  

   

Pack behavior pervades life. Soldiers, airline passengers, concert goers, wherever we are we cluster.  The behavior that helped us to survive as hunter gatherers persists on trains, planes and automobiles.

May 9: Soviet Victory and One-Third of My Broken Bones

May is a big day in my life--and for those who still celebrate the victory of the Soviet Union over the Nazis.  While I am happy the Soviets won (and angry that Russia has returned to its Soviet/Tsarist past) for me, May 9 was twice the anniversary of a lot of broken bones and subsequent surgery.  

On May 9, 1945, the Soviet Union announced victory over Nazi Germany. We and the rest of its allies declared victory on May 8, but the Soviets waited until after midnight so they could have a separate date for victory. 

On May 9, 2007, I crashed at 51 mph on Turkey Hill in Lancaster County PA.  A Medevac helicopter flew me to Lancaster General Hospital with ten broken bones, including a smashed 7th vertebra. I had plastic surgery that night to re-attach my forehead. The next day was surgery to scrape out C-7 and replace it with a cadaver bone.  Mike Whittaker got me the Medevac. Without that, who knows. 

Eight days later I walked out of the hospital in a neck and chest brace.  

On May 9, 2020, I had a very low speed bike crash in Philadelphia that splintered my left elbow into twenty pieces. Five days later I had surgery to reassemble my shattered humerus, requiring breaking my forearm in the process.  The next day I walked out of Lancaster General Hospital in a very large cast.  

Today, I did not ride a bicycle.  I know it only happened twice, but I rode yesterday and will probably ride tomorrow. For however many May 9ths I have in my life,I will be a pedestrian.  

On Target Meditation

For several years I have been meditating daily.  Briefly. Just for five or ten minutes, but regularly.  I have a friend who meditates for hours, attending meditation events and meditation retreats. I feel like a grasshopper next to meditation giants like her and her fellow meditation experts. Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari are two authors I read who are deeply into meditation.

Listening to a description of a meditation retreat, I realized that my practice is very firmly rooted in the most meditative experience I had prior to actual practice: firing on an Army rifle range. To hit a pop-up target just a foot tall and two feet wide at 50 to 300 meters requires control of body and breathe. Forty shots in less than ten minutes requires that breathe and body stay fully under control as the targets pop and drop.  

During the moment of aiming, exhaling and firing, I do not remember random thoughts popping into my mind, the moment is too intense.  But lying in the dirt waiting to fire during the summer months, many ranges have gnats and flies flitting around the firing positions.  Those gnats are like the random thoughts I have during meditation. I wave them away then ignore them.

Meditation has become such a part of American culture, that people talk about meditation at lunches, dinners, barbecues, just about anywhere.  Just as mentioning motorcycles will lead someone to an accident story (fatal or maiming), mentioning meditation will lead someone to say they can't, often in considerable detail.  I thought the same.  Then I didn't.  

I can say definitively as a motorcyclist who survived a bad crash (not maimed, but two weeks in the hospital being reassembled) that meditation is much safer!! 

Anyone who can fire a weapon and hit a target can meditate, the focus and breathe control are ready for use.