Montréal

Labor Day was low-key this year. We had a quiet day and a small cookout in the courtyard during the afternoon. But later in the week, the novice master decided to give the three of us a little break from all the activity in the house and the noise of the city, so we went up to Montreal for a couple of days and stopped at the beach on Lake Champlain on the way there and back.

Multi-day trips during novitiate are exceptional, but because there is an Oblate house there the provincial can designate it as the novitiate residence for a certain period of time, allowing us to have a get away without loosing any of the 365 days required for novitiate.

Nice, windy Lake Champlain: much cooler than Boston this week.

Paul getting ready to jump off a bridge into the lake

Hanging out with Fr. Shawn's father and brother at the beach

The Oblate house in Montreal, right on the bank of the St. Lawrence "Fleuve"

Morning view from the porch

Outside Notre Dame du Montreal, a ~0.25 scale replica of Notre Dame du Paris

Interior

The main altarpiece 

7,000-pipe organ

We also visited St. Joseph's Oratory, which I had been to on my last visit two years ago.

It was good to get out of the city during the heat wave and go somewhere a little cooler and less humid, but most of all to get away from the noise and activity for a few days. We didn't do very many activities or see many sights outside of our pilgrimage to the Oratory shrine, and we were able to spend a lot of extra time reading in addition to our normal novitiate routine.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I was intending to post pictures from the Thanksgiving road trip to Quebec this week, but today I was at the center of excitement of quite a different sort.

After doing a preparation-intensive group presentation and Q&A session on Aristotle's Metaphysics in philosophy class this morning and finishing another group research project at Boston College by 11:00 am, I decided to take the rest of the morning off and instead of reading went on a walk down to Boston Common.
It's approximately a 30-minute walk, so after doing a loop around I decided to take the train back to give my feet a rest and be back to St. Clement's in plenty of time for the 12:10 pm mass. So I boarded the T at Park Street on the far side of Boston Common.

When the train approached the platform at Boylston, the next stop on the far side of the Common, people had just started to disembark when there was an enormous impact that sent people reeling. I turned around actually expecting to see the rear of the car crunched (it was not, but it was still quite a jolt).

Now, I had only just made the train at Park Street and was standing at the very back, even up against the rear of the end car, when it left the station. Providentially, I mistakenly thought I had boarded a train which bypassed my destination so I had decided to move forward to change trains at the next stop.

Thus, I was fortuitously no longer against the back of the train car and ~5 feet away from the point of impact when the collision occurred. I was also facing squarely away and walking so my legs absorbed most of the impact. I was also sliding along the bar even though the train was stationary, so I didn't get sent flying. So, I only suffered a big jolt and extremely loud noise.

Also mitigating damage was the fact that the accident occurred only just before noon rush, so most passengers were seated and not knocked into each other. In my section, a couple men lost their feet, cell phones and i-pods went flying, and I was just missed by an airborn cup of hot coffee, but there were no serious injuries. All told, about a hundred people were treated at the site and 35 were taken to hospitals for treatment of minor traumas.

I didn't stick around for that: because no one in my train car was seriously injured, we all filed onto the platform when the operator manually opened the doors at the front, and, after milling around for a minute to see if anyone needed urgent help, I headed up to the street to walk home in time to catch the carpool for my afternoon class in Brighton. There was a big hullaballoo with first responders trying to get down into the station and MTA people shutting it down, so that was another reason to get out of the way.

So, aside from a massive adrenaline rush that lasted a few hours and probably some soreness tomorrow, I escaped unscathed and can check "hit by train" off my bucket list. Hitherto, my safety precautions in Boston have been centered around inevitable altercations with crazy drivers, so it's ironic the first accident occurred in the safest part of the transportation system.

Also, for anyone interested I did not already notify, I will be flying back to MI on Christmas Eve and in town until Epiphany, so let me know if you want to make plans to get together/hang out in the intervening period.