Down and Dirty in the New York Subway

I've had a case of writer's block for the past week; a bit ironic considering I'm currently reading a book entitled "If You Want to Write." Yes! Yes I do! I also want to photograph, but last weekend I lost my camera (and my cell phone, but I got that back). For anyone who knows me well or followed the travel portion of my blog, this should come as no surprise at all, but I do find it somewhat of a let down that I managed to hold onto my camera for twelve months through five countries, countless guesthouses, trains, busses and rickshaws and then how do I end up losing it? In the back of a New York City taxi cab. To add insult to injury, I had my phone number stuck to the side of it in the event of such a careless maneuver, but I'm pretty certain a NYC cabbie's secondary source of income is in the sale of drunkenly overlooked cameras, phones, iPods and Blackberries. I do not expect a call.

The next night I found myself at the West 4th St. subway station in the sole company of a dozen orange-vested graveyard-shift subway workers busily tending to their "Track and Tile" cleaning detail. (Yes, it's true, someone actually does clean the New York Subway and its network of stations!) Between trains and jokes of questionable taste, half the workers would set wobbly wooden ladders down into the tracks, climb across to the other side and begin furiously scrubbing the 100-year-old, grease-streaked tiled walls with long-handled brushes. Workers on the platform directed high-pressure hoses at the wall to rinse down the dirt his teammate had just brushed loose. When a train approached, they'd quickly grab their buckets, climb out of the tracks and wait for it to pass before climbing back in.

"How often does each station gets cleaned?" I ask Tonya, a Harlem native who's been cleaning for the subway since 2002. "I have no idea, but I've never cleaned the same station twice," she replies with a laugh. "What's it like working underground?" I ask as a yellow flatbed garbage train, loaded with trash generated by the day's 7.8 million riders, rumbles to a stop on the other track. "Well, as you can see, there's a lot of dirt down here. Some of it's really old and I don't think it will ever come off. It's dark and smelly down here. I'll tell you, it's hard work." If I ever complain about my job again, somebody smack me.