I’d never been to Wonderland. Imagine! Four years in Boston, and I’d never been to a place with a name like that. So lovely, isn’t it? So lovely and so deliciously mysterious, sitting there at the end of the Blue Line.
I wanted to go. Once, I told myself as I boarded the train at Government Center that I would go. I told myself I would go as I sat in my seat, crowded on all sides by people with luggage – people heading to the airport to leave Boston.
Even then, even when I said I would, I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pass Revere Beach. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit in my seat when the doors opened at my favorite stop – when they opened, as I love, practically onto the sea. I know myself. I bolted from the train and walked smiling toward the water.
Again and again I did that. I did it in the fall, on the rare day off from school or soccer. I did it in the winter (I was ecstatic the first time I saw the beach in the snow), and I did it in the spring, spreading a towel down on the sand and forgetting whatever book or project I had brought. In the summer, I went home to land-locked Kansas City.
Still, I wondered.
So the other day, in Boston, I boarded a Blue Line train to Wonderland. I imagined sprawling roller coasters and spinning teacups. Funnel cakes and hot dog vendors. Carnival workers in red and white striped polo T-shirts and cotton candy piled high on cardboard sticks. The sort of things that might exist in a place called Wonderland.
I know they did exist. I had decided to write a story on my subway-accessible sea for a class, and I knew then that I had to write about Wonderland. So I researched the history of Revere Beach, and there it was – the history of Wonderland right before my eyes. All there in case anyone wondered.
It used to be a giant amusement park. Wonderland: “Revere Beach’s Mystic City by the Sea.” It was only around for a few years in the early 1900s though. Some roller coasters and carousels made it to the 1970s, and then they were torn down too. High rise apartments went up where they used to be. A dog track called Wonderland fills the space where the Mystic City once stood.
I knew all of that as I made my way to Wonderland. In the back of my mind, I knew that there may be nothing Wonderland-ish about the place today, but I pushed that thought away.
At Revere Beach, I made myself be absolutely still. I concentrated on the task at hand: wondering. Only one woman was left with me in the car. She clutched her purse in her lap and held her groceries between her feet. She had no teeth, but wore a pretty shade of lipstick. I asked her about Wonderland.
“You never been to Wonderland, honey?” she asked. “It’s just a stop like any these here other stops. Got a booth for tokens, you know.”
She misunderstood me, mistaking my actual wonder for inexperience, and asked me if I was a student. She nodded her head when I said yes, as if that piece of information explained my naiveté.
“Last stop, Wonderland,” the conductor said.
When we got off the train, she pointed in the direction of the ocean, telling me where I could find it. I thanked her and headed in that direction because it was clear that all of Wonderland was gone.
There was a massive parking lot where buses idled waiting for passengers. The few people who got off here headed up the stairs to the streets of Revere. Behind the subway station, I could see a convenience store: Wonderland Convenience.
I walked to the beach and I stared at the sea. I waited a long time, getting up the courage to ask three old men, who were sitting and also staring at the sea, about Wonderland.
They explained about the old amusement park. They told me about riding the roller coasters. They were curious about my curiosity. They asked me where I was from.
“You’re from Kansas?” the one called Louie asked. “You’ve never seen the sea! No wonder you’re staring at it like that!”
No wonder.
I was disappointed, at first, that I did not see any old Wonderland things. The shell of a roller coaster, for instance, or a rusting carousel horse.
But the sea revived me. I walked along the beach, stooping to pick up shells because I never did learn to pass them by. I put them in my pocket to take home.
A woman and I passed each other twice, walking in opposite directions. The second time we passed, she stopped. I stopped. She spread her arms out to the sea, full of wonder. Because I understood her inability to express herself and because I was full of wonder too, I spread my arms out to the sea.
“Isn’t this wonderful,” she said.
And I agreed. It is wonderful.
Wonderland.
Rebecca Beyer, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.
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