Last night, the trains were swollen with people.

I waited on the platform at Madison and Wabash, and the first Brown Line that arrived had no seats open and barely any standing room. I was in no hurry, so I let it pass and waited for the next one. I was a little bewildered, because it seemed late enough that the rush would have died down, but whatever.

A long time passed before the next Brown Line. It too was packed. I looked in the window to see which conductor was driving it. It was a guy I recognized: big doughy sphere of a head, thin film of stubble on his scalp. He wasn’t one of the conductors who annoy me with their driving or announcing habits, so I figured, screw it—I’m getting on.

I was in the front car, as usual. (I get off all the way up at Kimball, so it pays to be in the front car at the end of my evening commute.) I stood with my back to the door that leads to the conductor’s cockpit.

I thought I’d try to read, but the crowd filled in to the point where there was no room to hold my book in front of me without bothering everyone. So I switched to playing Bejeweled on my phone, but I kept losing. Frustrated, I put away all my self-distractions and settled in for a dull, annoying trip.

I found out why the trains were so few and far between, because the conductor kept announcing the story, over and over again. “Once again passengers sorry for the delay we had a train go off the tracks at Kedzie and had to return to Kimball against traffic I apologize for any delay or inconvenience we’re running on schedule now.”

Another one of those catastrophes (for others) that leads to an inconvenience (for me).

So we lurched our way, shoulder to shoulder, up from the Loop. At Belmont, there was a knock behind me on the door against which I was leaning. The conductor opened it.

“Seriously?” I thought. “He’s going to make his rounds through the train when it’s this crowded?”

But no: He said, “Maybe we can get a little breathing room here.”

Belmont was the last stop for a while where he needed to look out the left-hand window. So he opened up the little front area and shut himself into the smaller portion on the right-hand side. It was actually quite thoughtful of him.

At first, all I did was back up, so that instead of having my back to the door, I had my back to the window at the front of the train.

But then I realized: I’m at a window at the front of the train!

I turned around and watched the commute from an angle I’d never seen before. This is a trip I’d observed through the side window countless times. Through the back window, the scenery receding, several times too. But I don’t think I’d ever had a head-on view before, houses and streets and stations approaching constantly.

The curves were the best. Between Belmont and Southport, between Paulina and Addison, and especially between Montrose and Damen, where a swirl of snow blew off an overhanging tree, and we passed through it as through a glittery fog.

Oncoming trains’ headlights. Never-seen CTA traffic lights I didn’t know how to decipher. Arcs of footprints in the snow at each platform outlining ghosts of the trains that had come before.

I switched my iPod to “The Gentle Side of John Coltrane” and watched the snowy city approach me from two stories up.

I took out my camera phone and snapped a few pictures. I felt a little self-conscious about it until I noticed another guy next to me doing the same thing.I knew that Rockwell would be the next stop for which the conductor would need the left window, so I moved back into the (now much roomier) body of the train one stop earlier, at Western. Sure enough, the conductor lurched out and shooed away my fellow photographer soon afterwards. The front pocket of the train was once again sealed off from the passengers.

You never know what the meaningless little decisions you make during the course of the day will bring you. Take a train, or let it pass. The infinity of it all can give you vertigo. It’s rare that it occurs to me to notice the results of these decisions, even rarer that I am able to enjoy one of them.