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| Photograph courtesy of Metro St. Louis | |
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I
Feels like first grade again: I’m so worried about catching my bus, I go early and bring my banana and granola bar to eat while I wait—kind of like the guy I once dated, insomniac in a new job, who donned his suit, drove downtown and slept on the couch in his office. The TripFinder on the Metro website (metrostlouis.org) is a revelation—but I must’ve entered something screwy, because there are way too many bus icons in each option. So I’ve made my own stab: Hampton bus to the Forest Park Metro station, where I’ve taken the train to the airport. One starts with the familiar.At the bus stop, a woman comes up, hot-flash age, dressed in a tailored skirt and wearing a headset. I wonder what she’s listening to. Then a nice old guy hears my routing dilemma and says, “What you want to do is ...” diagramming five possible itineraries in the air like a football coach. His monthly train and bus pass, he tells me proudly, is only $30, and he goes all over the place—Chesterfield, North County, Belleville, Ill. (Later a colleague will offer to find me a fake ID. There’s a notion that’s lost its charm.)
Safely swept from bus to train, I step off at the Brentwood/I-64 MetroLink stop and ask the advice of a chubby guard who repeats dubiously, “Walk?” He points me to a path alongside the iron fence (Dierbergs doesn’t want commuters usurping its parking lot) to the opening. I am then to pass North Star, cut through the industrial area and across the Brentwood Promenade parking lot. “Now, the fat guy would just wait for the Wash. U. Red or Gold,” he adds, pointing toward the buses.
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I wave and set off on foot, arriving at work six minutes later, perspiring only slightly. Absurdly, I feel proud of myself.
In the evening, I reverse my route. The Hampton bus arrives, and I gather my things, only to see its lit name darken like a Broadway flop’s marquee. “It’s quitting,” says a woman who’s just gotten off. “Gotta wait for the next one.” She pauses, squinting at the back of the bus. “Three kids were hanging on the back of that bus, and I sure can’t see how.” We watch the bus drive away and speculate about Batman magnetic grips.
Twenty minutes later, I’ve learned that she became depressed four years ago after her mother died, stopped taking
40 milligrams of Paxil and climbed up on top of the flood wall down at the riverfront. Scared her kids half to death. Now she’s “walking with the Lord,” off all drugs. Her energy’s vibrant.
I arrive home two hours after leaving work. I’m sticky, cranky, and I keep seeing that flood wall in my head. But I feel a lot more alive than I do when I sit in traffic.
II
This morning the bus stop’s quiet; everybody’s reading. I glance at the shelter walls and think, “We should have a magazine rack; we could all bring and leave stuff.” Later my husband will snort, predicting a mix of porn and evangelism.Settling into a seat, I hear the driver’s radio crackle: “Watch for three people running to catch the bus.” How sweet, I think. Unless they mean he should floor it.
Off the train, I try a shortcut, a pass through the mountains of industry, and I wind up in a place where only trucks ever go. I backtrack, moving to the shade at the edge of the road and finding new ways to distribute the weight of my briefcase. I am learning things most humans already know.
That afternoon at work, I spend an hour I don’t have printing various bus schedules. TripFinder offers one bus and a 4-mile walk if I head toward the new Shrewsbury station. I decide to chance it.
On the train, I meet a guy who works for Citizens for Modern Transit—and assures me that the bus goes straight to the station. Four miles was probably 0.4. We get off and walk down the stairs.
“43,” he says.
“Huh?”
“There are 43 stairs.”
III
I have removed entire months from my calendar; I’m carrying a piece of paper instead of a notebook; one lipstick instead of 47; a driver’s license and a Visa instead of an accordion of hole-punched discount cards, video cards, credit cards, membership cards and—hah!—AAA. Won’t need that sucker. I tuck two $1 bills in the side of my wallet and stand at my stop, ready. I am feeling free. Inconvenienced, but free.I see in every distant truck the awaited bus. First you master logistics, then you learn to scheme within the system, and then you learn about the utter absence of control.
That old grade school feeling comes back: Why doesn’t somebody I know see me and pick me up? I smooth my crumpled bills, get out my quarter. Minutes pass. I keep dipping into the tote bag I’ve set on the ground, then popping back up, lest Bus Driver miss me. Dip, stand, dip—shit, there he is. I jerk upright, shove my notes in the tote bag, accidentally drop the $2 in too, climb on and fish for the bills. The bus driver sighs and swings the door shut.
Tonight, when I leave the train, I remember to check. That guy was right about the stairs.
IV
Waiting’s a drag, and a little nerve-racking, but then the beast of burden pulls right to my stop, right on time, and it’s a miracle all over again. This is the great thing about having no control: It leaves room for magic.What I now think of as my bus, the #11 Chippewa, still has the bell rope (that Hampton bus stopped only when it chose to) and a pleasant disembodied woman’s voice that says, “Stop. Requested.” I feel a weird delight when I see my bus in the distance: the reliable boyfriend who always calls when he says he will.
I notice regulars: a man with a tattoo framing his mouth. A computer professional from Saint Louis University. An older gentleman in a straw hat who waves his cane at my white torn-cotton peasant skirt. “What’s with the skirt?” he calls to me.
“It’s funky!” I toss back. He frowns. “Fashionable?” He shakes his head. “I like it,” I say defiantly.
“That I’ll take,” he says. “The rest is bullshit.”
V
This morning, I am so cocky I hit the snooze button. I still arrive at least five minutes before the bus, though, because my mother raised me anxious. Mass transit resembles life: a lot of waiting interrupted by periods of swift action.
VI
My morning commute now takes five minutes longer than driving, and that’s driving on a good day. Rush-hour traffic reports are a vague memory. Traffic itself is a vague body memory—toggling between first and second gear on Highway 40, listening for accidents and detours, taking back ways only to hit a conga line of cars at some intersection in Webster Groves ...Instead, I ride and walk and look for the unexpected: pink coneflowers; a rather lovely drainage ditch, dark green and sun-dappled; an odd gazebo, with no place inside to sit, behind the furniture store. I used to think buses contained lots of crazy people; now the ones who seem crazy just have earpieces for their cellphones. Progress?
VII
MetroLink is sleeker, cooler and faster than the bus; it also has these great digital clocks and a voice that announces when your train will be arriving in 30 seconds. I am fascinated by anything that runs like clockwork. Nothing in my life has ever been that deliberate.On the train, the socioeconomics change, too, recalibrated by airport travelers and the drive-me-to-the-station-honey crowd.
“Good morning,” the driver says walking through the train, and we answer like church, in unison. He says it again in a few minutes, but now he’s a disembodied voice driving us, and we feel no need to respond.
Tonight it’s hot and humid, and the bus is crowded. I squeeze in between two broad-hipped women on the sideways seat up front, the enforced intimacy at first intensely uncomfortable and then oddly reassuring. Still, I leave as soon as another seat opens. America has made a virtue of personal space.
VIII
People climb on at each stop: laminated badges, red “Schnucks” embroidered on pale blue, the dark bold poly “scrubs” of the fast-food industry, secretary clothes, the occasional suit. Some babble into cellphones, but not as many as I’d expect. Unwritten law: the more crowded the bus, the quieter. I steal peeks at people’s novels. Danielle Steele and existentialism. Not much difference.IX
I now know the exact thickness of $2, and I pay more attention to the weather, none to the traffic. Glancing up at dark clouds, I decide I need to Google “rain poncho lightweight hooded cool summer.”On the way home, a gray-haired woman in a wrap skirt is reading a diet book, tapping white leather sneakers unconsciously to the hip-hop pulsing from a young man’s headset.
X
This morning the bus was dead quiet. Tonight one woman’s speaking rapid-fire Spanish, and another yells up four rows to a newcomer, “I like your skirt.” I argue with the man next to me about whether it’s easier to cool down in summer or warm up in winter. Across from us, a big guy snores like a sea lion.
XI
It’s the first of the month, and I have a PASS! I zip it through the reader like a pro, no more fumbling. I start thinking of places I can go on the bus or the train, just to use my pass.Today’s driver is either slightly insane or very happy. He reads off bus connections in a throaty boom, inflected like a limerick. To a young woman in a fast-food uniform, he says, “You got another job? You quit jobs like I quit smoking!” Indeed, he can recite her résumé, from Burger King to White Castle to this one. He also knows half the people on the bus. When I get off and thank him, he says, “That’s OK, baby.”
XII
My favorite bus driver again. It’s 7:15 a.m., a woman in the front seat yawns, and he asks her what’s wrong. “I stayed up too long,” she says, and he shakes his head disapprovingly.On the train coming home, a young woman from the Caribbean tells me, “I made the dean’s list riding MetroLink. I was working and going to college and nobody knew when I found time to study.” A factory worker overhears me mention a frozen shoulder and joins the conversation to commiserate. “Thank God for Vicodin,” we say reverently.
XIII
What’s hard is not feeling bereft when the train glides away just as I arrive at the top of the hill. I learn a new emotional rhythm: S’alright, another one will be along any minute. Some folks do make mad dashes, which can be amusing, but most do not run around like Lewis Carroll’s rabbit, trying to time their rides. I now understand that laconic way people cross the street to their bus stop now: You know you’re gonna have to wait. And you know that what you’re waiting for will come along eventually. It’s soothing. XIV
I lied. This morning I saw my bus zooming to the stop a block away and made an O.J. run for it, arriving gasping and drenched in sweat just before the doors closed.In the evening, sitting alongside the tracks, I peer down at the rails and feel a sort of acrophobia. I’ve no desire to fall; I’m just suddenly, irrationally afraid that some day I’ll actually want to. A few days ago, we heard the driver’s radio come to urgent life: “There’s a female walking eastbound on the westbound track, and it looks like something might be wrong with her.” Security was sent instantly, and I realized how seldom there is any sort of crisis here. In London, polite announcements come regularly over the loudspeaker on the tube, apologizing for a delay because someone has jumped onto the tracks.
XV
Today I take the train to Wash. U. to interview a professor. The Big Bend station is underground, and there are even separate stairways for the different directions. All that’s missing are Paris’ philosophical billboards, New York’s saxophone players. They’ll come in time.
XVI
That seemed a poetic end to my MetroLink diary—but there is no end. I’ve become friends, for example, with the young woman from the Caribbean, Judith. One evening we were talking about reggae, and the older white guy with the paunch leaned over to ask her some arcane detail about some lesser reggae god, and I realized I’ll never stop being surprised.Today Judith emailed me: “Another reason why riding the MetroLink beats driving a car: Wednesday afternoon a female boarded the train at the Forsyth station. She wore a tiara on her head. A broad sash was draped across her front, from shoulder to hip. Her sash read: ‘Miss MetroLink.’ She gave everyone the queen’s wave (side to side, wrist action only), as she walked down the aisle with an entourage of about three females and eight males trailing behind her. They traipsed the entire car. Solemnly and with very little pomp, they got off at the Clayton station. I got back to my Harry Potter, which no longer seemed quite as otherworldly.
“One way: $2.00
“Add transfer: $0.50
“Entertainment ... priceless.”
