Riding a bus in Seattle on Sept. 27, 2010

(I wrote this a few weeks ago while visiting Seattle - it always takes me a while to post)

As a long-time resident of Seattle, I relied on the bus to get me to the University on a relatively frequent basis. Although I always preferred the bike commute, I was not a fan of pedaling during the “dark days” of late fall and early winter, when daylight was gone by 5pm. Thus, I often found myself on the bus heading to and from school.

I’ll be first to admit that such rides were often unpleasant. The bus moves at the pace of an old woman on a Lark scooter, carefully checking and re-checking the prices of every single item in Aisle 5 at the grocery store. The bus’s route crossed a large swatch of North Seattle, connecting soup kitchens run by various churches and charity organizations to cheap dive bars to prime pan-handling zones near the University. Thus, it had its share of patrons that enjoyed drinking malt beverages out of paper bags and/or emptying the contents of their bowels or bladder while in-transit. Combined with the inattention to grooming exhibited by many of my graduate student colleagues that were also passengers, the bus developed a complex and rich aroma that brought about feelings of desperation, loathing, and cynicism which could be termed “the malaise of the number 44 bus.”

(Above: Typical 44 bus. Heavily-laden bike on the front is equally likely to belong to a grad student or a drunken bum.)

Now that I live in Washington, DC, my commuting experience is quite different. I ride the Metro. It is spotlessly clean, as food and drink are outlawed. Periodically, a teenager who has chosen to defy this rule will be arrested in a rather public manner and the story will be conspicuously spread to the local press as a means of “sending a message.” Riders represent a wide cross section of the city – politicos in suits, beaten-down civil servants clad in ill-fitting, outdated khakis and glasses repaired with tape, working moms taking their kids to day-care, teenagers en route to school that listen to music, speak in loud voices as they seek attention from those around them, and text each other with violent movements of their phalanges, usually in simultaneous fashion.

Although I enjoy the diverse cross-section of riders in DC, as well as the attention to speed (as long as there are no track repairs, in which case the Metro is rendered as fast as a large horse-and-buggy, where the horses are only 3-legged) and cleanliness, I am somewhat nostalgic for the #44 bus in Seattle. It may not have been efficient or glamorous, but its grittiness was consistent (there was never a “nice ride” on the 44) and created a slight sense of proletarian solidarity among those of us without cars or without to desire to commute by car. (In a way, it was the nirvana of urban hipster-dom, toward which I must guiltily admit to sharing some sympathy.)