It’s become apparent that our little Metro Transit system isn’t exactly a municipal moneymaker. “Dismantle it!” come a hundred basso-profundo bellows from the radio’s right end. What good is it? It drains the city coffers, has no effect on congestion, and some are now claiming, in the wake of the bus strike, that crime actually goes down when buses aren’t running. Maybe all those well fed Land Rover pilots are right: We should just be content to ferry our bulk from cubicle to triple garage on either end of our hour-long commute. Our isolation from other citizens will become perfect, a complete and even Zen-like drone of absence. At night we will sleep the Ambien-induced sleep of the slightly restless from lack of exercise, and in the morning there will be no schedule to read, no bus driver with whom to exchange obligatory pleasantries.
I won’t be able to join this particular somnambulists’ parade, because I’m hooked—helpless and chronic—on public transportation. It began decades ago, in another life in New York, and it’s followed me here like some mangy boy whose eyelashes are too long to be anything but trouble. I was at that age when mortality is nothing more than a tragic phenomenon affecting only the old and unstylish, so when the subway shot out from the underground and sped over the causeway toward Broad Channel, naturally I got up and rode outside between the cars. Riding on a causeway is like flying over water: The railway and the sanded silver girders beneath the car are all invisible as it streaks through the sky. The train roared and rattled, my hair dancing in the wind like crazy black ropes. Brooklyn was behind me, cluttered yet vast. Ahead was the Atlantic Ocean, blue and spangled with white-gold sunlight. That train was flying faster than human thought; the boy I was with stepped out and kissed me, and I fell in love forever. Not with the boy—I couldn’t tell you his name on a bet—but with the New York City subway system, and with mass transit in general. Nowhere in the world did my private longings mesh so well with public utility.
It wasn’t just subways. Buses were okay, too, though they were not as fast as the A or even the 9 or the C, which, in turn weren’t as fast as the next ten years that sped by in a blur of compulsion, dropping me off with a thud on West Seventh Street in St. Paul on a February morning, outside of a red brick halfway house, under a gray and empty sky, waiting for a downtown local.
And waiting.
My feet were shod in stylishly pointed leather shoes, whose sleek cut left room only for thin nylon hosiery. They began to hurt so badly that I began to cry, hot salty drops of self-pity. I cursed my fate, I shook my fist at the indifferent heavens, I bemoaned the bleak road, the endless winter, and the lousy minimum-wage job that I had to suffer so much just to get to. If my attention wandered, I brought it immediately back to my situation; I was enjoying the warmth of my own tears. By the time the bus came, my feet no longer hurt, but neither could I use them. It was as if they’d been replaced by rubber stumps belonging to someone else. More tears from the little trooper, verging on hysteria, and the bus driver, with only a minimum roll of his wet asphalt-colored eyes, called the halfway house on his emergency line.
The nurse who came to get me was nice enough to wait until my feet were safely soaking in a bowl of lukewarm water before snapping a question at me: “Well, what kind of shoes are those to wear? It’s eighteen below zero—I’m sure we announced it.”
“What kind of bus,” I silently shot back, “takes twenty-seven minutes for the next one to arrive if you miss the eight-sixteen? What kind of place is this, anyway?”
It turned out to be the kind of place where one year later I was standing in the same gray weather on the same bleak road, waiting for the same bus, the critical difference being that I had learned it was important to read the schedule. It was a little warmer, not much, and my job was a little better, not much. Yet as the bus pulled up and I stepped aboard, I became aware of a strange, unknown sensation, something I had trouble naming. It seeped into the air like the smell of wet dirt that signals spring even when it’s still cold out. What was it? I kept still and waited for it to come to me. It was happiness. So began my new love affair with Twin Cities Metro Transit—slow, unreliable, but it got there, eventually.
Transportation maps are anatomical diagrams. Get to know them and you know your city’s blood vessels, its arterial flow. Any West Seventh route, for example, was a showcase for why people don’t bus in from the suburbs in any great numbers. I was
getting it together back then—chemically dependent, clinically depressed, talking too loud, and using too many hand gestures. I was mentally ill, in other words, but I still wasn’t a patch on half of my fellow bus-riders, who were often mad as coots, mumbling, inebriated, on assistance. The other half were working their second or third job, on their way downtown to sit in dirty parking-ramp booths, bus dirty dishes, scrub dirty toilets, and do all the dirty things we’d prefer not to think about in our more comfortable spheres—for the sake, as always, of a better life for their children. Some of their children will be grateful when they look at their tired parents, and some, for a variety of reasons, will be only uncomfortable.
“It’s weird,” I told my mother during one of our semi-weekly phone calls. “In New York it’s democratic—everyone has to take the subway. Here only marginal people take the bus.”
“Well, sweetie,” my mother sighed, “you are marginal.” I continue to call her twice a week, years later, but that’s probably just a residual symptom of the mental illness.
When the most recent strike rolled around, I heard a gentleman from the Taxpayers League of Minnesota suggest on the radio that the solution was for every low-income person in town to buy a car. I actually recorded his comments and replayed them again and again, but I still couldn’t figure out where he thought the money was going to come from. Did he think that, absent the enabling effects of a public transportation system, the working poor would stop frivoling away their income, pony up for insurance, and finally fill out all that car-loan paperwork they’d been putting off?
All I knew was that when my 132,000-mile, 1989 Pontiac Grand Am finally lost its drive axle, I missed several important doctors’ appointments and couldn’t reschedule sooner than ten weeks out. Additionally, I couldn’t make good on my promise to take my elderly, carless friend grocery shopping, and so he ate Slim Jims and nachos from the skyway convenience store for three weeks. I began to believe that the lights of the city, seen from an airplane, actually spelled out the words “screw the poor.”
Perhaps I am carping at the inevitable. If I want to live in a place like New York I should just bite the bullet, give up the idea of living space, and move back there. The truth, however, is that I like this ridiculous, unhip, goofed-up spot on the Mississippi River as much as any other place. We’ve got our own thing going here, and I want only the best for the town that saw me go from constant misery to intermittent happiness. I want what the Hmong did to University Avenue to spread through the entire area—I want us to be vibrant, unique, possessed of our own public character made up, like any public character, of our personal longings. But there’s no way around it: If we want to be anything but a tepidly connected series of bedroom communities with adjoining, invisible shantytowns serving as servants’ quarters, then we had better develop the political will to make transportation genuinely public—public meaning people like me, the ones who are getting up early to take the bus in from the margins to the middle, the hardworking ones and the ones who can’t work, the able-bodied and the mangled. Citizens.
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