On Transit

Last semester, on a cold and soggy November day, a particularly disgusting mix of rain, snow and sleet began to fall insistently from the sky - too solid to be rain, too wet to be snow, and slushy enough to grind all traffic in the city to a standstill. Waiting for the bus home in front of Coffman Union, I noticed that the traffic in front of me was inching along at approximately 10 centimeters an hour, and it occurred to me that my bus would probably be late. I zipped up my jacket and resigned myself to waiting, feeling mildly inconvenienced but not particularly annoyed. After all, there were worse things in the world than standing in the sleet, and there was something almost beautiful about the rain/snow in the streetlights while the twilight deepened. It was cold, but not (yet) bone chillingly so. I was in no hurry and did not mind waiting.

More than an hour after it was supposed to arrive, a lone 144 pulled up to the curb, and a relieved crowd of stranded people surged towards it in a frenzied crush of bodies. Unfortunately, the bus was already approaching its maximum occupancy; through the steamed up windows I could see a mass of unhappy people crammed sardine-like into the aisle. The first few who got to the door managed to force their way in, but before long the crowd inside the bus was as compressed as it was going to get and there was no room for any more passengers.

Sitting grimly at the wheel, the bus driver made an executive decision. "No room!" she screamed at the crowd. "We're full! No room!" A collective, despairing moan went up among the crowd, but they began to reluctantly back away, with the exception of one skinny boy in a brown jacket who hurled himself at the door and began to plead his case. "Just let me on!" he shrieked. "I'm tiny! I take up very little space!" It was very pathetic, but the bus driver was a professional and pitiless woman and felt no remorse. Ignoring his protests, she closed the door, and the 144 inched away into the rapidly darkening night.

I had made no attempt to get on the bus, having decided that waiting in the cold for hours was far preferable to waiting for hours jam-packed on a crowded bus. That was only the first of the 144s, I figured. I was confident that there would be other, undoubtedly less crowded busses before too long. However, an hour later, still standing outside and starting to shiver, I began to question the accuracy of my assessment. There had not been another 144 in sight, and my limbs were starting to feel more solid than usual. The snow was no longer very beautiful. Hunger growled in my stomach, and I became gradually aware that I was losing feeling in my feet. A former classmate walking by stopped for a moment to say hello, which led to my discovery that my cheeks were so numb that I was unable to form coherent words.

I began to wonder if my toes would freeze and started wiggling them earnestly within my shoes, trying to suppress morbid visions of having to amputate solid black and blue chunks that had once, in better times, been the little piggies. I seriously considered the option of removing my oversized mittens and using them as a pair of thick, improvised socks, but ultimately decided against this; it was a more desperate measure that I was really willing to take, and moreover, I was unsure if I would actually be able to jam my mitten-clad feet into my shoes.

It had occurred to me that there were several other less direct routes by which I could find my way home, and in fact by then the rest of the other 144 regulars had given up waiting and hopped aboard these alternatives. However, bizarre and sinister forces had taken control of my mind. I was determined to wait for the 144. I figured that the bus was so impossibly late that the next one rounding the curve would surely, by sheer probability, be my salvation; I lived and died with every distant bus I spotted. And lurking deeper still was an even more perverse and inexplicable compulsion: having suffered enough already, I wanted make this horrible experience as bad as possible - to really break barriers of commute misery. In a warped and masochistic way, I was curious to see when or if the bus would finally arrive. I wanted to be as appalled as humanly possible at the total ineptness of the mass transit system. I wanted to prolong my stay in commute hell as long as possible. I wanted the maximum possible amount of sympathy when I related my sorrowful story in the future.

However, after I had been waiting for well over three hours, even this strange mindset had worn off, and I swore to myself that I would get on the next 16 that arrived. And without warning, a nearly empty 144 appeared like some impossible mirage. Not quite believing that it had finally arrived, I staggered aboard and collapsed onto a seat. Across from me, a woman had removed her shoes and was massaging her toes. A Chinese man was talking loudly on his cell phone, apparently confident that no one had any idea what he was saying. How wrong he was! Little did he know that I had intensely studied two years of Mandarin and was able to pick bits of words and phrases here and there from his conversation: chiefly, “very cold� and “need more clothes.�