MEMENTO METRO by Priscilla Long
I have been on a strange and unusual trip and there are many ways in which I could talk about it.
– Carved in exit stairs, Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel
1. Me and the Metro
I lack binocular vision. I can see, but I can’t see out of both eyes at once. I lack depth perception. This explains why I ride the Metro – one or more of King County’s 1,300 public transit vehicles – every day. It’s even one reason I moved to Seattle, a city with good public transportation, after my principal driver and I got a divorce. It also explains why I have always adored Modern Art – flat paintings with their flattened perspective that imagine the world flat the way I see it. But back to the subject. I most often ride the Route 26, which begins at Green Lake, travels through the Wallingford neighborhood past my house, continues west through the Fremont neighborhood, crosses Lake Union on Fremont Bridge, travels east along Lake Union, turns south and arrives in downtown Seattle before continuing south as the Route 42. Although I can’t drive, I can ride the Metro.
2. Memento Metro Mori
There’s no surviving slipping under the wheel of a Metro bus. You are torn to pieces, dismembered, crushed.
On August 30, 2006, at 6:20 p.m., a 46-year-old woman was waiting for a bus downtown at Third Avenue and Pike Street. In a fast second, a bicyclist plowed into her and she tumbled under the wheel of an approaching Metro bus. The police, escorting passengers off the ill-fated bus, instructed, “Don’t look!” “Don’t look!” at the carnage she had become. She was the single mother of two sons, one 18, one in his 20s. She lived by herself in low-income housing and she had five cats.
And again, on April 25, 2008, at 1:30 a.m., a 19-year-old young man skateboarding down the hill that is 45th Street NE collided with the rear end of a Metro bus traveling down University Way. It was a Route 71, on its last run of the night. The young man was flipped under the back wheels and crushed. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, not at fault, didn’t even know anything had happened until police stopped her a block away. The skateboarder was much loved – a very accomplished, very athletic, very happy young man who loved his skateboard.
And there are other accidents, other deaths. We regular riders of the Metro know. We know the drivers know. We remember.
3. Chief Seattle’s Question
Why are you not afraid?
– Carved in exit stairs, Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel
4. Canoe Routes
Ancient public transit: the Indian canoe. In the Puget Sound region there were several types, carved by master carvers out of old-growth Western Red Cedar. To begin with, back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Haida and Tlingit would paddle hundreds of miles from as far north as Alaska to the Washington coast. Their ocean-going war-canoes were more than 60 feet long, eight feet wide, and seven feet high at the bow. A 1799 account of a raiding party noted 40 such vessels carrying 20 warriors each.
Seattle-area North Coast Salish canoes included freight canoes that could carry five tons. A general family-transportation canoe could hold 15 people and about three tons of supplies and trading goods. These vessels carried people to and from their summer fishing villages. Canoe carving and canoe paddling were high skills. The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe website lists the following types of canoes: Northern (Haida) canoes, Nootkan / West Coast canoes, Coast Salish canoes, Salish shovel-nosed river canoes, and Coast Salish racing canoes. The Coast Salish buried their dead in canoes. Ceremonies preceding cutting down the tree and moving the trunk and carving it propitiated the tree spirits and the canoe spirits and honored the carvers. Indians transported early white settlers in canoes. In 1852, Chief Seattle and other Duwamish Indians paddled “Doc” Maynard, a Seattle pioneer, north on Puget Sound from Olympia to a rough collection of shacks situated on an Indian place called Duwamps. Chief Seattle asked him why he was not afraid, but Doc Maynard was not afraid. He moved his mercantile establishment to Duwamps and thanked his friend by persuading the 70 or so American settlers of Duwamps to change the name to Seattle.
In Seattle, public transit continues.
5. Moving Reading Room
Experienced riders read. Other experienced riders listen to their Ipods or work on their laptops (Metro buses are wired). Inexperienced riders waste time, look at their watches, pace, look annoyed. (When a bus passes us by with its flip-dot signage reading “To Terminal,” we all get annoyed.) Last summer I read Moby Dick, mostly on the Metro. That long book with its short chapters was a perfect Metro read. Another good one, to my mind, is any book of short stories or essays. One trip equals one good story, one good essay. Reading beats driving around looking for a parking spot or pounding the steering wheel while stuck in traffic. Right now I’m reading Best American Essays 2008 edited by the best of the best, Adam Gopnick. Riding the Route 30 from the University District to my house in Wallingford, I’m reading a poet’s obsession with beads, all kinds of beads – pearl, coral, granite, ceramic. I read about finding beads in flea markets, about buying beads and sorting beads and stringing beads. Emily Gro-sholz’s piece, which begins, “What is the charm of necklaces?” charms me, despite the fact that Gopnick picked it instead of my “Dressing,” which is listed in the Appendix as a Notable Essay of 2007.
6. Heard on the Metro
“We’ve been sitting here a while.”
7. Dogs
Dogs can ride, but they must pay fare. I once saw a mastiff on the bus. He was a massive mastiff, silvery-white, easily weighing 200 pounds. He lay on the floor, apparently contented, his deeply wrinkled snout resting on his paws, as if the Route 44 bus were his preferred dogbed. Big dogs pay adult fare ($1.75, peak; 1.50, off-peak). Max mesmerized the non-canine passengers. They pet him and talked to him in baby talk. His master, a mastiff-sized middle-aged woman, smiled and talked to the folks talking to her mastiff. As for little dogs, most people carry them on as if their Chihuahua were their child. A little dog carried on doesn’t pay fare (neither does a little child carried on). I used to ride with Molly, our beloved standard black poodle. Molly was a large dog and she paid fare. Molly was intelligent and haughty and did not permit strangers to touch her.
8. Our Town
We Seattleites are a people. We are a people who sip lattes and macchiatos and mochas, who read novels, who buy old books, who collect books, who join book clubs, who write in cafés, who work on boats or rent boats or own boats, who fish off the coast of Alaska, who carry our chattels in our backpacks, who live under dark skies, who scorn umbrellas, who prefer rain to sun, who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, who eat salmon and talk salmon and legislate salmon, who know how to say geoduck and cheechako and Sequim and Steilacoom, who take the ferry, who know the ferry schedule, who recycle paper, who recycle tin cans, who recycle newspapers and magazines and cardboard boxes, who live with dogs and walk dogs and talk dogs, who vote for leash-free parks and other parks, who obey the scoop law, who don’t jaywalk, who do jaywalk, who adore our new truss-exposed Rem Koolhaas library, who abhor our new truss-exposed Rem Koolhaas library, who wear tee-shirts, who wear three-piece suits and backpacks, who wear saris and chadors, who wear skimpy halters and short shorts, who mostly wear blue jeans, who are European, who are African, who are Suquamish or Duwamish or Stillaguamish, who are Irish, who are Vietnamese and East Indian and East Timorese, who vote Democrat, who vote Republican, who don’t vote, who do skateboard, who do buy organic, who debate trees, who deplore sea lions dining on salmon, who flock to farmers’ markets, who ride the Metro, who sleep on the Metro, who read on the Metro, who write poetry on the Metro, who feel free to interrupt a poet writing poetry on the Metro by peering over her shoulder and saying, “You need a comma here. Cross that out. Move this line down to the next stanza. Look, this could be a really good poem. But you need a different word – maybe ‘love’ or darling’ or ‘sweetheart.’”
9. My Metro Dream
I am riding the Metro. I look down at myself. I am dressed in a bath towel. I am mortified. The other riders are dressed in regular clothes. I see that we are on Capitol Hill, on Broadway. This must be the Route 7. Now out on Broadway with its shops and traffic, a man is having a heart attack. Sirens wail. A Medic One rig drives up, flashing red lights. Someone’s heart is broken.
10. What the Driver Said
Metro Driver (in a screeching voice): Stop text-messaging from your car!!!! I can look right down and see you!!!!
Metro Passenger: Are you all right?
Metro Driver: (still screeching) I’m fine! I just haven’t had my coffee yet (hysterical laughter).
11. Hayburners
The first Seattle streetcars were horse-drawn. A team of horses drew these streetcars on tracks down Second Avenue. The concern was that they would frighten the regular horse traffic. The year was 1884. The fare was five cents. Three years later the streetcar firm retired the horses and went electric. In 1900 the first auto arrived in Seattle (it was electric). But autos were slow to catch on. On January 7, 1904, the Seattle Department of Engineering counted all vehicles crossing the intersection of First Avenue and Cherry Street. The count totaled 2,745 vehicles, all horse-drawn. Consider the cacophony of horses: harness bells, clopping, neighing, whinnying, blowing, chomping, the creak of wagon wheels. Consider the horse droppings.
12. Moving Backwards
In 1970, King County voters, including Seattle voters, voted down the transit portion of a ballot measure titled Forward Thrust. These voters voted down $440 million in mass-transit bonds that would have brought to King County an additional $900 million in federal funds to build mass transit. The “no” vote shot these federal funds to Atlanta to build its MARTA transit system. In September 2006, I flew from Seattle to Atlanta to attend a history conference. From downtown Seattle, on the Route 194, in rush hour traffic, it took me three-and-a-half hours to get to Sea-Tac Airport. I got to Atlanta and boarded the MARTA, a train, and was whisked to downtown Atlanta in half an hour. Later, at the history conference, I kidded some Atlanta folks that they should thank us Seattleites for our generosity since their MARTA was our $900 million gift in federal dollars to Atlanta, Georgia – that’s $900 million in 1970 dollars.
13. Writing by the Number
Back in Seattle, on the Route 26, on the way downtown, I am reading Jonathan Lethem’s essay “Ecstasy of Influence,” which lists renowned authors who have derived their literary strategies and perverted plot-twists from previous authors, often unknown previous authors. Lethem gives examples from Nabokov to Burroughs to Bob Dylan. I got the idea of writing a numbered 26-part essay on riding the Route 26 from Jonathan Lethem, who wrote a numbered 21-part essay on seeing the movie Star Wars 21 times.
14. Metro Man
Pierre Sundborg is a retired IBM network engineer who likes to travel, especially by train, especially in England, but who is stuck in Seattle caring for his aging father. One Seattle day he was becoming stir-crazy in his Queen Anne Hill condo and his wife invited him not to take a walk but to take a bus ride. So he did. He began riding the Metro, traveling to the four corners of King County on every single route. For this project, which occupies him for two or three days a week, he has drawn up rules and regulations. He rides every route from beginning to end – a trip over part of a route does not count and cannot be entered into his Metro Life List. If a route changes number, he is obliged to ride it again. He began with Route 1 (the Metro runs roughly 233 routes) and will end with Route 995. Sundborg enjoys conversation, according to Linda Shaw’s feature article on him in Pacific Northwest magazine. He talks to people, looks out the window, talks to the driver. He is fascinated by the diversity of the city, by the changing scenery, by the striking contrasts between neighborhoods. Pierre thinks it will take him two or three years to really get to know the city that has become his home.
15. My Metro Journey
I, on the other hand, am a stranger to Seattle, where I have lived for 20 years. For example, I ride the Route 26 almost every day, and on the way downtown, as we move east along the far side of Lake Union from my house, the 26 changes its route number to 42. But where does the Route 42 go? I have no idea.
One day, not wishing to be outdone too badly by Pierre Sundborg, I decide to ride the Route 26 all the way from my house to the end of the Route 42, wherever that is, and then to ride the Route 42 all the way back through its change to the Route 26.
I set out. On the way downtown from North Seattle the passengers are 90 percent Caucasian with an occasional Asian or African American. Four out of five passengers wear blue jeans and Nike-type running shoes. (Note on statistical method: From where I sit, I can see five pants. Four are blue jeans.)
As soon as we reach Third Avenue downtown, with the flip-dot signage now reading 42, the demographics shift and the passengers are now about 80 percent African American with only an occasional Caucasian. We creep through downtown on Third Avenue and then head south through Little Saigon and Chinatown. Now the passengers are Asian, mostly Vietnamese, none wearing blue jeans. Farther and farther south we go on South Rainier. Two beautiful women board. They have dark chocolate skin and wear chadors and speak softly in what I eventually recognize as French. Now the languages muted and soft are Vietnamese, Spanish, French, and one I can’t identify. Now we are on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, and finally we stop at South Leo in a rather suburban-looking community with yards and gardens and inexpensive-looking ranch-style houses. We wait there for 10 or 15 minutes.
A man boards, thin with thinning white hair; a long face creased and age-spotted, glasses, a hawk nose. He works his shut mouth in the manner of a person wearing removable dentures. He wears blue jeans, a zippered khaki jacket of the type sold at Sears Roebuck, and tennis shoes. He looks at me with piercing blue eyes.
Now a young couple boards, infant in carrier. The Mama, a pretty young woman with hair the color of an Irish setter and skin so pale it’s almost blue, is talking to the baby about its Daddy, sitting right there. The Daddy, a thin, black-haired, mustachioed youth with skin the color of an old copper penny, is playing with the baby too, cooing and holding its tiny fist. They talk about the child’s white-knit beanie and where her lost pink beanie might have gone to.
Then the Daddy says, “Is she all white?”
I reconsider my assumptions.
The Mama answers: “She’s a little Mexican.” She then adds: “Correction. Puerto Rican.”
“Who’s the Father?” asks the Daddy.
“Mmm, dunno,” the Mama murmurs.
“Some one off the street?”
“Mmmm. . . . ”
“I’d love to take the place of her father.”
“Rape!” she laughs.
16. The People
The people are like a huge strange and quiet dance.
– Carved in exit stairs, Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel
17. The Tunnel
The Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel runs 1.3 miles under the city and has five stations, each with a décor to fit its place in the history of the city. For instance, the University Station décor is all computers and digital linguistics displays and designs mathematical. The tunnel runs four feet below the old Burlington Northern Tunnel, built in 1905 and still in use. The Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel opened in 1990, closed in 2005 to be retrofitted for light rail, and reopened in 2007. The tunnel stations have art everywhere you look and carved on the rises of the exit stairs are quotations from history, from literature. Ascending the stairs into the everyday world you might register the words longing and enchantment.
18. A Sad Enchantment
Echoes Underground: They send a sad enchantment as if a longing to go would unbind the bound.
– Carved in exit stairs, Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel
19. Horse Power
On any given day, I might ride the yellow-and-blue 1996 Gillig Standard Diesel bus with the black anodized sash along its side and flip-dot signage for forelock; or it might be the New Flyer articulated bus, or the 2002 Gillig trolley bus led like a pony, pole to wire. Or it might be the low-floor 2003 New Flyer that will kneel to the curb on demand. My favorite improvement is this new floor-lowering mechanism. When I get off one of the old buses with the steep, two-step exit stair, I descend one step at a time as if I were a creaky-boned ancient, always remembering the story of the elderly gentleman who was active, who was energetic, who was pleased with his days, who was neighbor to my friend Irene, whose shoe caught on one of those exit steps, who was dragged. He lived but was so severely injured that he could not resume his jolly life but had to go live with his son in Florida.
20. Bus Ride to Hell
This is a story about the need to pee. I am in Olympia, the capital of Washington state, located 40 miles south of Seattle. It is 10 o’clock at night. This story begins at the end of a poetry reading where I was one of the featured poets. The reading was held in a café / bookstore in a remodeled church. The place was packed, the audience appreciative. I am happy. My comrade poets are happy. The evening closes. It’s time to go home.
My fellow poets drive, but they are not driving to Seattle, where I live. Our plan: Poet Jo Nelson will drive me from Olympia to Tacoma where I can catch a Pierce County Transit bus going toward King County and Seattle. Somewhere between Tacoma and Seattle that bus will meet up with the King County Metro Route 174, which goes directly to Seattle.
We are running late. We get into Jo’s gigantic jalopy and she guns the gas peddle. We lurch into the rainy night, Jo laughing wildly. We vroom to Tacoma, arriving just as the bus is pulling out. Jo veers to block the bus, screeching to a halt directly in its path. The bus jerks to a stop. The driver scowls.
I jump out and run to the bus. I stand before the shut double doors. For a second I think the driver is just going to sit there and glare. But he relents and opens the doors. I enter and pay my fare and thank him more profusely than necessary. He recovers his temper. I sit down. It is then that I remember that I have forgotten to pee.
It is late, it is dark, it is raining, and we are driving on and on over unfamiliar highways. I have no idea how long this will take. I go up to the driver to make sure he knows I want to catch the 174. I cannot pull the stop-request pull-cord as we approach the Route 174 stop since I have no idea where the Route 174 stop is. We drive and it rains and I really really have to pee.
We arrive at a huge empty parking lot surrounded by highways. The driver tells me, This is where you get the 174.
Here? I say.
Right here, the driver says in a kindly voice. The 174 stops right here.
I get off the bus into the night, into the rain. Like many Seattleites, I don’t carry an umbrella. I see the bus sign and it reads Route 174. The driver must be right. I wave thank you and he drives off. I stand in the rain, alone. But wait. I’m not alone. There is a passenger shelter a few yards away and it appears to be occupied by several large male youths, drinking beer. I keep my distance.
I am getting wet. My poems are getting wet. I have to pee something fierce. The 174 does not come. There is nowhere to go. All I can see is the vast asphalted parking lot, and beyond, highways, red taillights streaming one way, yellow headlights streaming the other way, bleary yellow streetlamps lighting up the rain splashing into empty parking spaces.
Now the 174 arrives, warm and well lit and the driver cheerfully opens the door. I am grateful. I board the bus.
The 174 is a night bus, picking up night workers, letting off night workers. It is a friendly, tired bus, friendly people getting on, tired people getting on. The 174 stops innumerable times before getting to Seattle. Now we are under silver airplane wings, picking up Boeing workers. This need to pee has now become a form of torture. Can a person die from a burst bladder? I refuse to wet my pants on the bus.
At last we arrive in Seattle. We arrive at the south end of downtown, SoDo, the stadium end, and – Ach! – a game is just letting out. It takes us 45 minutes to traverse the ten blocks from SoDo to mid-downtown where I must transfer to the Route 26.
I do then wait in the rain for the Route 26 which finally arrives, which finally carries me home. It is now 11:30 at night. I run into my house, peeing my pants as I go.
21. Bridging the Distance
I like riding over the Fremont Bridge, a blue and orange bascule bridge built in 1917 and providing passage from the Fremont neighborhood in the north end to Queen Anne Hill and downtown. On the way downtown, from the Fremont Bridge you can see the high Aurora Bridge looming to the left. The bus’s passage over the Irving steel-mesh deck is marked by a low rumble followed by the jounce back to asphalt. The city of Seattle owns and maintains 149 bridges. Washington state owns and maintains five Seattle bridges. The BNSF (Burlington Northern Sante Fe) Railroad owns and maintains one Seattle bridge. On the Metro I sometimes entertain myself by seeing how many bridges I can count out my window at any one time.
The Fremont Bridge spanning Lake Union’s Fremont Cut opens for vessels about 35 times per day. By federal law, marine traffic has right-of-way precedence over road traffic (except for special Coast Guard dispensations granted for rush hours). Any boat, by blowing its horn one long and one short, can require the bridge tender to switch on the red lights, lower the guard rails against the traffic, and raise the twin leaves of the bridge. The city’s website reports that for road traffic, the average length of the wait is four minutes. Sometimes it seems more like four hours. But I don’t care. I am reading the best of this year’s best essays, Barnard Cooper’s riveting piece on caring for his partner, who is sturdy and smart and witty and who is dying of AIDS.
22. The Beaten Path
If you follow the beaten path life becomes somewhat monotonous.
– Carved in exit stairs, Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel
23. Lost
I am on the Route 10, on my way from downtown up to Capitol Hill to teach my class at the Richard Hugo House. I am reading Lee Zacharias’s essay on buzzards called “Buzzards.” Surely this is the best of the best. It is about turkey buzzards and death buzzards and that old buzzard, her father. I read and read. I am moved, wowed, awed. The emotional and factual thickness of it, well . . . But then I look up. Wait! Where are we!? We’ve gone way past my stop. I jerk the stop-request pull-cord to cause the driver to service the next stop. I deboard. I walk back along the line till I arrive at where I thought I was going.
24. Wheels
Back in the “old” days, bicyclists – termed wheelmen – and auto enthusiasts were united in a single cause: good roads. Surfaced roads, smooth roads, roads made of something besides mud and horse manure.
Now drivers of autos and bicyclists share the roads they once lobbied for. Now they curse each other out.
But on the Metro, the motor vehicle and the muscle-vehicle have once again joined forces. Each and every Metro bus has a bike-rack bolted to its flat front. You can ride your bike to your bus, lift your bike onto the bike-rack, ride the bus, get off, lift your bike off the bike-rack, and ride it home.
25. Family Matters
I once clambered into the back door of a Route 44 at the NE 45th Street stop in the University District, going toward Wallingford. I sat down and who did I see a few rows ahead but my 17-year-old niece Joanna and her then-boyfriend, Aris. I was about to say hello but thought better of it. What a perfect occasion to observe my niece, to see what she was like apart from me, to see how she conducted herself around her boyfriend. Would she laugh a lot, be anxious to please, lean always toward him, so common in girls her age? Would she be shy? Would she talk too much? I observed the pair from my seat in the back and I was pleased with what I saw – an assertive, forthright, friendly girl, sure of herself, conducting herself with dignity and delight.
26. He Never Returned
In the Kingston Trio song, written and performed in 1956, Boston’s M.T.A. has raised the fare. It now costs 15 cents to board and a nickel to get off. Does Charlie have the nickel? He does not. He may not deboard. Did he ever return? “Well, he never returned, no, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned!”
And what of our fate? Going toward downtown, you pay fare getting on; going away from downtown you pay fare getting off. (In some obscure way, this philosophy also applies to routes that don’t intersect with downtown.) In July 2008 the fare was raised to $1.75 peak and $1.50 off-peak. If you are 65, as I am, or older than 65, your fare was raised from 25 to 50 cents. Getting on, you receive a transfer, a newsprint ticket with a printed border, its border-color – black, pink, pale green, dark green – depending on the day. The tongue-sized ticket is also printed with the hours of the day. The driver tears it off the ticket book at a time two-and-a-half hours hence. Using this transfer, you can board any bus moving in any direction for two-and-a-half hours. After that you must pay again. Or walk.
But can you ever return? Can you retrace your steps or redo your missteps? Can you resume your old life, return to an old love, redo a job not well done? Can you return to your happiest moments? Even when you return home from downtown on the Metro, using your transfer, are you precisely the same person you were when you left, unaffected by time and experience? Isn’t time – that big Metro bus – carrying us all along? Isn’t its flip-dot signage flashing the one destination we all hate to see? – “To Terminal.”
Priscilla Long is the author of Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (Paragon House). Her poetry and prose have appeared in The American Scholar, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Seattle Review, and Southern Humanities Review.