Years ago, my husband and I lived in Portland, Oregon while he attended Portland State University. While we were there we used mass transit. I was recently telling our son (who has a car…well, make that had a car) how great public transportation was.
You(we) first of all saved money on car insurance and gas. This having no car thing was ok for us as a young college couple. We went from having vehicles when we lived here at home in Pa., straight to busing. We didn’t have money for a car anyway and public transportation turned out to be one of the most memorable times of our lives. If you lived in the city, (which we did) you rode the bus in the down town area free of charge. This was perfect right off the bat.
We saw and met all types of people on the bus and some are still friends to this day. This was in 1978 . We met folks from writers to white collar workers to the local park block bums. We met musicians, students, neighbors and nuts.
Our first strange experience was when the fellow with tourettes syndrome started blurting out really awful words. Now understand, we had no idea what this was at the time and this young man would shout words of profanity like I had never heard before. Naturally, he was sitting right across from us. We called him “the human time bomb.”
Then there was another fellow who every time the bus would roll up to a stop, he would stand up, grab the cross bar in the back of the bus (the thing you hold on to), lift his feet up off of the floor and swing like a monkey. He would not force himself to swing, he would just sway with the momentum of the bus until it stopped and then he would stop a few seconds later. He did not do this once or twice, I mean like every single stop. He was as serious as a heart attack. Did you ever start laughing hysterically in church? You know it’s wrong and suppressing it is so hard. I didn’t know if I should be scared or amused. I’m sure I was a bit of both.
Once, when I was new to bus riding, I missed my stop and I suddenly realized I had to sit there in that giant bus with the bus driver while he took his one hour break. He read the paper, had his lunch, and took a walk. I had no idea where I was so I just sat there. I didn’t want to get off of the bus because I knew I was on the right one, I just missed my stop. I got to where I needed to be two hours late. This also happened to Mike. He was a working student and at the end of his shift, (at this point we lived in a small house outside of the city) he fell asleep on the bus and woke up at the end of the line and had to walk home twenty blocks in the rain.
One evening we ventured (by bus) to the outskirts of Portland to a movie theater to see a late night Grateful Dead movie. Again, not knowing any better and we should have realized by then that Jerry Garcia was well known for three hour guitar solos, we left at the end of the movie. We went to our bus stop and suddenly realized that the last bus came through right before we got to the stop. We got home at four in the morning and had to get up and work at six. It was literally a three hour walk home and of course our jobs required us to be on our feet eight hours.
While riding the bus you could catch up on reading (which now is more awesome with the technology we have), do homework, chat up a friend or just watch the world go by.
So the point I am making to our son is that losing the freedom of having a car is really gaining a different type of freedom. You will have stories to tell. You will stay slender.
