A Bus With a View

I have been a public bus rider for most of my life. When my sister Judy and I were children, our single mother owned no car. Indeed she never even learned to drive a car. While Mother was working at her job as a waitress, Judy and I would hop on a bus and go wherever we wanted--mainly downtown though. I remember our several summers spent on the Mississippi Coast when we rented either a small apartment or a small Airstream trailer on Highway 90 across the street from the beach. Mother said, "Just go outside and wait at the bus stop; a bus will come by in about twenty minutes." We did that to go to town and to go to church on Sundays at the now blown-away First Baptist Church in Gulfport. As a child, one would think that she would be fascinated by the sights outside the bus window such as the white sand beaches, the stately older homes dating back to the nineteenth century, the many piers, and the restaurants along the way. Not me--I was fascinated instead by the view of the people on the bus.

Our book club finishes our discussion today of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. In her evaluation near the end of the non-fiction book, Barbara observes that the affluent simply don't ride public buses or subways. Instead they take a quick cab to whatever location they need or drive to it in their cars. I had reason in October to reflect upon the truth of Ehrenreich's statement.

My husband Garlan and I spent a month in Seattle back in the fall to see our daughter Kimberly and her family, both immediate and extended. We chose to ride the metro buses to go wherever we needed to go since our daughter was obviously quite busy with a full-time job at Microsoft as a product manager and an ever-growing and exploring toddler.

It took only a day or so of this routine before we made an observation about our view on the buses. The clientele could be categorized into three over-lapping categories: the elderly, the very poor, and the mentally and physically challenged. With their city-dispensed cards, they could ride the bus for a mere $.25 or $.50. Here's just a slight bit of what we observed in our month of riding public transportation:

A caregiver with her Ipod and her earphones in her ears to block out the repetitive sounds of her charge, a somewhat disheveled middle-aged woman who looked to be in her forties. Occasionally, the caregiver would shove her or speak cruel words of direction such as, "Quit that now; sit up and behave." We saw them on the same bus route several times, and the treatment was much the same.

A young man with dreadlocks and a cowboy hat who sat by me on one of the bus rides into downtown. During the fifteen minutes or so (he sat beside me), he told me he was bi-polar, had spent the night in a local shelter, but had to leave because he came close to "decking" one of the shelter's workers. Evidently, the young man had made a small joke about the worker's purple tie being like Barney's, and the joke almost led to a major altercation. He was on his way then to the waterfront piers.

While waiting at the bus stop on Third Street close to the Pacific Place mall and the West Lake Mall, we watched as a woman picked through the muddy soil where a city tree was planted in order to recover several cigarette butts to smoke.

The next day on KING 5 news we heard that in the exact location where we had been standing the day before a homeless man accosted another homeless man. The latter took out his gun and shot the man dead before an astonished crowd of onlookers. Evidently, The Seattle Post-Intelligencier reported the dead man had bi-polar also and was off his medication. The shooter had permission to carry a concealed weapon and was not charged in the incident.

Yes, I agree with the author of Nickel and Dimed. If the middle-class and above rode the public buses and subways more often, they would not talk about the "invisible poor" but be able to witness the plight of these folks more readily. Perhaps then, they could address the issue of poverty and the mentally and physically challenged more forcefully.