A sleepy summer bus ride

It was not officially summer. And the last day of school still needed to be played out today. But this morning just wasn't interested in facts. The air was cool but the sun seemed oddly bright and summery in its glare. This felt like the first day of summer.

The No. 82 bus that picked me up on its way to the light rail station at 65th Street was one of the older ones with the benches that line the rear. I find the regular seats on these buses too close together for my liking, and I've found there's too much side-to-side motion when seated on either of the rear side benches. As a result, I ride these buses sitting in the corner on the back bench.

On this lazy day, a woman lies sleeping in the last forward-facing seat before the bench, using her backpack for a pillow. She's a semi-regular rider. She'll wake up about the time the bus reaches the Watt and Wal-Mart stop, shake off the sleepy cobwebs and get off at the Butano and Sam's Club stop. She is a poster child for a stress-free commute.

On the other side of the bus, a skateboarder is asleep, sprawled on the side bench, his head resting on his backpack. When the bus stops, I can hear the music from his headphones. His legs are draped over an old-school skateboard from the 1980s. It's a Santa Cruz Pro Series model, according to the sticker. The wheels are unusually wide by modern street standards and the hardware holding the trucks to the deck looks like hand-me-downs. The bolts extend out of the nuts like poser flag poles. All of this imagery is influenced by what I think my son might say. I've spent years, literally, listening to my kid talk about skateboarding. Someday he'll be a famous skater, and I will say I used to change his diapers. He'll hate that.

We pick up a few riders and let an equal number leave.

At the Watt and Wal-Mart stop the guy who chases coeds boards the bus. He sits down just inside the door. He appears anxious or disappointed, maybe both. Summer is not his season. The Sac State standing-room-only crowds of co-eds have shriveled to a hodge podge of riders who lack the dietary requirements to fuel the guy's efforts. At Howe and Northrup, he leaves the bus and walks to work. Maybe summer school will bring fresh meat.

I enjoy the lazy nature of the summer commute. There is more to see when there is less distraction.

More ins and no outs

Too cool. Well, really cool in a transitarian way.

I needed to get from 21st and Q Street to Eastern and El Camino in Carmichael at 6:30 p.m. Even though I had such good luck earlier this week, I was still a doubting Thomas. After all, no good deed goes unpunished. At least, not for long. In fact, I'm still afraid that saying nice things about Regional Transit's scheduling will cause a major disruption in the force or perhaps prompt another karma payback day.

So I will whisper this: Regional Transit had a schedule that got me from my door at 21st and Q and dropped me off at my destination at the graduation ceremonies at El Camino High School at 6:23 p.m.

The No. 38 bus is scheduled to stop at 21st and Q at 5:14 p.m. I was out there at 5:05. I will admit to fretting until the bus finally arrived at 5:19.

I got off the No. 38 bus at T and 30th and walked over to 30th and T (took me a few moments to figure that out) and waited for the No. 68 bus, which was scheduled to stop on its way to Arden Faire Mall at 5:33 p.m.

Boarded the No. 68 bus at 5:36 p.m. and got off at the mall bus stop at 5:54 p.m. to wait for the No. 23 bus, which would take me to El Camino High School.

There was a little more fretting when I watched a No. 23 bus pass by the stop and continue on Arden Way, but at 6:06 the No. 23 pulled into the mall station and I was on my way.

Now, when things worked so perfectly earlier this week I suggested it was just a coincidence. But if I'm going to have this much good luck, maybe I should buy a lottery ticket, too.

The young bus and the old guy

Richard Brautigan's "The Old Bus" is a short story collected in "Revenge of the Lawn." The story tells of a 20-something man who discovers he is a fish out of water among the old people who fill a San Francisco bus. Like much of Brautigan's images from the 1960s, things look different today.

The No. 82 bus runs from American River College to the 65th Street light rail station, stopping along the way to take on and drop off students attending the Winterstein Adult School, where immigrants learn English, and Sac State, where ... who knows. The rest of the riders are working folks. Only occasionally do elderly riders join this bus.

As I'm jotting these thoughts down in a notebook, there are four ladies on the bus who will get off at the Winterstein school. One is in her 20s. She is a very attractive, slender South Asian. Two women -- one Chinese, the other Eastern European -- are middle-aged. One is of an indeterminate age, but not elderly, dressed in the traditional headscarf of Eastern Europe. These women are a wonderful illustration of the colorful additions immigration brings to America.

Seated in the front of the bus is the Hispanic gentleman wearing his ballcap and carrying his lunch in a plastic shopping bag. He will always remain famous for his transitarian chivalry. Behind the gentleman is the young guy who chases coeds in the bus. With classes over for the summer at Sac State, there isn't much game on the bus. He looks a little bewildered today.

In the back of the bus, a totally unwanted thought occurs to me. I'm the old guy in this bus. Certainly from a 20-something perspective of the 1960s, I'm ancient. But even I can see I'm older than all of the other riders today.

The creaking of the bus takes on new meaning for me.

The Abortion on the bus

Finished Richard Brautigan's "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966," the second of three Brautigan books I'm reading while commuting to and from work on the bus.

This is a story about a man who works and lives in a San Francisco library where authors bring books. No one ever checks the books out. A special bell announces when an author arrives to deposit a book.

It is not a large bell, but it travels intimately along a small silver path that knows the map to our hearing.

And when the library begins to overflow, the books are stored in caves in Northern California and drunkenly watched over by Foster, the perennially t-shirted guy with useful connections.

This is also the story of a girl named Vida, whose body is so beautiful that it causes accidents when seen in public. She doesn't believe its her body. She thinks it must belong to someone else. She has written a book.

"It's about this," she said and suddenly, almost hysterically, she unbuttoned her coat and flung it open as if it were a door to some horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments, pain and dynamic confession. ... She had a fantastically full and developed body under her clothes that would have made the movie stars and beauty queens and showgirls bitterly ooze dead make-up in envy.

She is befriended by the librarian and one thing leads to another and soon she begins to feel at home in her body and then she finds herself pregnant and decides to have an abortion.

Even though the book says more than once that people often go to Sacramento to get abortions, the librarian calls upon Foster to make arrangements with a doctor he knows in Tijuana.

When Foster finally meets Vida we get the fullest sense of Vida's beauty:

My God, ma'am, you're so pretty I'd walk ten miles barefooted on a freezing morning to stand in your shit.

Having spent a couple of years in San Diego when I was in the Navy in the early 1970s, I have certain sympathy for Vida's unwillingness to spend any time there in 1966:

"There are too many unlaid sailors there and everything is either stone stark or neon cheap."

Published in 1971, the subject of casual sex and pregnancy and a subsequent abortion must have been considered avant-garde. Viewed through the lens of 34 years of Roe v. Wade, the book takes the flavor of a cautionary tale.

At the abortionist's office, waiting with other customers, the librarian considers a teenager accompanied by her parents, and muses:

Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.

I love Brautigan's imagery. Describing a cloudy day in San Franscisco:

Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in, but so far nothing rain has happened.

When the librarian first meets Vida and tells her he enjoys his job:

"It's good you're happy," she said. She said the word happy as if she were looking at it from a great distance through a telescope. The word sounded celestial upon her mouth, stark and Galilean.

The librarian is fretting about stepping outside the library for a moment:

"Come on now!" Vida said. "Let your granny gland relax a little and slow down those rocking chair secretions."

Vida and the librarian, sipping whiskey and relaxing:

After a while Vida and I were so relaxed that we both could have been rented out as fields of daisies.

Bottom line: This is another fun Brautigan book. Highly recommended.

Action figures from the bus

I was OK with the idea of an RT Driver blog. The more the merrier. Nice to have the views from both ends of the bus. All that stuff.

But I'm just not buying into the idea of RT Driver action figures.

That's just not right.

Ins and outs, but mostly ins (knock on wood)

The RT Rider blog has a motto. It's up there on the top of the site. It goes like this:

Travels of a rookie commuter as he learns the ins and outs of relying on Sacramento Regional Transit.

And travel I have.

Since I started leaving my car at home, I have had to drive just once, and that was only as far as the nearby light rail park-and-ride station. Every other day I've been able to rely on Sacramento Regional Transit.

Today was one of those great convergences of good fortune and RT scheduling.
Sort of like the clock that's broken and still tells the correct time twice a day.

I needed to get from 21st and Q streets to 11th and J and arrive at 2:30 p.m. That's a distance of 1.4419 miles, according to the Gmap-Pedometer. That's not too far to walk. Yesterday on my way to work, I took the No. 30 bus to 11th and L streets, walked to 11th and J and then walked to work, keeping track of the time. Thanks to the Transitarian Diet, walking is an option. But I'd be walking in the afternoon, and I didn't want to arrive looking and smelling like a sweaty dog in a tie and sport coat. I already look funny enough in a tie and sport coat.

While I was walking down 21st Street yesterday afternoon to time how long it would take to walk to L Street to catch the No. 30 bus, I had an epiphany, a big bus epiphany. A bus passed me on 21st Street, announcing "FREEPORT/DOWNTOWN" service.

OK. I have no idea why it didn't occur to me that buses travel downtown on 21st Street. But there is was, big as life and just as noisy -- the No. 62 bus.

But what about timing? my cynical self said to the gift horse. Back at the office I went to infoweb.sacrt.com and checked on the No. 62 schedule traveling downtown. Sure enough, the No. 62 is scheduled to arrive at 11th and L at 2:24 p.m. "Damn," I exclaimed out loud. That's plenty of time to walk two blocks to 11th and J.

When you consider that the Freeport to downtown bus runs just once each half-hour, getting such a perfect schedule had to be more than coincidence. This was divine transitarian intervention.

The bus is scheduled to arrive at 21st and Q at 2:16 p.m. I was waiting this afternoon at 2:10 just to be safe. I began to sweat despite the cool breeze when 2:16 rolled around without the bus. But soon I could see it in the distance, rumbling up 21st Street.

I was on the bus and on my way to my appointment by 2:19, and I was at my destination waiting for the elevator at 2:30. I would be hard pressed to get my car out of the parking lot, drive the 1.4 miles and find another parking space in that time.

Among the ins and outs of relying of Sacramento Regional Transit, this afternoon was a definite in.

Revenge of the Lawn, but not on the bus

I was in my backyard by the pool reading when I finished Richard Brautigan's "Revenge of the Lawn." It was Saturday. The sound of the pool's waterfall didn't quite mask the industrial noise of the filter. And neither the waterfall nor the filter could keep out the noise of the No. 82 bus. Weekend suburban nature sounds.

The No. 82 bus runs once an hour on weekends. Beyond the pool, past the house, over the sidewalk and on the street I mark the hour with the passage of the No. 82 bus. And 26 minutes later I mark the hour with the passage of the No. 82 bus. And 34 minutes later I mark the hour with the passage of the No. 82 bus. Three not quite equal parts make an hour on the suburban weekend.

I purchased "Revenge of the Lawn" when I purchased "Trout Fishing in America." Each of the new copies came with two other books by Brautigan wrapped inside the covers. All of these books I read separately when I was just out of high school. Three not quite equal parts make up each book.

"Revenge of the Lawn" is a collection of short stories, which was written about 10 years after "Trout Fishing in America." And the stories have much the same poetic imagery:

Like most Californians, I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more.

Thirty-some years is a long time between readings. Everything feels familiar and new at the same time.

On Monday I was back on the street waiting for the bus. Brautigan captured that too so very well in his story "The Old Bus":

I was glad when the bus came. There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.

Those @#%&$! RT drivers

I once had a bus driver abruptly start the bus as I was walking to a seat in the back. I was the only passenger and I ended up almost falling into a seat. Was she messing with me?

The thought occurs to me now because the guy over at RT Driver has been cut to the quick by the discovery of detailed instructions for how to complain about Sacramento Regional Transit drivers.

A woman who calls herself Hearten Soul published the article back on Oct. 31, 2006. The article is part of a site that invites people to create content. In exchange, the site offers payment based on how popular the article is. (To enhance her "performance bonus" you can visit her article here.) Her most recent offering is "Master the Art of Meat Carving," which from the viewpoint of the RTDriver guy probably makes sense.

Hearten Soul's bio doesn't offer any expertise in transit management issues, although the article sounds as if it were written by someone who works -- or worked -- in RT management. For "Education/Experience" she lists: "Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought."

I've only been riding RT regularly for five months, but I have never had reason to complain about a driver.

On the other hand, I have seen a passenger yelling and cursing a driver for not keeping to the schedule.

And I have seen a woman visibly upset because the bus missed a connection with a train that it WASN'T scheduled to make.

RT is a big company with lots of drivers. I'm sure there are some bad apples. Perhaps a few guys think because they've got a huge bag of seniority they don't have to make an effort anymore.

But I'd be willing to bet my monthly bus pass that the vast majority of RT bus drivers and train operators consider themselves professionals and attempt to perform their job in a professional manner. I might even be able to work up some sympathy for the people who handle the 321-BUSS calls.

How Long Will It Take To Teach A Whale Singer?

Under the category How Long Will It Take To Train A Singer, I find that News10 considers RTRider to be the preeminent blogger on the topic of the whales who visited in May. To see a demonstration, try this search.

If you click on the "More: Blogs" you get 33 different links to my "A whale of a trout fishing story" and then two links to posts to Sacramento Metroblogging.

Every day I get at least one visitor looking for a whale of a trout fishing story. I hope they are as happy as the Googlers looking for How Long Will It Take To Train A Singer.

Grateful June bugs and serpent masters

Another month, another pass. And now another RT blogger?

Beancounter asks the question everyone is wondering about:

We have a Sacramento light rail operator who blogs about his job on RT Driver ... and we have a light rail commuter at RT Rider.

But will they ever meet?

And if they do, will it create some sort of temporal rift in the blog space/time continuum?

I'm having difficulty getting a grip on the whole concept. I'm still stuck with the vision of that serpent slithering into the 65th Street station, clanging its bell and flashing its beady yellow eyes, smugly calling attention to itself.

Meet the Svengali controlling the serpent?

Not in the dark.

Not even in the cool morning light. The No. 82 bus pulled into Sacramento State at 8:47 a.m., followed closely by a No. 30 bus. I left the 82 and its rendezvous with the serpent and walked to the 30 bus. I was greeted by a lady driver as I boarded.

Soon we were traveling down J Street through East Sacramento. As the bus approached each stop, the driver identified the intersection. Stop after stop this continued. No one wanted to get off. No one was waiting to get on. A hint of exasperation began to tinge the driver's announcements. Her passengers began to feel guilty. Then the driver finally found a passenger waiting in front of Mercy General Hospital. After that everyone relaxed. The bus company thoughtfully replaced the driver at 29th and L Streets.

I left the bus at 22nd Street and walked to work. At a house near 22nd and O streets, someone has painted a large brick and set it up as a billboard atop the wall around a flowerbed. The brick is the size of a large, rectangular stepping stone. It has been painted bright pink. In black paint, it says, "Be Grateful." The Be Grateful brick billboard is liberally coated with gold or silver glitter. It is hard to tell the color in the sparkling morning light.