Mad Mountain Goat on the Big Rock Candy Montain

Slippery slope I climbed to get to the median strip near a turn lane.

Here in wintery Maine, it's normal to teeter on a four-foot-tall ridge of plowed-up snow while waiting for the METRO bus. I've gotten better with each winter here, as each is always an -- ahem -- opportunity to gain practical experience. If I'm careful, I can safely clamber up to the top of the ridge, and then stay there. The first thing I learned, when I moved to Maine, was to wear waterproof shoes with rugged ridged soles.You wear sneakers or dress shoes here in the winter, you die.

So I'm good until the bus pulls up, and then I have to somehow maneuver myself from the spiny ridge of the mini glacier down to street level. No amount of experience or practice helps with that part of the process. 

From the window of a passing car, the A-shaped snow slope doesn't look like a big deal. But when one is right there, there's no escaping the observation that the mini mountain range is not just deep snow to punch through in boots or good shoes and wool socks. It's actually a hard awkward hump of icy snow deceptively layered with a foot of fluffy snow. Up close, the downslope to the roadway is intimidating. 

On the sidewalk side, the snow is pretty and clean and fluffy. Mini snowblowers that look like riding lawnmowers, go along the sidewalks, and they scoop up the snow and then snort it out of a vent pipe which piles it up neatly along the edge of the sidewalk. 

On the street side, the dark gray-and-black side snow is mixed with gravel and sand and clumps of salt and ice balls and stiffened dirty mittens and small pieces of rusty tailpipe. This is all frozen together with a shiny slippery glaze of road salt brine. It's hard as stone, and no amount of kicking or stomping will make the slightest dent in the surface.

On a trip on the other side of the Casco Bay Bridge, in Portland proper, I was poised at the top of one of these snow-ice hills. Careful scanning showed me that the only potential foothold, near the bottom of the slope, was an enormous bootprint. It was much too large to be human. But then it couldn't have been made by Bigfoot because big furry creatures don't wear soled footwear. But if sasquatches did wear boots, this particular humanoid would have been wearing galoshes two sizes two big for its paws. The crater of a bootprint was certainly large enough for me to get my own Doc Marten shoe into, but then, while traveling down on a slippery slope, could I get my shoe back up out of there? Hmm.

There was no give to the edges of this deep crater, frozen like plaster or stone now, after having been stomped down while the snow mix was still new and soft. Above the bootprint, halfway up the slope, was a sort of ledge, only about three inches wide and perhaps ten inches long. Not as long as my shoe, for sure. 

This sort-of ledge, shallow and uneven, had a chunk of snow lying on it. I carefully leaned forward a bit and kicked the snow chunk away with the toe of my shoe. Then I tried to talk myself into the idea that I could wedge the side of my right shoe into the inadequate dent above the semi-ledge. If I aligned my right shoe just right, maybe I could drop my left foot into the big huge frozen footprint crater. Then what would happen? I knew what would happen. My mind filled with images of myself, three weeks into the future, at a physical-therapy clinc, using my just-surgically-rebuilt knee to pedal an exercise bike.

Okay, no. Time for another approach to getting down to street level so I could get onto the METRO bus. I clambered back down the fluffy clean slushy snow of the sidewalk side of the four-foot-ice hill. I had to get off the sidewalk as soon as possible as it was coated with a layer of water on top of clear ice. I picked my way along the surface of death till I came to a driveway where I could move over into the road. 

It says something when one is safer sharing the asphalt with rapidly-moving traffic than if one is using the theoretically-cleared pedestrian walkway. As I walked, I kept close to the curb and chanted my usual walking-in-the-road mantra, which goes "Don't hit me with your car, I'm sosmeone's mother, don't hit me with your car." I got through this chant about six or seven times and then i was at the bus stop sign.

The metal pole which held the sign was buried in dirty snow. The heap of snow and ice chunks formed a pyramid all around the sign so there was no spot anyone would stand at the bus stop unless one had a person-sized gyroscope they could fit into, or maybe stilts with plumber's helpers at the ends. I looked around for a place that I could stand near enough to the sign to be recognized as someone who wanted to ride the Forest Avenue METRO bus while also remaining far enough back from the street that I wouldn't be wiped out by a heating-oil tanker truck.

[Happily for you,Rreader, this is where the notes for this blog post end. I never got revved up into full rant mode. I remember that the bus finally came and the driver yelled at me for standing in the wrong place. Then when i got on the bus, we had an argument so unpleasant that I ended up writing a scathing letter to the METRO office. I did that instead of finishing this harrowing tale. Better to tell the bus people what the issues were than to yammer on at length here. I can see from where I started this Blogger entry that I made the notes for this post almost exactly a year ago. I can report -- based on bus trips taken last Wednesday and Thursday -- that the struggle to get from the bus stop to the actual door of the bus is exactly the same as it was twelve months ago. However, was taking local buses here in South Portland. I had much more friendly and helpful drivers this time, so score one for the South Portland Bus Service vs. the Portland METRO.]

 

It Always Went Bad When We Got to the Pizza Hut Corner

For about fifteen years, during my first marriage, I traveled to and from the grocery store as a passenger in a car. First in a compact car which groaned alarmingly when we made a right turn, then in a station wagon with a backseat full of younguns, then in a sedan with more people and dogs than we had room for. 

After my divorce, I did my shopping by getting on the city bus conveniently located in the same block as my apartment and rode to Kroger. I was grateful to live so close to the bus stop, even if I was woken each morning by the 6 a.m. motor coach roaring "Number Four, Indianola Avenue!" with its volume set at "Spinal Tap" level, 11-out-of-10 volume. 

I remained grateful and accepting that the bus went from my block to the grocery store as long as I timed things right for my twice-a-month grocery outings. The north-south bus route that went up and down the avenue had an alternating schedule and it had some gaps in it. Every other bus went to the grocery store, and there were time periods where the Weber Road #83 didn't come along for a while. If they'd been on a regular hourly schedule, I could have kept track of the fact that the 1 pm, 3 pm, and 5 pm buses went to Kroger while the 2 pm and 4 pm did not. Alas, there were complexities.

I had a printed schedule to tell me when to leave my house, and I could also get bus times by calling a recording on my cell phone. I was pretty good at leaving the house at the right time. But I sometimes found it hard to keep track of which bus I needed to take home once I had shopped. Honestly, it was hard to know going to go south on Indianola Avenue and which one wasn't.  Why this was so important will be explained later.

Even once I'd actually gotten on the #83 headed towards home, I wasn't sure what was going to happen when the bus got to my street. There were printed schedules in holders behind the driver, but they were never for the bus I was on. I assume this was encourage city bus tourism. ("If you like the Number 83, you may also enjoy Routes 7, 17, and 92!")

On some COTA routes, one could ask the driver about where a particular bus did or didn't go. The hippie guy who drove the Route 4 North was always great, answering any question I had. But most of the drivers who drove the #83 Weber Road route were the kind of bus drivers who hate you for even getting lnto their bus to begin with. 

Why were the Weber Road route drivers so cranky? I think it was the Pizza Hut issue. Maybe also the hospital loop issue, now that I think of it. It was probably the combination of the two problems together. 

The problem with the Pizza Hut corner was that the intersection of North Broadway and High Street was just cra-a-a-zy. Over the years, many schemes had been hatched to fix the issues, but the issues remained. 

You couldn't turn left on High Street but everyone wanted to. People impulsively did so without warning. Additionally, people could and did legally zoom south along the curb lane on High, then do an abrupt diagonal slam into the turn lane, followed by a NASCAR type slide around the front bumper of whatever vehicle was poking out into the intersection in the hope of making an illegal left turn. 

On top of that, North Broadway goes down to the river and near High Street the slope is practically vertical. On the west side of Broadway, people in junker cars whose engines didn't idle evenly tended to ram right through even when the light turned red because they were afraid their cars would stall out and they'll roll backwards and run into the person behind them, and of course then they'd have to lock themselves into their car long enough to make a speedy cellphone call The General to get instant insurance coverage before the cops came. 

The intersection was so crazy. . .

How crazy was it?

. . .the elementary school had constructed an entire underground tunnel system to let children reach the other side of High Street. 

So this is the street corner which stressed out the bus drivers and made them mad at us. Most of us passengers wanted to get off next to the Pizza Hut, because that's where the north-south #2 bus stopped. Due to intersection insanity, the bus was not allowed to let people off at the Pizza Hut; the law or the bus company or sometbody who decided things had decreed that people had to get off across High Street, next to the Kroger parking lot. 

Nobody wanted to be taken across High Street, because the bus we needed would surely shoot by while we furiously hopped up and down like Yosemite Sam on the opposite curb. If we were in danger of being late to work, we'd have to chance jaywalking while praying we'd get safely to the Pizza Hut without being flattened by cars in turn lanes going every which way. 

A rare few of the Weber Road route drivers showed mercy and illegally opened the front doors of the bus for just a second to let us escape. They'd pretend they were adjusting the door to "close it better" and they'd look away for the 45 seconds it was open. The effect was like someone opening a screen door for a bird that's gotten trapped on a sun porch and has been beating its wings against the mesh screen. We escapees said nothing and we didn't look back. We just zoomed out the folded-back accordion door and we were gone. 

But most of the drivers wouldn't break the rule and furthermore, they were sick of us begging to be let out as we saw our northbound connection steaming up the hill toward the hearing-aid store."Driver! There's my bus! Can I get out here? Please, let me out here!"

And then, after the bus driver dropped off angry or forlorn passengers at the reviled Kroger lot stop several times a day, each COTA driver had to take the bus around the loop near the visitors' entrance at Riverside Hospital. More frustration all around. 

There were two bus stops at the hospital, and the first one was fine. That one was used by workers -- mostly nursing aides and custodial staff -- and these people were regular riders. Totally familiar with where they were within the hospital complex, of course. But the second hospital stop was used by people coming to Riverside for the first time to visit someone, and these passengers were worn out, having usually already taken one or two buses before they ever got on the #83. By the time the hospital bus got to the turnaround loop near the revolving door, the first-time riders were all turned around in their choice of doorways. It was like that moment in the Harry Potter movie when the newbie witches and wizards have to find out how and where to take the train to Hogwarts. 

The visitors were also stressed out because they knew they had to hurry up. They had about forty-five minutes to get in and see their Grandma, and then they had to scurry back to catch the first of three buses going the other way so they could be at work at KFC when their 5 to 8 pm workshift started. 

So they didn't know where to get off the bus, or what door to use, or how to find the return bus again. And this made the cranky #83 drivers even crankier. They didn't understand how we could all be so clueless. They, the drivers, knew every sealed crack in the asphalt parking lot at the Hospital and yet we, the foolish riders, didn't seem to know to go through a door clearly marked VISITORS.

  The double whammy of the Pizza Hut corner and the hospital entrance muddle set up the eternal battle of #83 driver versus #83 passenger. The drivers who took me east on North Broadway from Kroger toward indianola Avenue were already mad at me for being a human and being on their bus. So though I was unsure about whether this bus was going to bring me and my foodstuffs home, I didn't dare ask if this particular Weber Road bus was the one that turned right on Indianola. 

Sometimes, as a regular mass transit rider, you can tell from what the bus does that you are about to go where you don't want to g. You can pull the bell cord and hope your transfer is still good. But there was no way to tell on the Weber Road route that things had gone wonky until the bus didn't make the turn. If the bus didn't make the turn, I still had one chance to save myself -- if the light was red. The four-way stop had a traffic light where indianola went across, and there was an official stop half a block back. Drivers were only supposed to open the door at the stop, but even rule-enforcing drivers would let you off at the corner if the traffic light was red. 

If the driver  let me off at the red light, it was an imperfect solution as I was several blocks north of where I lived. It was a hassle to carry my groceries all the way south from East North Broadway down to my block, the one where the old movie theater was, but it was do-able.

 However, if the light was green, and the bus didn't turn onto Indianola, then I was doomed, because the next place the bus stopped was on the moon. The Weber Road bus hijacked me along the north edge of the Park-and-Ride super-duper parking lot, then down the sloped, patched pavement that goes under the dim, heavily-graffiti'd railroad underpass long enough to support multiple sets of train tracks, and then past a long grassy vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, past Panic Lighting (appropriately named as by this time I was indeed panicking, and THEN to Silver Drive, the access road running parallel to the &^$*@%! highway.  

My best option, from Lunar Base III, was to haul myself and my stuff south along the burm of the access road, and then if I made it, turn at Weber Road, stagger uphill and over the railroad tracks, then go up the alley and then up the other alley to my apartment building. I couldn't just go back the way the bus had brought me. Turning around to go back up the slope under the railroad underpass would mean a really, really long walk with right angles around fenced-off areas. 

So, when dumped out near the highway, I took a few minutes to distribute the weight of the groceries so I wouldn't be pulled down on one side by five pounds of red potatoes and four cans of Progresso soup.Then
I tied the handles of the grocery bags together more tightly and set off, trying to cheer myself by noticing that it was not raining, hailing, or snowing.

Added to my joy of living on one memorable day, I was wearing the wrong jeans. If I'd known I was going to get off a bus with two heavy bundles of canned goods In the Middle of Nowhere, I would have made another fashion choice. 

In the previous few months, stress had caused me to drop about twenty pounds. My blue jeans had become too big. I hadn't had time to go find better-fitting ones at Goodwill. Instead, I was notching my belt at the innermost hole to cinch my pants up. 

This is the point in my sorry tale in which I share the less-than-fascinating fact that one of my legs is about two inches longer than the other one. This little quirk causes my distinctive walk ("I looked out the car window and I knew it was you!") in which I slightly swing my right foot out in a small arc with each step on that side. Otherwise, the ball of my foot would bump into the ground as I stepped forward with my right leg. (If you've ever worn two different shoes with different heel heights, that's my life.) 

Normally this isn't a huge deal, but oddly, it's a major issue with finding pants which really fit. The leg-swing causes me to walk with a slight twisting motion like the agitator in a washing machine. This tends to drive the waistband of my pants down my torso. In daily life, it's a minor issue. When I walk from the car in the parking lot of a store or a restaurant, I stop right before we go in and I do a quick waistband alignment which makes me look less like someone who slept in her clothing the night before. 

Well, on the awful day that the bus overshot my street and I had to get off near the highway, I found that my usual walk, plus the too-loose pants and the interaction of my jacket hem and my jeans waistband, aided by the pull of the grocery bags at the ends of my arms, accelerated the twisted waistband isue.  This meant I had to stop about every hundred feet. I'd put down the grocery bundles, yank my belt up, pick up the bags and walk another hundred feet. Not many people drove along the access road, which was good since the burm disappeared in places where the grassy slopes were steep and I had to walk along the edge of the pavement. But I'm sure I was visible to dozens of drivers going toward downtown on I-71. If I'd had posterboard and a Sharpie in my Kroger bags, i would have made a sign that said 

                                 NOT HOMELESS
                                     JEANS TOO BIG + MISSED MY BUS STOP.

The worst part about the ordeal, really, was after I clambered over two sets of bumpy railroad tracks at the Weber Road crossing and made it up the alleys to my house. I put the grocery bags down inside the front entrance and went into the bathroom. I flicked on the light and saw myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. It was hard to look at myself. I looked totally exhausted, somewhat humiliated, and more than slightly crazed. My eyes suggested a combination of Aileen Wuornos having a bad day, Patty Duke as pill-addled Neely O'Hara talking to herself, and Susan Hayward as faded star Helen Lawson, gazing into a hall mirror as she realizes that youth and beauty are everything.

[By the way, if you're wondering why I didn't just spring for a taxi home from the grocery store once a month, the answer is that cabs wouldn't come to my neighborhood. There was no Uber or Lyft then and the drivers needed to make big money. All the empty cabs were idling along the curb, way off at the airport, in the hope of getting a $50+ fare. No one in a Yellow Cab was going to risk their spot in the  queue just to drive miles and miles west to Kroger on High Street and take me home for ten bucks.]

Having had this overshooting-the-stop experience once, I tried not to have it happen again. But I struggled alone. The bus drivers felt that I should know what time each bus that turned south on my street. But I had a lot of complex details to arrange. First, I had to plan the route so I only had to pay the fare once. My wicker bill basket always held a tidy stack of unpaid or partially-paid bills , envelopes covered with notations like "Paid $25. Pay $15 more on Friday." Or "One month past due. Must pay previous amount by the 13th. Call office?" So I squeezed every nickel and counted out pennies to drop into the fare box.

Two different bus lines went up and down my street. One of them went all the time and one went now and then. The one that went all the time was the Number 4. If I caught the 4 North, I could ride it to the corner of Morse and High, then use a free transfer to jump onto a Number 2 South on High Street and hop off at the public library, which had a great sculpture of an open book along the walkway to the entrance. 

If I had good luck, i could drop off the books I'd read, pick up my reserves, and dash back to High Street to take another  Number 2 South the rest of the way to Kroger. Each bus transfer stayed valid for two hours, so if the Bus Gods were with me, I could shop at Kroger for 45 minutes or so and deftly use my heavily-inked and bent transfer to get on a #83 home. One trip, one fare.

If I remember right, the correct #83 Weber Road bus took me up the street to my apartment if I caught it at the North Brodway stop at 3:17 or something close to that, and not again till maybe 5:45. I tried hard to remember that, but by the time I had hauled myself on and off three buses and picked up my library books, I still had to run around and shop quickly while choosing carefully. It was necessary to balance out the both the cost and the physical weight of my groceries. Cheap food is heavy food -- sacks of potatoes, big bags of rice, canned soup on sale three for a dollar. So I had to get as much as I could carry, but not more than I could carry.

The return bus from Kroger, even when it was the magic lucky bus which let me off near the dry cleaners across the street from my house, still had to be caught at the stop on the other side of North Broadway. 

The exit of the grocery store was catty-corner at the exact opposite end of the huge parking lot from where I needed to be. The parking lot was large, as steep as an Alpine slope and nearly as icy and treacherous as the Alps in he wintry months. 

Therefore, as I shopped, I had to keep looking into my cart, trying to decide if I was both getting top value for my very limited grocery-budget dollar and purchasing items I had a realistic chance of hauling uphill across the nearly-endless expanse of the Kroger lot and then across the crosswalk and then back down the sidewalk and over the hellstrip to the shelter.

Also, I I had to have bags that were well-managed and within my control so I could put them up on the bench or hold them till the bus came. That particular bus shelter was gross. Smoking and spilling were two of the least objectionable things bus passengers did at the ol' eastbound #83 stop.

During each grocery haul adventure, I was an off-hours bus rider. I was too busy to ride at peak commuter hours. First thing in the morning, I was at my old house, helping my daughter get ready for school. And then in the evenings, I worked, starting around dinnertime. So I did my bus traveling in mid-day. Mornings and evenings, the bus was crowded with commuters, all with earphones or books to distract them from the hubbub.The atmosphere was fairly calm, if unfriendly, but each bus was jammed with people who all wished the other people weren't on the bus with them. These people all had day jobs.

When I rode the bus during the day, my fellow travelers were almost always poor people. Some of them were on their way to social work, psychiatric, or medical appointments. Some were on their way to the food pantry, or to score some pills from a friend, or to look around for people causing trouble so they could join in. Some were going to the public library to spend the whole day reading books about the Civil War. And some were lonely or scared, or their houses were unheated, or they had no house, and they stayed on the bus as long as the driver would tolerate that.

Each big bus would seat 50 or 60 people, maybe more, but there were usually 5 or 6 people on the bus during the day. The bus company pretended they didn't know why ridership was so low. Through this ruse, they got grant money to install large blinking digital displays and efficiency time check GPS things to document that the bus was on time. Or would have been on time if it hadn't broken down on North Fourth across from the old Wonder Bread factory. At least we knew how late we were. 

The main reason I disliked the bus was not among the ones that kept away most potential riders. The buses were semi-dirty, often late, and filled with weirdos. But hey, I rode the Indiana Avenue bus into downtown Indianapolis circa 1972. Indiana Avenue was so rough. . .

How rough was it? . . .

. . . the legislature considered changing the street name because it reflected so badly on the entire Hoosier State. 

Once, a rock came flying through a window, scattering shards of glass onto some empty seats and the aisle. The bus driver said "Anyone hit?" and when we said no, the bus kept going.

Another time, the driver had someone in the back row shake a wino to wake him up and the man turned out to be not asleep, but dead. 

So these little issues with people in Columbus, Ohio telling me they wore a Walkman to drown out the voices they heard? Like riding in a %&$*%!# horse-drawn carriage with the Queen of England. 

So noise, dirt, craziness -- not really a problem for me. What I personally hated about taking the bus (besides being yelled at by mean drivers) was all the feelings I had while sitting on a bus bench and watching one rich person at a time, alone in a large car, drive right by me. The comfortable middle class drivers weren't bothering me or sneering at me; they didn't see me at all. But I saw them. In particular, I watched affluent young people, in Land Rovers outfitted with custom Eddie Bauer leather upholstery, whizzing along East North Broadway.



They'd driven east from the Henderson Road area and they held the steering wheel casually while they sipped from plastic Starbucks cups filled with $6 lattes. Just before they got near the bus shelter, they swerved without signaling into the left turn lane to go north on High Street. 

Off they went. Going shopping, going to hang out in someone's rec room, going to score pills from a better class of friend than the daytime bus riders' friends, or perhaps going to attend one afternoon class, say Marketing 202b, at a small local college. They never gave a thought to schedules or the expiration time on the back of a bus transfer. If any of these young people had gone to public school, then perhaps they'd ridden on a COTA bus once, during a field trip to the science museum when they wer ein fourth grade.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing like sitting on a metal bench when it's hot or cold, in a dirty outdoor bus shelter with smeary windows, to make one aware of class difference. I'd never really wanted to be rich, never wished I lived in a comfortable split-level with a large television in every room and full surround sound throughout the house. Honestly, I could look at a house that cost $450,000 and compare it to where I lived 00 in a two-bedroom dump with an old wooden stockade fence that was falling over-- and I liked my dump better.

But sitting in the hot sun or the cold wind, watching people, clean and comfortable, sipping coffee drinks that cost more than my food budget for the entire day, was supposed to make me feel "I wish I was them," and it did make me feel that. Wait, but no! I didn't wish I was them; I wished I had their stuff and their comforts. 

And right there we come to class war. Why does anone need to fund more studies on social unrest? It's not just that the haves have while I, as a have-not, don't. It's that the haves don't stay home and enjoy all the groovy stuff. It's not the stuff they want; its the chance to gather with other haves and compare and see what they might need to upgrade, and then it's the added joy of parading it in front of people who don't have the groovy stuff and will never have it.

I'll tell you what else -- driving around all day, buying things and showing them off to the poor people -- keeps one from thinking about what money does to people's lives. But sitting on a bus bench? It gives one time to think. Also the chance to commune with others in the same circumstance. Or not really the same circumstance, just the same method of coping.

On the bus, I met people who'd just been hit by the economic downturn. They were sure they'd get a job soon, get their vehicle repaired, and climb back up into the lwoer middle class. I met people who were caught in social work whirligigs, where they rode a bus from office to office to office, bringing one piece of paper to Office A from Office B, then going back with anothe form from Office B to Office A. Office A would have no record of the original form and the person would be going back to get a new copy. I met people who started drinking at 8 a.m. or maybe they never stopped drinking the night before. They would chuckle and taunt the police officers driving by, as they'd hidden the liquor bottle over by the trash can and the drunkard was sitting legally inside the bus shelter and the cop could do nada.

Everybody was getting by. Everybody was going where they needed to go. And so was I. 

These days, I am married again, and we drive to the grocery store (the cut-rate grocery, of course) in a car. But a handful of times I've carried three or four plastic grocery sacks from the store to our house, and the street's plenty uphill on the way back, believe me. Yet I've felt peaceful, if a bit fatigued, when I got home. 

And that's because everyone in Maine is old and poor. It's not just that there's no one to envy, but rather that there's no shame in being working class or even the next economic level down from working class. We have trees here, and lots of potatoes, and church rummage sales with perfectly good winter coats for $2 or whatever you've got in your pocket. That makes all the difference; it really does.  

*****

In the photo below, North Broadway is the road the bus is on and High Street is the one going across the intersection near the top of the picture.  A is where people want to get off the bus when going west on North Broadway. The former Pizza Hut is now a Starbuck's, of course. B marks where the people who can't get off the bus at A have to get off instead, and then they must run back to A, and try and cross the street without dying in the multiplexity of turn lanes. And C is the spot where one lugs their fourteen separagteKroger plastic shopping bags if one want to take them home. Smart bus commuters tie the handles of the bags together; otherwise tomatoes and cans of soup escape and roll down the center aisle of the bus toward the driver, as the hill is very steep at point C.