A Bostonian Commute
In the morning when I leave, this time of year, the sun has almost risen, the sky colored cotton candy pink and blue. The air is cool and I walk with my hands in the deep pockets of my jacket, but it’s nice to step into the fresh winter.
At the bus stop, I shuffle my feet, looking to the left to scout the bus’ approach. When it arrives, I walk to my favorite seat at the back right of the bus, where I like to get a window seat just behind the wheel cap, so I can prop my legs up on the rise in the floor. The bus is always quite clean, defying my preconceived notion of city buses. The seats are a bright royal blue plastic, and the poles a bright yellow, giving it an overall very cheerful vibe.
The bus pulls away from Sycamore St and we whisk toward the city, beating much of the traffic, stopping at cross streets, passing the hospital, pausing outside the bakery, before entering the underground.
Then it’s onto the T I go, all the way to the end of the platform, where I am perfectly positioned for drop-off at my stop. I pass a homeless person under a blanket lying on the platform benches, bags of returnable cans beside them.
On the T, it’s quiet, everyone in morning mode on their phone, reading books, or listening to whatever is playing on their headphones.
Stop after stop is punctuated by dark tunnels: Harvard — Central — Kendall/MIT, until we approach Charles/MGH and crest upward, crossing over the river. In the warmer months, there are scullers rowing and sailboats out on the water, but now most boats are wrapped in protective white. The buildings on the banks of the river stand majestic, shining in the bright daylight. I try to look up from whatever it is I’m doing when we cross the Charles, and I’ve noticed that I’m not the only one. Soon, we’re back underground. Park Street — Downtown Crossing — South Station. Most passengers have exited by now, and the train feels quiet, almost peaceful. One more stop to Broadway and I exit, too. Up two sets of stairs, I arrive at street level.
Most days of late, I head down Dorchester St. It’s not a particularly nice walk — a journey down a glass-, nip-, and cigarette-strewn main drag — but it’s faster by five minutes. After a few street crossings is the route’s one bright spot: passing the 24-hour sub and doughnut shop, which smells like fried dough and always has a police car or three outside, so you know it’s good. (I’ve had a doughnut from the shop and can confirm their quality.) After the doughnut shop comes the bridge over the highway overpass, featuring a narrow sidewalk framed on one side by a wall and a foot-and-a-half-wide pipe, and a five-inch-wide, five-inch-tall strip of concrete. This is followed by an even narrower walkway between a tarp-covered chain-link fence and a row of cement blocks. I’ve often wondered whether these are temporary walkways, but in my 16 months working in South Boston they’ve never changed aside from the occasional replacement of the fence’s tarp when it becomes too tattered.
The longer option is a walk down West Broadway, somewhat nicer (especially in the sun). It’s a good route for watching people walk their dogs (and I have to laugh because almost every time I see a dog pooping in one of the sparse patches of grass), and the location of the annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade. For weeks last March, the sidewalk was littered with green, orange, and white streamer confetti and beads, along with a mind-blowing number of empty bottles of liquor. From West Broadway, I cut over to B street and pass a Boston Housing Authority neighborhood packed with cars parallel parked so close to one another, I wonder how they get out.
Both routes converge at the head of Old Colony Ave, the corner where the brewery and bistro sit just in front of my office. I pass them and head in and up to the second floor. It’s 8:00.
In the summer, often I’d emerge from the office at lunchtime for a walk in the warmth. On these meanders, I found a mulberry tree, some advantageous purslane, and quite a few resilient burdock plants. In the winter, however, rarely am I compelled to leave the office for a break, though I know it would be good for me, and so I stay on the second floor, my only connection to the outdoors my frequent glances out the office windows, until I pack my bag after 4:00.
It’s early enough that there’s still light in the sky, and sometimes I catch the sunset as I walk back to the T. As I pass people on the highway overpass, one of us walks balance-beam style on the barrier across from the pipe or steps into the road for a brief moment to let the other pass. I carry on up the sidewalk, where once I saw a lone goose and another time a small rabbit, across intersections, and back into the underground, again to the end of the T platform, where I’ll be closest to the exit at Harvard Station. The T comes and I step on.
When we cross the Charles again, the sky has for months been dark. The lights in the windows of the tall buildings by the river shine gold in contrast. Only in the last week have the days lengthened such that it’s light as we cross the river.
Once we get to Harvard, I hustle to the underground bus station, past a group of Girl Scouts selling cookies and a wave of people doing the reverse of me, exiting a bus to get onto the subway. I pick up the pace as I reach the ramp up to the busses, a usually needless attempt to avoid my least favorite thing: arriving just as a 73 bus is pulling away.
The buses in the evening tend not to be reliable, but I’ve found that before 5:15 is better than after, when I’ve had to wait twenty-five minutes for a bus despite the schedule declaring the arrival of two in that timeframe. I pull out my phone or book and wait until the 73 arrives, then get aboard with the rest of the crowd waiting to return home, swiping my pass and heading toward the back if I’m lucky enough to snag a seat.
The bus exits the station into Harvard Square, which at this time of the evening is bustling. We pass trees lit with warm yellow-white Christmas lights and the place where in October stood a skeleton in a Hawaiian shirt. Then we head out of the city and toward home.
One recent day, it was snowing as I rode the bus home, which was especially welcome, what with the incredibly rainy winter we’ve had. I happened to glance to my right into the aisle to see what I thought were snowflakes falling. I looked up. The hatch on the roof was cracked open, and snowflakes were drifting down inside the bus. It was an unexpected bit of magic that was incongruent with being aboard public transportation.
As we pass each stop on the bus ride home — School St, Cushing Square, Slade St, more and more passengers exit, thanking the driver, and traffic gets lighter and lighter. Waverley St is the second-to-last stop, and when we approach I press the button on one of the bus’ poles to request a stop. I exit and round the corner, cross the street when I can, and arrive home. It’s dark inside, but warm. My slippers await me at the door.