Photo: Wally Gobetz.
“Shoot,” I mutter, looking at the clock on my computer. It’s 4:30 p.m. in Oak Park, Illinois where I’ve just finished teaching, and that slates me for a 5:15 transfer to the Brown Line train in the Chicago Loop. Which means I won’t get a seat. Which means I’ll be shoved into a space more precariously crammed than my closet. Which means that I will be practically hugging about five other commuters for 20 minutes, saying “sorry” at least a half-dozen times as I lurch into them on our journey. I often wonder why people willingly submit to conditions that might otherwise be a human rights violation.
I guess you’d have to be a sicko to say you liked being so close to other people, but I do have to wonder why I find it quite so obnoxious and awkward. I mean, on other occasions, wouldn’t I claim that I love my fellow humans? Don’t I celebrate the faith that claims God became a human not too different than the guy chewing gum in my ear? Public transportation has a way of making the abstract concrete.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the CTA is the United States’ second largest web of public transit. Each day, says the Tribune, the CTA gives 1.6 million rides – 500,000 on the trains alone. A crowded train car in this system is kind of like a laboratory. Throw something interesting into the mix – say, a pigeon flapping around inside a train car – and you can marvel at the individuality of each person’s response.
In three years of regularly riding Chicago Transit Authority trains, I’ve learned that the CTA can illuminate a lot about human nature. I’ve learned that people will give a fifty dollar bill to a stranger if he has a slab of wood, three cups, and one pea.I’ve learned that different colored plastic prayer cloths are purportedly good for different kinds of illness.But sometimes this clunking laboratory of human experience teaches bigger lessons.
Contentment is Transferable
It was an early morning, and I opened the station door for a man with crutches and one leg, walked beside him on the stairs, lost track of where he was, and then ended up boarding the same car. I sat diagonally across from him while he stacked his crutches on the seat beside him. He placed a plastic cooler on the floor by his one foot. I smiled at this man in his paint-splattered sweatshirt, a smile both wistful and bumbling.
He smiled back at me.”It’s hard having three legs,” he told me. I laughed, and smiled some more. The message was clear: he didn’t have less than me, he had more.For the rest of the day, I kept remembering the short, black-haired man with his lunchbox by his foot and his crutches on the seat, and it was like somehow his words had multiplied the things I had: I felt like I had more of the things I loved, more appreciation for my home, more love to give my friends.
During the months surrounding that encounter, my morning rush-hour commute would frequently land me on “The Blessed Train” – a Red Line run operated by a cheery driver many Chicagoans appreciate. “Good morning,” he would say. “All aboard the Blessed Train. The Blessed Train is the best train.”He had a hearty voice that boomed over the speakers, and his appreciation of his work let me recalibrate.It became the omen of a good day ahead.
Photo: Lee Bey
“Bad” Trains Offer Impromptu Community
I’ve moved since then, and instead of the Blessed Train, I ride the Green Line, a line of track with a bad reputation. The second time I rode the Green Line, a friend told me a girl had been stabbed right on the train.Also, the Green Line is not the site of the only CTA disaster, but its operator had one of the most outrageous responses. When a Green Line derailed last year, the operator ordered everyone to stand on one side of the cars so the train wouldn’t plunge off the elevated track. Despite the dangers and past catastrophes, the Green Line is one of my favorite to ride (in the daytime).
The thing is, people talk to each other on the “bad” trains, and ignore each other on the “good” trains (like the Brown Line, which runs northwest from the loop through wealthier neighborhoods). For instance, a few months ago I was reading Gregory Wolfe’s The New Religious Humanists just as the Green Line rolled away from the station, and someone asked me, “Hey, is that a good book?” Then it was, “Where’d you get that?” which eventually led to another scrutiny of the title and the sigh, “Man, I should get myself to church.”
This brief exchange did not pressure me to keep talking; it was merely a pleasant way for both of us to begin the trek home. When people talk to me on the Green Line, the feeling is not that someone is flirting, or getting ready to follow me home, or scam me (okay, well, except for the guy hawking prayer-cloths). Instead, the feeling is that, by boarding this train, I am now part of an impromptu community.
We Aren’t Easily Threatened
It’s the mantra of CTA riding: “If you see someone acting suspiciously, please inform CTA personnel immediately.” The thing is, if we took that mantra seriously, we’d be on the intercom every five minutes or so. There’s always someone talking to himself in the corner, or looking protective of some oddly-shaped package, or glaring at us unnervingly. But I was amazed the other day at just how much suspicious or even aggressive behavior people will witness unperturbed.
I was riding the Brown Line (that’s right – the “safe” one), and from my vantage point it looked as though someone was lying down in the aisle. I could only see the tips of battered white sneakers sticking out from behind the metal dividers by the doors. I whispered to the guy next to me, “Is that person okay?”
“I think so,” he responded, no doubt pegging me as a tourist, “though you never know with people these days.”
When I leaned over to look more closely, I knew why he wasn’t as concerned as I was.The man wasn’t lying in the aisle. He was just sitting on the floor with his back against one of the dividers. Odd enough, though. He stayed like this for a few minutes, mumbling to himself, then hiked himself up and paced the aisles, glaring at everyone and still muttering.His eyes were sinister and his hair was wild.He paced right out one of the emergency doors and stood between the cars, wild hair blowing, like he was on the boardwalk enjoying the ocean breeze. After a few minutes, he came back to my car and continued pacing. As we neared the Loop, I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion. The guy had taken out an Aquafina bottle and was slamming it against the divider, muttering louder and looking at us like we had all been his tormentors since childhood.
To me, what was even stranger than this guy’s behavior was that every passenger but me seemed oblivious. They kept reading. They kept their earbuds in. They hardly glanced at this guy or each other. As for me, I decided I wasn’t going to wait for the guy’s next move, so I followed another CTA mantra: “Move to the next car if your immediate safety is threatened.”
Reflecting on it, I suppose the passengers’ response wasn’t abnormal. It’s already taken a whole lot of trust just to live in a city, because, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a city is a place where strangers live very close together, most of them bargaining not to hurt each other. Urban existence means that we have given each other a generous dose of trust. It’s not the sort of trust where we’re making eye-contact and talking to each other all the time, but it’s the kind of trust that it takes to have the same entryway key as five other strangers, or where we’re hopping into a vehicle a stranger (be it a cab driver, bus driver, or train operator) is driving. In some cases, though, maybe this daily trust means our danger sensors are corroded.
CTA Stories
Another thing I’ve noticed in my three years here is that Chicagoans love CTA stories. When the RedEye version of the Tribune has a column about the CTA, emails to the editor pour in.The Decider section of The Onion ran a series on what it’s like to ride certain lines of the CTA round trip. There are whole blogs dedicated to sightings on the CTA and rants about it.
Whether ranting or celebrating, chances are that part of the draw of public transit stories is that there are unusual things to be learned about human nature when we’re all crammed together. The quirks, threats, or homilies in motion that we notice on the train are merely the quick emergence of a million stories of the people riding packed together above Chicago.