We’re On a Ride to Somewhere

Let’s Take that Ride

I can’t remember the first time I took public transportation on my own. I think mostly because I was really young. My parents weren’t ones to go out of their way to give me and my brother rides anywhere and shuttle me around town. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

It was most often up to me, alone, to figure out how I was going to get from Point A to Point B. Even when a friend called me up to see if I could play on a weekend, you ask?!?Absolutely. It went something like this: “Here’s the schedule for No. 7, Jay. You can use some of the coins scattered around the bottom of the drawer to pay the bus fare. If you need to take BART (the subway), you can pay for it with your allowance.”

Despite many misgivings and frustrations over the years about their lack of help in this arena and me being on my own in figuring it all out, it did give me a great sense of independence and confidence in my ability to navigate through a strange new world only a few miles away from home.

Equally important, such early lessons in travel taught me that it’s a great way to integrate with society, one’s city or town, and even one’s own neighborhood. You see, it seems that my parents weren’t the only ones who did this in the Berkeley of my youth. My friends not only lived just down the block from me, but also a few bus stops away and some even way up at the very end of the line where some very close family friends lived.

As is not uncommon with early childhood memories, I don’t remember where I met one of my closest childhood friends, Ezra. He lived only one bus stop up the road from where I got off. Did we meet on the public city bus? Or was it on one of the many school buses that I rode throughout my youngest years that followed the same route? Who knows? My best guess is that he also rode School Bus 27 to get home everyday, all back in the day when parents weren’t tasked with dropping off and picking up their kids from school.

I also clearly remember, as an older kid, making new friends on the bus ride home from summer camp. All roughly the same age as me and rowdy as hell from the unbridled joy of being on summer break, the bus driver and other passengers must have despised being on the bus with us. No matter! All that was important was to keep all the laughing, joking, teasing, poking and prodding from coming to a screeching halt between the dozen or so stops between camp and home. There was no better cement mix than that.

To this day, I thoroughly enjoy riding public transportation when traveling. Though my current hometown has a horribly sparse public transportation network, when I’m out on the road in another place, I constantly seek it out. Yes, we’ve also had many vacations where we’ve booked a rental car and lived life that way. Some destinations aren’t practical to negotiate any other way. And with kids, it’s often the only thing to do that makes sense.

But for other places, what we’ve found is that being in a private car really insulates us from the real world churning around us. It significantly reduces the number of people we can randomly strike up great conversations with.

Alternatively, taking public transportation is one of the great equalizers. You get to see, hear, and be with people from all walks of life. Perhaps there’s no better way to start to gain an understanding about how other people really live in another culture than to jump on a bus, subway, train, boat, or other public form of transportation that’s made inexpensively available to the masses at large.

I’ve met some wonderful people in the world this way, some of whom I will maintain contact with for the long term. Many others interactions, though as fleeting as they’ve been, have simply led to short but wonderful memorable conversations, some of which have become huge highlights of the trip itself.

Like my Tawainese friend, Ming, who I impossibly sat right next to on a train in Tokyo, Japan. We instantly bonded as he disclosed that he had just broken up with his Japanese girlfriend moments ago. My friend, Stan, who I met on a public bus ride up to a castle atop a hill in Koblenz, Germany, ended up being a great traveling companion on what would have been a solo trip through Germany and Austria. There was Crazy Sal who I met on a public city bus in my own hometown of Berkeley, California. And Nora from the trail outside of Lucerne, Switzerland (if one can stretch the definition of a trail to be seen as a form of public transportation, free for all to use). There have been countless, and often nameless, other people in other circumstances that I hope to never forget.

Back to my youth, I now give much thanks to my parents. These mini expeditions into the real world were important lessons for us youngsters to understand that the highlights of life are the actual tangible people that are standing or sitting right next to you. It’s not the ultimate destination that matters, or the sights that you see along the way, and it’s certainly not all those pictures we take and posts we make that end up making lasting impressions. It’s the people.

It’s all so incredibly simple, easy, and it costs barely anything to gain all the richly rewarding experiences of meeting, talking with, and getting to know another human being. It’s such a cheap and elegant tool that we all have at our disposal as we travel locally or abroad. You already own everything you need to make it happen - just yourself and some small change for fare.

Amazingly enough, it’s the people that you meet at the bus stop who you may remember the rest of your life and who can and often will enrich your soul beyond anything you thought possible.

This post, written hastily today while on the road, is dedicated to one of most cherished childhood friends, John Chachere. I learned this morning that he passed away earlier this week. I learned this news from my friend, Ezra (mentioned above, pseudonym used as customary in my posts) . I met “Chachere,” as we all called him, while the two of us were waiting for the public bus to arrive at a bus stop in downtown Berkeley right after high school got out. Chachere was a one-of-a-kind individual that I consider myself lucky to have met and known. Our friendship made a lasting impression and our times together were unforgettable and quite formative for the person I am today. May you rest in peace, my old friend.