I took the Muni train to the ferry building one evening this week, to catch my boat home. We had the usual assortment of passengers, teenage students in too-tight or baggy clothes, straining to be as different from their parents as possible, a couple homeless people, unshaven, unkempt and often odoriferous, tattered clothes and conversing with the ghosts of friends, anxious tourist families with well-scrubbed children, sometimes tempted to stray about the car and explore signage until a parent calls “stay close!”, and commuters such as myself, black, Asian, Hispanic and white, all headed there, not here.
When they built Bay Area Rapid Transit, commonly called Bart, they tore up Market street, the main artery that runs southwest from the ferry building toward Twin Peaks, and they put two parallel train tracks under it, one on top of the other.
The deepest level is Bart, which continues on via the Bart Tube under SF Bay, and connects to the East Bay. Above that is the SF Municipal Railway, part of the City’s transit system of streetcars and buses. They share four stations during their run under Market street, but have separate entrypoints, so that if you are underground on one system you can see but not get to the other.
So I sat in the streetcar facing the front, aisle seat, and as we reached Powell street station, I noticed again how the door opens, sliding out next to the car so it’s glass window had a curious two-paned mirroring effect. Barely translucent, you could see out to the Muni platform, yet each departing person was reflected, so that as the portly Hispanic ladies shuffled out the door, two opposite ladies converged from the outside shuffling in, as the tattooed 20-somethings with baggy pants and bulging cleavage left I saw their doppelganger selves approach in the mirror and merge at the door, as the sweat-shirted, clean-jeaned tourist family glanced about, assured themselves this was their stop and hustled to the doorway they too collapsed into themselves, and as the homeless man with his bags and in his fatigues followed his opposing image approached and merged and he was gone, too. They all went off, all becoming themselves, never to be seen again.
I can’t help but think, sometimes, what connections we might have. I might have been a tourist in the town those Hispanic ladies came from, once. I could share musical tastes with that tourist Dad, or read the same writers as Mom, the 20-somethings probably go to clubs I once frequented in the City, and that homeless man and I may well have sat next to each other at a Giants game once, even sharing a laugh in ballpark camaraderie.
I once read something about the Ayatollah Khomeini I wish more westerners knew. You know the guy, you can picture the scowl as well as I can — it’s what we ever saw of him. Stern, patriarchal, the image of reproving fundamentalism.
I heard he loved to watch Roadrunner cartoons, and that’s how I try to picture him now, watching Wiley Coyote’s doomed failures in pursuit of the elusive bird (beep! beep!) the springs and contraptions and explosions, with the poor coyote looking to the screen and waving forlornly as he plunged into the abyss, or burnt to a crisp on the road as the bird zoomed up behind — beep! beep! — startling Wiley so bad he jumped and bonked his head into an overhanging rock.
The Ayatollah once laughed, too, at Wiley’s repeated assaults, the elaborate plans, the best efforts, the Sisyphean failures we recognize and laugh at so long as they are not our own, and all so familiar across our cultures.
When the Muni train pulls into the Embarcadero station, the last stop for many of them, they often line up at the entry way. So we wait to reach the passenger loading zone, and this is inevitably where some train suffers mechanical failure, so that the queued rest of us fume. We are in the station. Our platform is right outside the door, albeit not yet to the loading area.
We were once trapped for 10, 15 minutes, a fellow ferry passenger and I imploring the driver to let us out, we were going to miss our ferry, all to no avail. (I seriously considered opening the emergency window and crawling out.) So we caught the second ferry half an hour later, instead.
As we wait, just inside the station, we face the stairway and escalators traveling to Bart, beyond glass partitions. I stand in the doorway of our train, waiting to pull forward, facing the long escalators and stairs, descending from the station above, down to the BART platforms below.
The people travel in two lines. The type B personalities all step onto the escalator above and ride serenely down on the right side, in no hurry, while the type A personalities enter on the left side and walk down, jogging and jiggling, hurrying to queue, to catch their train, to get home.
And I watch them, from the Muni streetcar doorway, all descending, some hurrying, until my car lurches forward, and I am sprung, out to our escalator and the station and up to the street, through evening crowds of the Embarcadero plaza and the Ferry building, to the pier of my ferry.
If you could not distinguish the tourists from the commuters by dress (and you often can) you might still tell them apart by comportment. The tourists wandering, wide-eyed, soaking in the openness and the views and jabbing at their maps and books as they talk, while we are striding along, focused, headed home.
I tell myself that this time I will get on the ferry and go upstairs and enjoy the ride across the bay. I won’t get up early and stand by the door, waiting to get off at front and get to my car so I get out of the lot and to the intersection in time to catch the first green traffic light, rather than stuck waiting in another queue for that long red. This time I’ll sit up on the upper deck and look out the window at the receding city skyline and Mount Tamalpais in Marin, at Angel Island and Raccoon Straits and the lighthouse atop Alcatraz and the Bay Bridge. I’ll stay in my seat as we pass the huge container ships and cranes of the Port of Oakland, and join the queue after we dock.
My wife will wait, and our separation-anxious hounds, Ernie and Edie, can wait a little longer for their frantic, exuberant reunion celebrations. It doesn’t matter if I catch the 6:00 beginning of the Deutsche Welle report or the BBC world news. The ayatollahs will still scowl (we’ll never laugh at cartoons together), and I’ve got this boat ride to enjoy, if only I will.
But you know, I’m just the type, when I get on that escalator, to get in that type A personality left lane, rather than the type B right.
Trains are a never-ending source of amusement to me. I sit on the Metro, the fastest way to get across town, and look at the people around me, many similar to the archetypes you described. I wonder, What are they listening to on those MP3 players? Canto-pop? Beijing Punk? Bad, bubblegum American pop music? The tourists have that same glazed look about them, watching the digital map above the doors, telling each other how many stops are left. I guess some things are the same right across the globe.
This was a great post. Thank you.
It was a great post. Another one I want the whole freakin’ world to read.
You have a way of seeing things with a clarity that doesn’t take the reader to a far off perspective as is so common, but rather gives them that bird’s eye view, and then rolls them right into the picture.
Your post brought to mind an article a friend of mine wrote many years ago. An architectural critic and cultural commentator, he wrote about the increasing preponderance of skywalks in Canadian cities (specifically Edmonton and Calgary). Though these are designed so that pedestrians can avoid the winter the net result has been the creation of a class structure. Security guards keep the street people from dirtying the halls and those who are better heeled now avoid the streets. Even worse, the two “classes” no longer mingle. Ties in with Christopher Lasch’s books about the loss of democratic and uncommercialized public spaces.
Your post was about observing and interacting with other walks of life. It would have been so bloodless had it been about reflections at the club instead.
Thanks, all three of you.
Stevo, I wish I could trade commutes with you once or twice — I’d love to ride the Metro in China, just for a change.
Amuirin, you know, in re-reading, I always see little things I want to tweak! This time I thought: too big a jump to the Ayatollah; I’d connect that more, now, weave it in.
Steel, that makes complete sense. I never used the skyways in Minneapolis enough to notice anything liek that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Fifteen years ago I got talked into a vacation with friends in Palm Desert, CA, and the segregation was appalling. All of the workers, the restaurant workers and groundskeepers, etc., were Hispanic and 90% of the retirees were white people in country club clothes riding around in golf carts.
When I got home to SF I got on the bus in to work and it was the usual democratic mix — I was very happy to be home.
[...] Well, Doc is really thoughtful and wise, and so is this post, ‘Meeting our Doppelgangers‘ by Ombudsben. You’ll [...]