WP#1 Hey Mr. Driver Man, Don't Be Slow

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon at the bus stop. The kind of afternoon that made you regrets getting on a bus. The green grass and blue sky had all the vivid color of a six year old's rendition of a landscape using a Crayola eight pack. As I sat there listening to all the cars roll by on the surprisingly busy street I noticed a common theme. Everyone was in Red. It was game day in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most people just had red accents to their clothes, some had full blown costumes as they sat at a stoplight with their red clown wigs and face paint, others strolled down the street with their red beads shinning and their Cornhusker t-shirts identical to the one tightly stuffed onto their dog. When the bus finally arrived it was not the packed crowd I thought it would be. There were a couple of young looking guys wearing husker apparel sitting close to the driver, a woman who looked like she was well into her sixties wearing a red blouse sitting opposite of the guys, and an older Hispanic woman with her daughter who was no more than eight.

These people seem to be the only ones aware of the terrible traffic and complete lack of parking spaces that would befall any who chose to drive downtown to watch the football game whether at a bar, restaurant, or the Stadium itself. “Don’t go downtown on Saturdays. Just don’t do it” had been uttered to me hundreds of times it seemed since my arrival in Lincoln a little more than a year ago. Not only that, but I’d been told by teachers in classes, not to drive down to the game, “take a bus, it’ll save you money, it’ll save you time finding a parking spot, and it’ll save the environment!” This seemed like sound advice to me. And as such I expected there to be a crowd huddling together in the aisles waiting until they got as close as they could to their final football watching destination.

But the bus was all but empty. The plastic seats covered in upholstery that seemed to be taken from the carpeting from a great many elevators were largely unoccupied. I looked from the back of the bus where I was sitting at the graffiti the decorated the bus windows. Little more than scratches hardly visible unless you were sitting at the window seats initials were carved into the plastic covering of the windows. Some symbols which only a college-oriented eye would immediately recognize as Greek letters for what was probably a frat (though, it could have been a sorority, it is the twenty first century). A couple of the etchings were grammatically incorrect declarations of how much “ass” the cornhuskers “stomp”. They reminded me of the universality of public transit vandalism. Back home in Milwaukee I never had a car, and if I couldn’t bike or bum a ride, the Milwaukee County Transit System was a frequent hangout of mine. They were littered with marks from keys, razor blades, and permanent markers proclaiming things largely unintelligible, making the back windows all but opaque. When I moved to Chicago this summer The Elevated Trains (More concisely referred to as Ls) were covered in graffiti, stickers, posters illegally taped, and all manner of other lasting impressions left by those who had commuted. The bus I was riding on today, while it did have some of the aforementioned familiarities, seemed like it would be in the “Gently Used” sections in the metaphorical Bus System Bazaar.

The people on the bus seemed familiar as well. The guys, talking quietly about college football and people they knew having varying relations with each other, seemed well practiced at taking the bus to the game. The slight slur in their speech patterns told me they had already engaged in a pregame ritual of downing large amounts of cheap alcohol before having to buy beer at the stadium or bar where they’d watch the seemingly all consuming game. The old woman on the other hand hadn’t the faintest hint of the Husker fanaticism that permeated the streets save the crimson blouse covered by a white knit shawl. She sat hardly moving straight ahead out the front window. There was a cold focus on the slightly inebriated boys sitting next to her was vaguely apparent to me sitting as far back as I was. She made no more than two glances at them which were short and out of the corner of her eye, barely moving her head. The Hispanic woman was sitting similarly to the old lady, but instead of watching the boys, when not looking out the front, she directed her attention at her daughter. Young, wild haired, and wearing a pink Dora the Explorer shirt with a little brown stain on the sleeve, the girl stared out the window to her side watching intently as the world flew by her. Speaking in Spanish, a language in which I claim no fluency, the girl seemed to ask her mother all sorts of questions. Her mother responded with short answers that only briefly satisfied the girl until she could think of something else to say. All the while the mother affectionately stroked the girls back, who was frequently standing on the seat with her face pressed to the largely unscratched plastic windows. They too seemed utterly unaware of the husker game that was the majority of the culture on Saturday afternoons.

I watched as the people, one by one got off as we approached downtown, all with that look of direction. Some more stressed with the crowd they were stepping into, others reveling in it. Living on campus means that I don’t have to leave often. If I want food, there’s the rot, if I want coffee, there’s a coffee shop right across the street, all my friends in town live close enough that a ten-minute walk will bring me to their door. It was nice to see a different world, a different culture that reminded me so much of the way my life was pre-college, and, hopefully, would be where ever I go.