“What a long strange trip it’s been”
Robert Hunter of The Grateful Dead might not have had commuting in mind when he penned the now iconic Truckin,” but for many, the lyric applies aptly to their daily roundtrip journey. I know it did for mine.
Call me a New Yorker. Despite having lived in Connecticut for more than a quarter of a decade, and having had brief affairs with other cities like Los Angeles and Washington D.C., I have more than earned that title. I began in the Bronx, spent formative years in Queens, commuted through Staten Island, worked in Brooklyn, and lived in Manhattan.
The Staten Island/Brooklyn elements came about because my dream school, Middlebury College in Vermont, accepted me for admissions, but only for the start of the second term: hence the moniker “February Freshman,” or for the cognoscenti and members of the 90-strong group, “Febs.” That left me still living with my parents while much of my high school cohort relocated to their college dorms. I had to fill the time, and my coffers with spending money. These were the days before the vaunted “Gap Year,” or in my case, “Gap Semester.” No far-flung trips to exotic places to learn some esoteric skill or save some esoteric species for me. No, I shipped off, literally, to the arguably exotic-in-its-own-right downtown Brooklyn to work at Sight ‘N Style, my Uncle Martin’s optical shop. It sat at the prime real estate corner of Fulton and Jay Streets, near the now defunct A&S Department Store and the courts. I reveled in a street scene and clientele way more diverse than that of the high school and town (Westfield, NJ) from which I hailed.
Fluent in Spanish from having studied it since third grade and cemented it with a summer in Madrid at age 16, my uncle designated me as translator. It delighted me, with my Mediterranean coloring and apparently adequate accent, when customers mistook me for a native Latina. That stint in Brooklyn proved as educational as any trip to the Sorbonne (where my soon-to-be roommate was whiling away her fall semester) might, albeit in glaringly different ways.
From learning the rudimentaries of optical refraction and eyeglass composition and fitting, to seeing a side of life the suburbs simply did not afford, the experience broadened my lens on life. But one aspect in particular from that episode of my young adulthood left an especially strong impression on me: the commute.
My mother had already worked with her brother, first at the Sight ‘N Style on Fifth at 35th, and now in Brooklyn. She had pioneered the complicated and circuitous commute route like a modern-day Ulysses might: we hitched a ride with several men who also lived in Westfield and worked at a satellite office of Metropolitan Life that my father had established in Staten Island to administer the Group Universal Life policies that he’d developed. Although he’d since been promoted and relocated back to the mothership at 23rd Street near Madison Square Park opposite the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, this group still made the pilgrimage to the stepsister of a borough daily. They picked us up at an hour so early to offend any normal teenager and dropped us at the St. George Ferry terminal where we’d ride to Manhattan. From there we walked to catch the subway to Court Street, Brooklyn. On a good day, the one-way trip took around 2 ½ hours.
We’d stop at the deli next door where the owner Joe would toast us and generously butter hard rolls, and pour us our morning not-too-light coffees in the iconic blue and white Greek-key design take out cups before we worked until 3 PM, and then did the whole thing in reverse.
This particular commute was rather long, complicated, and arduous, bringing to mind John Candy and Steve Martin’s escapades in the 1987 Trains, Planes, and Automobiles. So many, though, share similar experiences. Maybe less so since Covid-19 ushered out the commuting routine that Sting describes of “back like lemmings into shiny metal boxes” (Synchronicity II, Gordon Sumner), but nevertheless, the commute as a common practice of modern society has such a specific connotation as to have become a trope.
While some must grow numb to the movement and milieu, my age, transience, and desire to move on made me hyper aware of the process.
The Car
I cannot remember it precisely, but I see it in my mind as a nondescript, beige Dodge Polaris, maybe with a half vinyl roof - we were cramped and sweaty in an unconditioned summer torport. The vinyl seats crackled under our weight and did nothing to dissipate the heat. My mother and I sat in the back in a position of deference, I on the “hump,” in complete surrender. The men: Jimmy, Ronny, and Charlie - all “-ies,” donned unbreathing polyester white or ecru short sleeve work shirts and skinny ties and crewcuts. One wore thick, black, Rayban Wayfarer-like glasses.
No one smoked in the car but they all smelled of smoke. It was an awkward ride given the tacit terms of our transportation arrangement: My father was their boss, and so they were somewhat obliged to ferry us to the ferry and back; we were, though, indebted to them for doing so. I felt sure they resented having to pick up the boss’s wife and daughter (even though my parents did socialize with them and their wives), but they never let on. In fact they chatted amiably as if we were invisible and deaf, like my children did when I carpooled them around with their friends. About the game, about work, and sometimes about those wives - and not always in glowing terms.
The Ferry
Slews of Staten Islanders (tourists cruised midday not early morning and late afternoon) queued and shuffled like lambs to the slaughter: tired and not looking forward to their day’s work, we made our way to wooden, pew-like benches, for commuting not communion. Passengers rarely even looked out the windows during the 25-minute crossing, despite the majestic vistas at our disposal: the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Twin Towers dominating the skyline. They sipped coffee in the morning, and beer in brown paper bags on the way back. The small, grimy snack bar did a steady business, the air redolent with odor of overcooked hotdogs rotating helplessly on the roller grill. It was a marine metal food cart with typical New York City snack offerings: popcorn stale in the salt air, gigantic “soft” pretzels that were, in fact, themselves hardened from the commute, Coca-Cola.
The captain docked the big school-bus-yellow vessels with a surgeon’s precision, only occasionally caroming off the big rubber bumpers protecting the pier like a big golden pinball. I wonder now, what Pete Davidson and Colin Jost will do with the decommissioned one they recently bought for $280,000. The ferry ferries 12 million passengers a year, 24/7, for free, every day, and has done so since 1905. In retrospect, I’m glad to have participated in this iconic NYC ritual for eight months.
The Subway
Awake by now, we all moved with an urgency that didn’t exist at the outset. We collectively wanted to get to our desks, seats, or counters on time. Those of us heading to the subterranean bit of our sojourn did decidedly not want to hear a train roar out of the station just as we descended into the miasma of the summertime second circle of hell that was the NYC subway. The heat and humidity amplified by the cavernous downtown skyscrapers only compressed and densified below the city streets. Now extinct tokens that we bought in rolls in advance granted us access to the underground tracks; savvy riders would not waste the time to purchase single tokens.
Subway riders doubled down on the no-eye-contact-no-conversation protocol, more out of a desire to maintain peace and avoid provocation than the ferry-goers exhausted ennui. In those pre-cell phone days we had fewer distractions. Some folded newspapers with the finesse of an origami artist to avoid smacking their neighbors with the New York Times or the Post, their fingers temporarily tattooed black from the transferrable ink.
Fortunately, this was the shortest leg of our journey, and trains ran in both directions frequently and with little service disruption. We boarded just after and just before morning and afternoon rush hours, respectively, so we usually got seats and huddled together for safety in the number two.
Commuting
Commute derives from the Latin commutare, which means to change often or completely (Etymonline). Changing venues, changing from a friend or family member to a coworker, changing from doing something enjoyable to something exigent. The commute itself changes us: I returned home so exhausted that all I could do was eat dinner and plop down to watch Charlie’s Angels or Rhoda. I couldn’t read a book. I understood why my father had two fingers of Scotch over ice every night. And this was just temporary, and I was young. Those that I know who have commuted for their entire careers have paid dearly: with time lost with their family and with physical ailments inflicted by years of tortuous train seats.
No commute I ever made again (even the dreaded and legendary Los Angeles freeways) compared to this one in time, effort, and the literal and figurative tolls it took. It was impossible, then, to know how technology and a plague would facilitate work from home, and hence quality of life. We couldn’t have done the work we did from home, as so many cannot. And I know some people appreciate the time between work and home to transition from one mode to the other. I look back on that odyssey of a commute with mixed emotions of revulsion and appreciation. Like any challenge, it had its benefits: time spent with my mother, exposure to oddities I’d never see in suburban NJ or bucolic VT, and an appreciation for the academic adventure on which I was to embark.