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PrintCOTA's Daydream express
On a recent cold spring morning, I took a COTA bus for the first time in years. I’d ridden my mountain bike to a repair shop in Clintonville and needed return transportation from civilization back to campus.
It was a very interesting ride.
First, it was safe. I wasn’t a vulnerable little pedalist on a 50-pound bike dependent on the tender mercies of motorists who may or may not want to share the road.
Second, it felt good. Smooth and airy, you glide along quickly like a giant magic carpet. No fuss, no muss and you don’t feel bumps. Lulling and nice.
Call it the Daydream Express.
Looking through the windows you just want to zone out in a public-transpo trance of passing urban/
suburban scenery. It’s a state of organically induced mellow consciousness and entirely legal. COTA marketing department, take note.
But, of course, the real deal is your fellow travelers. These folks have traveled their entire lives to ride with you for however short a duration of time (to paraphrase Javier Bardem on the life-or-death coin tosses in No Country For Old Men). We were all coins in the same cosmic pocket called The North High No. 2.
You have your students, your downtown workers, your suburbanites heading into the city and miscellaneous easy riders sharing a common carbon footprint. You’ve got a moon-drugged Gothie, headphoned and iPodded, of course, next to your bank worker, dressed for success—headphoned and iPodded, too. Next to them was the woman who still wore winter on her face—weary, very weary. Sitting across from me was a sorority girl dressed in matching black miniskirt, heels and hosiery, looking as if she were on her way to a job as a cocktail waitress instead of class like her armload of books suggested.
A few blood-plasma donor types rounded out the small collection that grew a bit stop by stop. Not exactly the Star Wars bar scene clientele on wheels, but predictably unpredictable.
The most interesting character was the Sketcher, a serious-looking bespectacled youth with dirty bangs and bohemian countenance. I presumed he was intently drawing those around him, judging by how he would look up furtively several times per minute and then furiously scribble with a heavy art school pencil on a medium-sized pad.
I found myself watching him observing and interpreting those around him, or at least reproducing them, with a concentration bordering on migraine-inducing. Intense. Which only whetted my appetite to see how our fellow travelers were faring in his artistic mind. I was so engrossed in his preoccupation I became aware that I’d been unaware of time. I chuckled to myself and thought: Who’s being strange here? We were at Hudson and High already.
An original hippie with a cane limped on, followed by a twitchy-faced dude. Fine candidates for sketching, I thought, though the Sketcher didn’t look up. I was annoyed, especially since the Wavy Gravy fellow seemed like such a visual delight.
I found myself lifting my head, hoping to catch a reflection in the glass behind him of who or what he was drawing. But no go. What a busybody! I even got up early for my stop at East 15th Avenue and stood in front of him. His pad was in his lap, sketches facedown.
I was dying for a look, but I left the bus without a glimpse. I’ll never know. The bus, as big as a C-130, gently hissed away.
Roll on, No. 2, roll on.
