The City Commute

Some basic rules of weapons training are to make the weapon an extension of yourself, and know where it is and what it’s doing at all times. This sort of training should be mandatory for anybody navigating New York City.

I have two modes of carrying my bag. For subway navigation, I hold it at my side, so it takes up the minimum amount of radial space, and so I can quickly move it in front of or behind me when the available corridors of motion start to constrict.

Once I’m at street level, if the foot traffic isn’t two dense, it goes over my shoulder, which is comfortable, but requires being aware that my shoulder is now extruding eight inches farther behind me and three or four inches farther to my right. This may seem a small amount, but navigation in the commercial districts of Manhattan during the day is often a matter of inches. A sudden twist of my torso could knock a fellow commuter to the ground, so I have to account for this extended space consumption when calculating safe turns and passages.

Most people fail to expand their kinetic awareness when encumbered with even their daily baggage. This is most often demonstrated by the standing spin, wherein a person with a bag of some kind is talking to someone, then suddenly needs to look in another direction, so they do a full turn and manage to block an entire sidewalk, often hitting a passerby with their bag in the process. The spinner simply doesn’t understand that they are consuming the space outside their body.

You are what carry.

It’s not hard to forget that my morning tends to begin after much of the workforce has already taken its first break. The crush of the 9 to 5 office workers that comprises rush hour comes after the slower, more staggered commutes of the people who provide the maintain the infrastructure and provide the services that support the businesses full of people who shuffle data and imaginary money.

The city that never sleeps stirs groggily from its half-conscious night dreaming at around five in the morning, downs its coffee, and is hard at work by 8:30. The morning that I and most people with my kind of job deal with is a rushed invasion of already bustling commercial space that most of us unconsciously assume just magically appears at 8:45.

Commuting at seven to a 9 to 5 job is a calmer experience. Because the noise hasn’t hit its stride, the engines revving and gates screeching seem starker, and more in focus against the quiet. Because the sidewalk population is still far below critical density, commuters walk calmly, and seem possessed of purpose and determination instead of fear and calculation. The people awake and serving coffee seem happier than anybody drinking it. I expect this is partly because it takes a certain kind of person to wake up at sunrise, and partly because that’s better for your body clock anyway. Once, long ago, I made a point of having a couple hours to myself before going to work, and enjoyed my week days much more than I do now. But my New York is a city of the night, because a country boy loves the city for its lights and shadows, not its honest face.

It took me a while to realize it, but there’s no substantive difference between my commutes to and from work. Roughly the same number of people at each station, roughly the same chance of subway catastrophes, and the dour half-awake expressions of pre- and mid-coffee morning travelers are difficult to distinguish from the exhausted and drained slouches of the evening passengers. The evidence of ego seems as crushed by semi-consciousness as it is by a fully realized work day.

The slight, cosmetic differences are seasonal. The end of day subway exodus in the summer is the moment the pace of the day finally slows. In the winter, its cold and dark, so this doesn’t happen until people get to their homes and bars. The environmental oppression is roughly equal between seasons; the exhaustion caused by hurrying through the cold creates the same physical muting as the in-tunnel summer heat that simply robs you of the ability to move.

My exit point in Brooklyn involves crossing a street with a four-minute long light. Most of the time, we all cluster at the corner and peer down the streets, hoping for the rare break in traffic during the endless Don’t Walk light. We look past each other in much the way we walked past each other ten hours earlier, when we weren’t ready to communicate, now not bothering because we have nothing left to say.

There’s no better example of existential futility than waiting for public transportation. There’s little anger on the subway platform during a long wait, because there’s nothing to be angry at. Even a bus has a visible driver who can receive an angry glance; a train might have a head sticking out of a window, but probably not the head responsible for navigation. There’s just an anonymous tube that may or may not show up at any minute. Until it does show up, there’s nothing you can do.

At one point during my first regular commute requiring public transport, at UMass, I caught myself and my fellow commuters craning our necks to see another two feet into the distance, looking for the bus, and I suddenly wondered why we bothered. It was never going to make the bus come faster. At first I thought it was like sports fans believing they were contributing to the game through a TV, but the truth is people just want to see the headlights at the soonest possible moment, because the thought that this time it will never come is the creeping dread the ego must disprove.

Once I realized this, I tried to be Zen about it. I stopped looking, turned up my headphones, and read a book, not noticing the approach of the bus until it was there. Now, craning to look down the subway tunnels is pointless anyway, because in the train stations I frequent, you feel the breeze from the oncoming train before any other sensory evidence.

But something about being underground makes it worse. The idea that a train may never come is sister to the fear that everything you can’t see might not be there, and there’s not much to see in a subway station. After half an hour, the thought begins to tug in the basement of the brain: maybe this is all there is. A walkway filled with strangers, next to a tunnel leading into darkness in both directions. Darkness that may or may not contain trains.

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