I Am So Popular: Leander Meander (Training Lessons)

While I had a very good time, I can now report back that BA is certainly not a pastoral paradise—it’s loud, bustling, wildly crowded, and let’s just say the city’s name might have once been accurate, but these days it’s pure irony, like the way they name the streets of housing subdivisions after whatever parts of nature the developers eradicated to create all those piece-of-shit cookie cutter houses.

Monday evening, 5:30 Argentine time, I got in a cab to go back to the airport to head home. In total, the return trip took 23 hours, involved three airports and four packed planes, required sleeping poorly in an upright position with the seat in front of me angled back into my lap, and left me with a severe case of ankle edema. So naturally, when Warren suggested, upon my return, that we try out the new Cap MetroRail, I thought, “What better way to relax, unwind and re-embrace my favorite place in the world then to get on a jam-packed train to Leander!”

Okay, call us fools, we didn’t actually anticipate the jam-packed part. Sure, the trains are running free this week, encouraging folks to try out the novelty of our latest attempt at public transportation. But really, how many people would want to ride to Leander mid-afternoon on a Wednesday?

Turns out the answer is: A Whole Lot.

Hilariously enough, before we headed downtown to catch the train—we wanted to take the full start-to-finish roundtrip ride— I packed for the trip. I brought my knitting, a real book, an audiobook, and, no shit, my laptop. I imagined reading a few chapters, listening to a few chapters, making a little progress on a sock, and maybe writing a couple of blog posts. I based this optimistic list of goals on past rides on other trains in different cities around the country and around the world, places where trains aren’t novelties, but an everyday part of life, where people nap, get shit done, engage in romance, and sing badly for spare change (which I sometimes think is offered more in appreciation for the end of the singing than the singing itself).

When we arrived at the station, it became very clear, very quickly, that all this baggage I brought was going to be a major hindrance. That we managed to squeeze on board at all was a testament to both our tenacity and a clear lack of fire code rules limiting occupancy. Canned sardines enjoy far roomier accommodations than we experienced, but so be it. The mood was, for the most part, pretty damn jovial on that two-car affair. And since public transportation is not, in Austin, the well-oiled, take-for-granted way-of -life it is in so many other cities, very few people attempted to engage in typical commuter behavior. It was like a party where people are already talking about the party before the party’s over. It was like a blog where the blogger blogs all about blogging. Everyone had something to say about the train—from blowhard “authoritarian” fact-spewers to little kids clutching cardboard facsimiles of the vehicle upon which we were all getting intimately familiar with each others’ physicality and opinions.

For the first forty-five minutes or so, Warren and I had the pleasure of standing near a couple of seated, loudmouth hillbillies, who put me in touch with my more judgmental side. At each stop, many more people got on (or tried), while very few people got off. As there is only one exit per car, and as the aisles are too narrow to allow two-way passage, those folks in the back who did wish to disembark had their work cut out for them. As one woman shouted, “We’re getting off! Wait, we’re getting off! Hold it!”, the hillbilly wife muttered, loud enough to incite a potential riot, “Just shut your mouth and get off!”

This is when the part of me that was enjoying the boisterous atmosphere gave way to my more typical tendency to worry as I imagined a day in the near future when train fisticuffs occur regularly. Hillbilly Mama’s attitude was a good reminder that public transportation can easily lend itself to flared tempers and heated words exchanged. But, sigh of relief, the exiting woman paid no mind to the loudmouth, managed to shove her way out, and we all lived happily ever after, proceeding to Leander without further verbal aggravation.

I have to say that the crowd appeared to be sent over from central casting, and that CSA had been instructed by CapMetro to round up X number of actors representative of sundry racial/ethnic/socio-economic groups. Thus these all-aboard demographics did not mirror, say, the Sea of Lily White that is the ACL-fest. Instead, folks of all shapes, sizes and colors, speaking different languages, mushed together suggesting our city is actually some melting pot of wild diversity. There was even a woman in a burka.

The PA system provided still more entertainment. Whereas in NYC train stop announcements come across as garbled, incomprehensible static, and in Paris (or Tokyo or Buenos Aires) I am rendered equally clueless courtesy of language barriers, here you could understand every crisply rendered message. Some were pre-recorded—I especially enjoyed how “Saltillo Plaza” was pronounced as if a Spanish-language teacher had been hired just to say those two words: Sal-TEE-yo PLAH-sssssa. But the best were the live announcements, as the engineer captaining our adventure came over the speakers at regular intervals to give real time updates. “Someone lost a cell phone—please, everybody, look around for it!” And then there was this one—“I’m going to have to slow it down a lot, my windshield wipers aren’t working right and it’s raining…” followed not long after by, “I’m going to have to really slow it down now, the windshield wipers aren’t working at all.” Curiously, considering all this blow-by-blow commentary, no explanation was offered when we hit something on the tracks that, fortunately, sounded more like a hubcap than a dog.

At some point, Warren and I were able to make our way to the back of the car and, at long last, procure seats. By this point, we had reached Leander and were heading back. The novelty had worn off for me and I pulled out my book and started to read. Then I noticed the kid a couple of seats over and it occurred to me he was autistic (something I know a little about having been an attendant for many years for a friend of mine with autism). A lot of kids with autism hyper-focus on a particular topic, and a very popular category along these lines is trains. My excitement reignited momentarily as I imagined, watching the kid eagerly take in the whole affair, what an exciting trip this was for him.

Out the window, a huge rainbow appeared—perhaps God’s covenant with Austin that fucking finally we are going to get a seriously decent means of getting around that doesn’t involve driving and spending ten hours looking for parking. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go before enough cars and stops are added to make this dream a reality, but I enjoyed the fantasy that one day, like commuters elsewhere, riding the train will be so common it won’t elicit much excitement at all.

I’m not holding my breath. I’ve often said that Austin is not really a city, but rather a bunch of fun little towns strung together like pretty beads. Never mind the ever-expanding skyline, the 2nd Street District’s attempt to force a Houstonian feel to downtown. Most days it feels like Austin will never really grow up into an actual metropolis, which is fine by me. Though, best of both worlds and all that, it sure would be lovely traversing our big little town courtesy of an honest-to-goodness means of transport that works. All aboard anyone? Sure would be nice.

Spike Gillespie thinks trains are really neato. She blogs for JetBlue, KnitBuzz, and her own damn self at spikeg.com, where you can check out her recent photo essay Mi Encanta Los Perros de Buenos Aires.