Time to round up the best tales of my activities and observations working for Portland Streetcar the past year. . . .
Jan. 5: “I finally got into housing!”
He’s a regular rider who always greets me warmly and sometimes makes a gruff joke, whether we we meet aboard a train, on the street, or at the library.
We chatted about the brutal weather hitting the East Coast, and I told him I’d been in Boston for the Blizzard of ’78. He remembered spending last year’s Portland snowstorm in warming shelters.
How long you been outside, I asked. Since I came to Portland, he replied. How long ago did you move here, I continued. Seventeen years.
Mar. 14: It was a little after 8 a.m. Tuesday. I was aboard a train on my way downtown for breakfast and my Portland walking tour (mother and daughter on spring break from Des Moines and a young woman from Connecticut, with layovers in San Fran and NYC, now living with her husband in London).
At the Art Museum stop on 10th, a man apparently rushed on at the front door. I hadn’t noticed because I was studying my electronic tablet. Then a woman — a blonde, perhaps in her 40s — stepped into the doorway holding a mobile phone to her ear, trying to hold the door open and delay the train, while pounding on the operator’s door and telling him not to proceed.
“This man dented my car and I’ve got the police coming,” she explained, while trying to keep whomever she had on her phone apprised of the situation. “She’s chasing me for no reason!” the man appealed to no one in particular from the middle of the car.
Disgusted by the stalemate, I stood up from my seat in the very front left corner and called to him down the car, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, then step off the car and face the music, and you’ll be cleared. But don’t hold all of us up while we’re trying to get to work.”
He dashed off one of the middle doors with her in hot pursuit, the doors closed, and the train went on its way. When I got off two stops later at 10th and Alder, the operator thanked me.
Mar. 18: This morning I worked a shift for Portland Streetcar during the Shamrock Run and witnessed an instance of massive cultural appropriation.
Mar. 18: It was midmorning, and the Portland Streetcar crew managing the cross traffic between trolleys and runners had seen several of the Shamrock Run events -- the 5K and the half-marathon -- go by.
An enforcement officer checked the schedule and said the 8K, a kids’ 1K, and a 4-mile walk were still coming.
“Four-mile walk?” one of the crew objected: “Dude, get on a treadmill!” The supervisor on site thought that the walk should have been routed along the riverside “escapade.” (He was trying to recall its official title, the Esplanade.)
“Tapenade,” I suggested.
“That, I can get into,” he responded, making a spreading-with-a-knife motion with his hands: “The four-mile tapenade!”
May 1: It was a little after 9 p.m. when a couple stepped onto the streetcar I was on and started peering earnestly at the route map a foot above my head and discussing their possible destination in Japanese.
I obviously looked like someone who might be able to help them, in my yellow hazard vest with silver reflector strips, and bright red baseball cap branded “Portland Streetcar” . . . but I didn’t wish to barge in, especially if they didn’t speak English -- a dim but real possibility -- so I just stood looking at them from four feet away with a vaguely interested expression and a slight smile.
They never once appeared to look at me, and I never heard a proper local destination name I recognized, before they headed down the car to seats. A few stops later, they got up and headed for a door 20 feet away from me. I happened to be glancing in their direction as he headed out the door. She paused to look at me and made a stiff bow before following him.
May 14: I was doing passenger counts late this morning with Patrick when I found myself standing above an older couple from Ventura who were wrestling with a downtown map.
They were headed to Powell’s and the Deschutes Brewery Pub, and I explained how to get there. “Boy, nothing’ll get ya lost like a map,” the man commented.
“There’s a Sur le Table around here somewhere too,” his wife said. “Surly table, yeah,” he added.
May 18: I was doing rider counts when a woman got on with the students at PSU Urban Center. Small, with stringy hair and limbs, she had the ragged look of a denizen of the streets, so she could have been anywhere from mid 30s to early 60s in age. Her jeans were ripped open from the upper thigh to mid-shin on both sides, so her bony legs were exposed to the air, and she hauled on a large, opaque white garbage bag of cans.
She was seated before I realized she was carrying an animal as well. (I realized later that it might have crept out of the backpack on her lap.) It was nestled against her neck and hair and looked long and greyish brown, so I guessed it was a ferret. She clasped and stroked it with her hands.
After several minutes I could see it had a yellow underside and was nuzzling her greasy hair with a bill. I realized I could hear quiet peeps coming from it, as well. It appeared to be a duckling, but it was large; maybe four inches long and 2 or 2-1/2 pounds. When another rider got on the train at a later stop and noticed it, I heard her murmur to him, “gosling.”
She poured it into her backpack and got off with the pack and bag of cans at SW 10th and Alder. I’ve seen lots of dogs, some cats, a ferret, and the odd tropical bird, but that’s the first time I’ve seen one of those aboard a streetcar.
July 7: I did an evening work shift on the streetcar tonight and, as I’ve noted here before, over the past four years I’ve seen more and more trash left on the trains. I think it’s part of that larger “How President Reagan Made Your Neighborhood Uglier” effect I’ve observed and need to write about on my blog.
Anyway, apart from the usual cellophane wrappers, empty soda cups, free weekly newspapers, a cigarette butt, and so on, I picked up and disposed of a couple unusual items I’ve never encountered before:
-- an empty box for 10 Trojan latex condoms
-- a pile of at least 30 Pokémon collectors' card wrappers, and maybe even some cards
When did moms stop teaching kids to pick up after themselves?
Aug. 15: THE FARELESS DRAGONFLY
When streetcar operators have a couple minutes of layover (typically at PSU Urban Center, NW 9th and Lovejoy, NW 11th and Marshall, the OMSI platform, the Convention Center, or SW Lowell and Bond outside my building), they have the option of leaving all the doors standing open, or keeping them closed but primed to pop open if a rider pushes a door button to get on or off while the train is stopped.
This time of year, most of them choose the latter to keep the cooler AC air inside (and today’s really polluted air out). But this morning at 9 a.m., the operator had left all the doors standing open.
When I stepped on the train, I noticed a dragonfly was flitting around the interior. It was a good-sized one: at least two inches long, blue, with a comparable wingspan. Passengers sitting on the train were few, but the unusual fellow traveler was freaking some of them out.
It flew to the far rear of the train and bounced between the windows adjacent to the locked-off cab. A young man who was sitting in a seat at that end noticed the dragonfly, and got right up and went to the other end of the train. A young woman who boarded and started toward that end also perceived the large insect and did an about-face.
I thought about how to get the dragonfly off the train, waiting for it to head toward the center doors so I could try to herd it out with my outstretched arms. It continued to bounce around the far end, so I searched for a newspaper. Riders often discard free weeklies on the train which I have to pick up and dispose, but there were none to be found that early in the day.
I stepped off the train and checked the trash barrel on the platform. Nothing there. Went to unlock the break room where the operator was resting, and a streetcar maintenance worker was also in there. She told me she had gathered up trash bags and a couple loose newspapers outside the door.
I fetched one and headed back to the train, but saw the dragonfly swoop out the doors at just that instant.
Sure glad I didn't have to demand to see its fare . . . .
Aug. 19: It was an eventful afternoon working Portland Streetcar on a Sunday. Among other things, I:
-- kept a keen eye on a trio of dicey young characters who got on at NW 10th and Johnson, one of whom kept weaving about the center of the car in a slow, aimless dance with his large backpack swinging around, so that an elderly woman in a seat put up her arms to ward it off, completely unnoticed by him. He made a seemingly sincere effort to buy a ticket on board, since he said he had but two unused paper tickets for his buddies, but he was carrying only a $20 bill and a credit card, so he waved his companions off at the next platform, NW 9th and Lovejoy, where they puzzled over the fare machine for long minutes before the train’s doors closed and we pulled away . . . whereupon I leaned down to the white-haired, very wrinkled but still healthy-looking woman (late 70s, would be my guess) and murmured quietly, “We made it!” and she looked up at me with a grin and said “Yes!"
-- overheard a large, overweight rider I’ve often seen on board chatting with out-of-town visitors and stating he had been a professional elephant handler with circuses that traveled the U.S. and Europe, but quit because “I lost my nerve” after 40 broken bones over a ten-year career. They sense your fear, he explained.
Aug. 20: Saturday morning I did something I’m not strictly authorized to do -- especially when I’m not on duty, which was the case here.
Carole and I were headed to the other end of the NS alignment to catch a film, and at an early stop (OHSU Commons) I noticed a very sour-faced woman board. Having spotted her, my immediate thought was: I hope she doesn’t sit at our end. Fortunately, she took a seat in the center section.
Things were fairly quiet for several stops, but then a pair of middle-aged fellows boarded with two cute kids, a boy and girl -- about age five, I’d say -- and sat and stood across the aisle from this woman. I sized up the men as a couple: gay fathers of the children, I suspected, or perhaps a pair of “uncles.”
A little more time passed, and then the woman started into a loud, steady monologue generously laced with F-bombs, “fat whore,” and worse. She didn’t look at the couple (or quartet) across the aisle, but it seemed fairly clear she was aiming her abuse at them.
I got up and strode over to her . . . a distance of about 30 feet down the car -- but trust me, everyone could hear her, even if they might not catch all the details, including the operator through her open door even further up the train.
I leaned down and asked her, politely but firmly, to lower her voice. I may have specified that it would be good of her to do so out of consideration for the small children. She paused, then started up again. I asked her again. Perhaps the second time I tried flashing my Portland Streetcar ID and cautioning her that I work for streetcar, and I could ask the operator to get her removed.
Then I turned away as if to return to my seat. I didn’t want her to feel like I was monitoring her. But she started up again, just as loud and just as profane. That’s it, I thought; I whipped out my ID and ordered her off the train.
Now, I’m not authorized to do that, but I was fed up, there didn’t seem to be any alternative . . . and she complied. It worked.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment