Apr. 16: I was doing passenger counts on an A Loop streetcar this afternoon when I noticed a young man wrestling with a map, and another rider struggling to help him with directions.
I went over and explained to him how to get to the airport from where we were, and that I’d be on board to alert him at the transfer point.
He had an odd, sort-of-but-not-really-British accent, so I asked him where he was from. South Africa, he said. But he works in Dubai and was visiting Portland for three days on business. He liked our city very much.
I asked him what he like most. He said the people are very friendly and relaxed, and it seemed like a fairly safe place, compared to Africa—though Dubai is the safest city in the world, he added.
That has its good and bad sides, I observed, and he agreed.
Apr. 17: Carole and I were getting off a streetcar at NW 10th and Couch to go to Temple Beth Israel for a lecture on Bob Dylan. I waved at the train operator, who said:
“You look weird without your hat.”
I replied: “I always look weird.”
To which he responded: “You said it.”Her: “Good balance.”
It’s either a small world . . . or maybe everybody comes through Portland eventually. . . .
Apr. 29: Saturday afternoon I spent putting up informational posters about next weekend’s shutdown of B Loop streetcar service for maintenance work.
As soon as I finished my shift, I stepped onto a train at SW 11th and Taylor, and a man peered around the fare machine from his seat at me in my yellow hazard vest and branded Portland Streetcar cap and asked, are you an inspector? No, I do customer service, I replied.
He immediately asked me for free tickets. Why would I have free tickets, he responded. He said other customer service people had given him free tickets, and when I explained that’s not our policy—that all riders have to pay some kind of fare—he interrupted and said I was not giving good customer service, I was just being nasty, and I should find another job.
Then he stepped off the train at SW 11th and Clay with his bicycle.
I suppose I could have come up with a slightly more diplomatic initial response, but if I had actually chosen to be nasty, I could have asked him what he was doing riding the streetcar when he had a bicycle.
Apr. 29: Today for Portland Streetcar I was supposed to finish putting up posters that inform riders of the pending B Loop service shutdown this coming weekend.
I did do that, but I also went to work trying to remove as as many, and as much of, the stickers, mini-posters, book covers and pages, and other detritus people have jammed into the back wall of our shelters behind the system map cases over many months.
These are the same flotsam that may be spotted on telephone poles, exterior walls, the back of traffic signs, on park benches, and so on, but one series of items has been in a class all its own.
Someone has torn pages out of a book and written, in black felt-tip ink, various notes in the margins and other white spaces of the page—ranging from “Gaslighting” and “Fake People” to “FBI,” “CIA,” “NSA,” “CNN,” Alien,” “SNP,” “Israel,” “Libya,” “UK,” “Swiss,” “Fox,” and many other things—before jamming them under the glass.
Two things made this genteel form of vandalism especially distinctive:
1. All the pages appeared to have been torn out of a book by Dr. Stephanie Moulton Sarkis titled Gaslighting: Recognize Manipulative and Emotionally Abusive People - And Break Free . . . and
2. The perpetrator had meticulously placed these pages, with adhesive, in more than a dozen of the Portland Streetcar platform shelters.
I doubt Dr. Sarkis was trying to publicize her book, which, to judge from the text I could see on the pages that were use, seems to focus on gaslighters in a romantic, family, workplace, or religious cult context, rather than on the much bigger world conspiracy to which this street Jeremiah was seeking to call everyone’s attention.
By the way, “WNBA,” “NHL,” and “NFL” are also implicated in the plot. Lillard might be clean, but I dunno about the rest of them.
May 14: Slices o’ Life on an afternoon aboard Portland Streetcar. . .
Monday afternoon I worked several hours on the 001 train—the oldest streetcar in the system—and counted boarding and departing riders. Around 3:25 p.m., an attractive young woman got on the B Loop at East Burnside. Straight bangs and brown hair to her shoulders, a thin black sweater over a blue-gray dress atop brightly colored and patterned trousers. A thin black choker and heart-shaped spectacles containing yellow glass completed her “Sixties flower child” look, though I would imagine she was no more than 20 or 22.
When she had taken her seat and doffed her sweater, I noted an extensive network of tattoos along her shoulders and upper arms.
Loads of people boarded and left as we swung around the northeast corner of the system, across the Broadway Bridge, then south through the Pearl District. She rose right after NW 11th and Johnson to stand near the doors for the Glisan stop. I noticed her distinctive spectacles lying ton the seat she’d vacated, so I scooped them up and strode town the car to catch her before the doors opened.
“You’re gonna want these,” I said, handing them to her. “Oh, thank you! I would have been so sad if I had left them,” she told me. “Me too,” I said with a smile.
* * * * * *
4:57 p.m. After a full circuit around the downtown, I was riding around the northeast corner of Tanner Springs Park again, and glanced over at the rail fence to notice a young man getting down on one knee, and the woman in front of him throwing back her head and covering her face with her hands, as two photographers captured the moment.
May 15: Today a woman noticed me standing in the middle of the streetcar while it was in motion, tapping on my electronic work tablet and not holding onto, or bracing my body against, anything.
Her: “Don’t fall. I might laugh.”
Me: “I won’t fall. I’ve been doin’ this for five years.”
Me: “Lots of practice. Besides, I don’t mind if you laugh.”
Her: “I got Aspergers; I’m rude.”
Me: “We’re all rude for different reasons.”
May 21: I was chatting with the operator of the streetcar on my way home from this morning’s walking tour job when a fellow came up to us with his downtown map and asked directions to the zoo. We’re pretty lost, he said.
Indeed they were, but I explained to the couple in detail how to get back to the MAX line to Washington Park. Then, to make conversation, I asked where they were visiting from. Champaign-Urbana, they said. Oh, my favorite novelist went to school there, I responded. Who’s that, they asked (fairly eagerly, I suspect, because there’s hardly anyone else it could have been).
Richard Powers, I answered. He was my TA in school, the woman told me; I was friends with him for a long time. She proceeded to tell me several stories about Powers when he was a young, unpublished writer . . . before the 11 novels I’ve read . . . before he received a MacArthur Grant and a National Book Award and a Pulitzer . . . and before the time he came to speak in Portland, in March 2008, and recognized MY name when I introduced myself because I’d written about him on the Web. (See? Even big-time authors Google themselves.)
May 23: Rich and I, the grand old men of Portland Streetcar customer service (coming up on five years since we were hired), manned a table today at the PSU Transportation street fair on Montgomery Street, which has been closed off to car traffic between SW 6th and Broadway for the month.
Among the people who came up to chat with us was a student who said he had come to school here from Phoenix, where “we just opened a streetcar line.” I sniffed and said, “But it doesn’t really go anywhere.” He responded that wherever you go in Phoenix you’re not going anywhere. I laughed and said I won’t quote you on that.
When I was riding into town, for a brief part of the run my train had—get this—3 power wheelchairs, 2 walkers with wheels and seats, and a human-powered adult tricycle . . . all in the middle section of the train. When we got to the Art Museum stop where several of these human vehicles wanted to de-board, I had to supervise a sort of Rubik’s Cube exercise of shifting everybody around (I had to lift one of the wheeled walker seats out of the center aisle) so people could get where they needed to go.
A woman also asked me how short-term visitors to the city could buy streetcar fare. I gave her the entire spiel, which climaxed with the observation that the cash-and-coin fare machines on board are often out of service—as the one on that particular train behind her seat was—so “that’s a sort of gambling lottery we run for you.”
June 27: Just to change things up, I decided to get up at a quarter to five this morning and walk to the bridge to catch the MAX, then a #15 bus, so as to jump on the very first NS streetcar out of the garage at NW 23rd and Marshall at 5:45 a.m.
I did passenger counts, and ridership was thin and quiet at that hour, of course (although there had been at least 20 people on the #17 bus, which I caught at the bridge instead of a MAX train at 5:13, and many more riders than that on the 15 bus).
Numbers of streetcar passengers picked up considerably about 7:15, naturally, and when I was headed north a second time from South Waterfront, a somewhat flustered woman with a gentle Southern accent got on at SW River Parkway at 8:05, probably from the Marriott or Hyatt.
I explained to her the basics of the system, then learned she was in town for a clarinet convention at PSU. Apparently there are dealers and virtuosos in attendance, but she was visiting from Winchester in northern Virginia—the very north end of the Shenandoah Valley—as a member of an amateur clarinet ensemble that had been invited to perform at the meeting.
I told her I’d done time on the clarinet, long long ago, as well as percussion, violin, and French horn (all badly) because my Dad was a band and choral teacher, and she said, oh, the French horn is wonderful; I’d love to learn that. Yeah, but it’s so hard, I sighed. She agreed about that.
I took a break at the Starbucks at NW 11th and Lovejoy, and about 9:15 a black French bulldog waddled by in a harness that featured a white cloth crest with gold stars which arched above and behind her head, and a hard plastic curve an inch or two around her muzzle, almost like the bottom ring of a football helmet face guard.
I noticed a gentleman at a neighboring table staring at the rig with the same puzzlement I was feeling, so I called over to him, “She has a roll bar,” and he laughed.
July 18: This morning I trained a brand-new customer service rep on how to do rider counts aboard Portland Streetcar. Jake is a teen—about to enter his senior year of high school—but he’s already got a Class C Motorman’s license, so he’s been operating Willamette Trolley trains under supervision for nearly two years, and he wants to study transit and urban design when he gets to college.
From 9 to 11 a.m. (between the morning commute and lunch hour) is typically one of the deadest periods of the day aboard streetcar, but about 10:15 a.m. we had a unique counting experience: two different flotillas of toddlers with chaperones boarded at different platforms but rode our train simultaneously before getting off at separate stops as well. Since the little ones have to hold hands while peripatetic-ing (kinda sorry that verb doesn’t exist), the Automatic Passenger Counters embedded above the doors often undercount them.
You might think these would be a counting nightmare for hand counters as well, but actually, all I have to do is keep track of riders who appear NOT to be with those groups. Once the doors close, I go to a chaperone and ask how many are in their group, and they always know PRECISELY, which makes things easy for me. Once I have those figures, I don’t have to pay any attention to the group when they get off again (though I do have to remember the totals; today, I wrote them down since I had two different rafts of them).
One of the chaperones recognized me from a similar encounter yesterday, so when she stepped on the train, she said something like “I just can’t get away from you!” Yeah, I said, you’re pretty irresistible. Well, so are you, she replied. I recognized her from when she used to be a Portland Walking Tour guide.
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