Escaping the shuttle bus

A walk from North Quincy

I shouldn’t complain, since this is about such a relatively minor nuisance, but it is perhaps instructive with regard to the fragility of the human soul. For more than a week here in Boston the branch of the subway that I take daily to work was down because of construction, replaced by a shuttle bus service between the several stations that were not in use.

On the first morning of the shutdown and shuttle bus service, people stood in the still cold and wintry wind waiting for the bus, and when it finally arrived and after a while took off, it was only to pull to the side of the road a few blocks away. Minutes passed in silence that was becoming increasingly tense. People started to demand explanations. Finally the driver walked down the aisle to yell at the person who was yelling at her the most to tell her that the bus was broken and that there was going to be another bus coming to get us. The doors were opened and again we stood in the icy wind.

The pictures below are from earlier this week, when the outage was still in place but I just couldn’t take taking the shuttle bus again, when in the previous evening on my way home the whole ride had again been the bus inching forward in the afternoon traffic, the passengers yelling at each other and at the driver, and the driver at them. The shuttle bus was adding an hour to my commute per direction. I looked at the map and saw that the nearest station still being serviced, on the other branch of the line, was an hour walk away.

I wish I had done this swap of how to spend that hour earlier, but now that I did finally do it, I was glad. The wind was still strong and icy, but it feels very different when you’re walking into it rather than waiting in its way.

In any case, this is my walk from North Quincy to Dorchester, along road shoulders and highway bridges; not the coziest environment for a walk, to be sure, but in relative terms it felt like an almost revelatory reminder of the power of a walk to improve one’s situation.

All pictures taken with the Fujifilm XF10.