“Transportation Odysseys: The Experiences You’ll Never Hear"

            The first image that came to my head as I boarded the Los Angeles public buses was the story of Odysseus in Homer's epic, The Odyssey.  For the college student, being Odysseus is, going to war with the parents over when to call, when to visit, and what not do while in school.  It is the reality of being away and the opportunity to explore new places, meet new people and life-long friends, readjust to new challenges, and mature from the success and failure of those many endeavors.  I looked forward to my time in college as my chance to venture beyond the theories in the classroom through diverse, outgoing activities.  But, I learned very quickly that this was a task that would bring me conflicts far after the college acceptance letters had been received.  A caged bird in the trap of the 'overly concerned' parents, I wanted to fly, still flapping my wings in an attempt to escape the invisible boundaries of state, county, city, and home.  Unlike Odysseus, I wanted to get lost...very badly.

Before I called the University of Southern California my academic home, I made the 22-mile daily commute from the city of Carson to Santa Monica College every day for an entire year in the middle of morning rush hour traffic.  From the passenger's seat of my dad's Ford Expedition, I towered over the Hondas and Toyotas on the 405 freeway, my usual companions in the grueling, gas-guzzling journey.  National Public Radio blared while I would try to ignore the bumps and quick-fix patches of the road by feigning sleep.  Somewhere in between, I'd catch the tail end of travel essays by many an explorer, read by the same person who actually experienced those journeys, thrown in between a BBC news report and a contest for a trip for two to Maui.  While I stayed in the classroom, killing time by reading past where the professor told me to stop and watching the pigeons and seagulls devour the unwatched portion of a student's lunch, these same adventurers were becoming the masters of their own fates, embracing the worlds that only were connected to the rest of humanity by plane and horseback.  Another force, the human innovation of transportation, was taking them away to the many landmarks on Earth, while the ones that carried me, and the other half of Los Angeles, to their respective destinations was simply taking me to another part of the county.

In Los Angeles, he who has the car is the ruler of the road.  Unfortunately, there are so many rulers vying for power that the wheels no longer turn amidst the battle for lanes and exits.  Freeways are parking lots.  Side streets are filled with drivers jockeying in line for something far ahead that can't be seen.  I found that my time on public transportation was a game of patience.  If you waited long enough, you'd make it to the destination you chose to reach, long after the cars that preceded you had arrived to it and left to sit on the road again.  In other words, you're at the mercy of the driver behind the wheel of your bus, and when that bus breaks down, all you can hope for is that it rolls into a recognizable station so you can transfer to another line.

            After a loaded, 14-hour day at SMC, I'd hop on two buses and a light rail train to return to my home, a three-hour trek spread out over those vast 22 miles (give or take a few yards).  Three hours would have been the time it would have taken me to blast down the I-15 on a Harley to arrive in Las Vegas, and here I was, leaning on one of many cold metal poles that lined the middle aisle of the Route 10 Big Blue Bus that trickled along the clogged artery of the infamous freeway from which it got its name.  In the time it would've taken me to return to Carson, I would have finished next week's paper and probably fulfilled a day's worth of sleep in one of the dingy fake wood cubicles in SMC's student union.  Late in the evening, when I'd be on the train, the sun would set through the filmstrip-style windows of the train car like the end of those spaghetti Western movies.  Those same NPR audio essays echoed from the chasms of my own mind, repeating the most vivid details from the narrator's travels abroad.  I could imagine myself conversing with the same natives and riding in the same Range Rover across the flat lands of Africa.  In Los Angeles, these grasslands aren’t the same - the wildebeests were grunting masses of steel and plastic, and the vegetation was miles of petroleum byproduct.  It wasn’t the rides that I loathed the most; it was the destinations that were in front of me after the rides were over, places I didn't want to be at and the fact that I wasn't in control of my own life's itinerary.  The problem was flashing its many exhaust pipes at me the entire time - I needed to get out of Los Angeles.   

         But how do I escape the cage?

Flash forward a year.  I finally transferred to the University of Southern California after a year of hard work at SMC.  With a sure path for a BA in English in my midst, I resolved to make the most of my time at USC, eagerly jumping at every chance to visit a distant city across any border.  After listening to several programs set up to receive college units while studying in another country, I proposed to my parents my possibilities for expanding my international horizons at USC’s expense.  I was immediately met with much disapproval.

"You're a college student.  You're not supposed to travel.  You're supposed to study."

            My parents adamantly stood by that maxim.  The college student is a bookworm, burying her nose into the text that contains the theories of the field she studies in.  College is defined, to them, as the mastery of that theory, the names of long-dead poets and authors sliding out of my tongue faster than the Green Line train that will get me that dream career.  I wondered about my bookwork as I passed the same hospital on the 10 freeway for the countless time (finally, in my own car), envisioning myself trapped on the shore of some god-forsaken island with these monsters of the text beckoning me from their caves.  I was (in theory) supposed to be preparing for the real world (whatever the heck that was), but something was still holding the rope of my little rubber dinghy and keeping me from setting sail.  It's often the dream of many an outgoing, college student to embark on a journey to a place for the sake of experience and excitement.  And so was my dream to embark on the same trail of the audio essayists and the ambitious.  What I faced was the wall of authority, of fear, and of concern that I had gone mad with this desire to leave what was deemed to be a complete package of what the world was supposed to be, a self-contained metropolis of 3.7 million people. 

A typical argument with my parents would consist of a one-sided lecture stuffed with random statistics, half-true and exaggerated for dramatic effect, usually ending with some line foreshadowing my corporeal demise or the violation of my inner being.  Every location in the world has their bad points, I'll give you that.  For the inexperienced and sheltered, their only authorities of anything past the hometown are Fodor’s and records of first-person accounts, the same lectures that made up my typical college class.  I’d have to admit, as a life-long resident of Los Angeles and one who has never been on a plane, let alone gone more than five hundred miles in any cardinal direction, the temporary change of coordinates is a daunting proposition.  On the other hand, the absolute refusal, in other words, complete denial of the possibilities to ever experience time away was, for me, the most disappointing moment of my educational career.

            "Los Angeles has everything you need.  Why do you need to leave?"

After many months of failed arguing and frustration, I devised my plan to create my own personal “study-abroad” trip.  Armed with a backpack, duffel bag, my journals, and a GPS unit, I made a truce with the monsters of my past, public transportation, and organized an excursion to see the East Coast. 

So, in the Spring Break of my senior year at USC, I left Los Angeles for Baltimore, MD, an eight-day trek complete with short stints through Washington D.C. and New York City.  Drugged up on Dramamine, I braved the several security checkpoints and boarded an airplane for the first time.  My eyes remained fixated on the shrinking houses below me as my winged vessel took off from the runway at LAX, zooming through the clouds, and then stabilizing itself while I struggled with my bag of dry roasted peanuts.  By the first hour of my plane ride, I was looking down over the rust colored hills and canyons of Arizona, watching cars below on what appeared to be the I-10, the same highway that had me at a standstill in a bus only a short time before.  But this time, nobody was stopping, for there were no fixtures of human society to clog an exit. 

When I landed in Baltimore, three hours later, my friend greeted me at the terminal and we made our way to the trains that had been strategically placed at the side of the airport.  My first concern was how I was going to get around the several states I needed to cross to reach my specific destinations.  My friend simply told me, “The public transportation here will get you wherever you need to be…usually faster than the cars will.”

And so began my crash course in train hopping and transferring through buses in an interconnected web of lines and schedules.    I found a deep serenity going down the long lengths of countryside between Baltimore’s suburbs and downtown, trees and shrubs beginning to bloom amidst century-old buildings that were too young to be considered as historical.  Baltimore is a small city, with so much of the land still unconquered by corporation-sponsored franchises and the expansion of pre-fabricated structures.  I sat down at a local Royal Farms (the “RoFo” as the natives say there) enjoying a unique flavor of fried chicken that made me forget the fast food stores a little while longer.  Once I acclimated myself to a city that ended its work at 4PM on a Saturday, I wondered why I had to rush to see everything.  Standing still truly did give me the change of scenery.

Of course, I’d get the occasional phone call from my mother somewhere in the late afternoon in some suspicious inquiry of why I didn’t come home for my weekly expected stopover.

“What are you doing right now?” she would ask.

“Studying.”

“Where?”

“Barnes and Noble.”

And that was all she needed to hear from me.  I seemed to have forgotten to mention that I was glancing at a picture book under a hollowed-out smokestack that formed part of the foundation of this Barnes and Noble branch in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.  Just earlier, I was posing in front of the USS Constellation and snapping pictures of a docked Coast Guard battleship, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.

            Later that week, an Amtrak coach brought me across several states to New York City, the rows of real trees that I had seen somewhere between Philadelphia and Trenton making way for the overwhelming heights of the steel and glass of skyscrapers.  I was thrown into the bottom of a chasm, much like Los Angeles in its many multitudes of people but different in its dynamic; something was always moving at an impossible speed.  I’d swim through the blurs of people that didn’t wait for crosswalks and weaved through the yellow of taxicabs across a street.  Every stoplight signaled a race for the other side, and I earned the battle scars on my feet as well as the bad favor of my walking boots.

            In this part of the East, the pedestrians win the battle of intersection and exit.  They may have to elicit the help of a subway or two, but it’s the fancy footwork that gets them into the crevices of home, store, and workplace.  I found that here in New York City, my time on public transportation was a game of calculation.  If you waited long enough, you'd miss the destination you chose to reach, but you’d still get there long before the cars that preceded you had arrived to it and left to sit on the road again.  In other words, you're at the mercy of your own volition, and when that subway breaks down, all you have to do is dash over to the next station and transfer to another car.

It seems to me that my foolish dreams of seeing other places have brought me to a solid conclusion: I must stay in Los Angeles.  It is the only then that I can live under the auspices of safe, familiar territory where you'll never move (especially when you're on the freeway).  When it comes to a day when my parents want to get out for a bit of a vacation, and when they deem me "mature" and "ready" to get on an airplane for the “first” time, at least I'll know how to get through the checkpoints in the terminal.  I won't get lost on the New York subway and I'll know the difference between uptown and downtown.  I'll know which cars are the best for sleeping on the Amtrak line.  I've returned home from my own traveling Odyssey with stories from abroad.  But, you're not supposed to know about it, because here in Los Angeles, all we see are the cars in front of us, not the open skies above us and the rails below us, that lead to open plains and real trees that don't hide cell phone signal amplifiers.  I’m just a college student who needs to put myself back into the books.

            Perhaps, when I can finally tell these tales freely, they'll remind others who are rambling sleepily to work to change their scenery every now and then.  We can all get out, even if we each have to sneak out and fulfill those dreams ourselves.  I can only hope that the ones who first said “no” will listen and consider the options, whether it’s comfortable or not.

Choose your Destination:

Baltimore, MD/Washington D.C.

New York, NY (Coming Soon)