Riding the bus: A summer to learn, a lifetime of ride skills

Published 1:30 am Sunday, June 4, 2017

I got my first job when I was 16 years old, as an intern at the San Diego Zoo’s education department.

As jobs went, it was pretty sweet. Instead of flipping hamburgers like some of my friends, I wrangled fifth graders at Zoo Camp, escorted them behind the scenes of the tiger exhibit where we would frequently be “marked” and led them to the okapi enclosure where the kids scooped manure.

The theme of the camp was “zoo jobs,” and all of us learned a lot. But my biggest takeaway from that summer was learning how to commute to work via the bus.

The San Diego suburbs in the 1990s were notoriously horrible when it came to public transportation. It took me an hour and a half and three buses to get from my house to Balboa Park, which was only a 30-minute car ride away.

The first time I did a test ride of my bus commute, I ended up stranded in the middle of a seedy part of downtown and had to use a payphone to call for help. I thought I could stay on the third bus until it looped back to the beginning of its route, but it turns out I was on an express bus.

I didn’t know what express buses were — that’s how clueless I was.

By the end of summer I had gained the wisdom of experience. Bus 1: Read a book and chill out. Bus 2: Listen to my Walkman and stay alert. Bus 3: Clutch my backpack in front of me and don’t make eye contact with the people who appeared they might be on drugs.

Later on in my life when I took the bus to college, job interviews and to the grocery store, those skills stayed with me.

I want my kids to have bus skills too, but like so many suburban children, their lives are spent being chauffeured from one activity to another in the back of their mom’s car. How will they learn about transfers, correct change and pulling the cord before the next stop?

This past week I gave my 12-year-old son an assignment. Use the internet and figure out how to get from our house in Edmonds to the Alderwood Mall and back riding the bus. My son explored the Community Transit website, planned our route and determined how much money it would cost.

The next day we rode the bus without any drama, had a lovely lunch at Panera and then came home. The trip was so pleasant, that we would probably travel to the mall via bus all the time if it weren’t so expensive. Our combined fairs cost $7.50, which is a lot more money than we would have spent on gas.

I wish I could teach my son to hold an echidna, be peed on by a tiger and feed a giraffe carrots, but those lessons are beyond my ability to teach.

Although, who knows? Maybe this summer we’ll take the bus to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and make some new memories.

Jennifer Bardsley is author of the books “Genesis Girl” and “Damaged Goods.” Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, on Twitter @jennbardsley or on Facebook as The YA Gal.