Bicycling

A Bus to Brooklin

Hank Garfield

I took a bus to Brooklin. Not Brooklyn, New York, which has hundreds of buses, but Brooklin, Maine, which has one. My challenge was to get from Bangor, where I live, to my family’s home at the end of Naskeag Point, without using a car. It CAN be done. Here’s how.

You have to get up early, and get to the Odlin Road park-and-ride lot by 5:30 on a Friday morning. The Jackson Lab bus runs five days a week, year-round. It transports employees to and from the Jackson Lab facilities in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor. But it’s also open to the general public, and they will drop you off anywhere along the route. It leaves promptly at 5:30 and seconds later hits Interstate 395 and is on its way.

To get to Brooklin, you have to take this bus to Ellsworth and get off somewhere close to downtown to meet a second bus. It runs only on Fridays, but also year-round, and serves Surry, Blue Hill, Deer Isle, Stonington, Sedgwick, and Brooklin. The cost for the whole one-way trip from Bangor is nine dollars.

Both buses are run by Downeast Transportation, based in Ellsworth. A complete schedule of their routes is available at the Bangor Transit Center, and online.

But the bus doesn’t stop at the Transit Center. I called the day before to make sure that both buses carry bicycles and to verify the schedule, and at 4:55 Friday morning, I set off by bicycle from my house in the dark. I had timed the ride a few days earlier and confirmed that I could do it in a comfortable 20-25 minutes without busting my aging butt. The sky was brightening when I wheeled into the park-and-ride. The bus was already there. I guess someone had told the driver to expect me, because she made a note on a clipboard and said she could drop me off at the Mill Mall in Ellsworth, where a short bike ride would take me to City Hall to meet the second bus.

The first bus was about half-full, about fifteen passengers. A few brought blankets. It was a quiet ride. The sun came up around quarter to six. At 6:03 I disembarked at the Mill Mall, right in front of Sylvie’s Café. “Open at 4:30 AM” said the sign in the window. I enjoyed a smashing breakfast and listened to a group of truck drivers at another table discuss various routes they took between Maine and Florida. At the lumberyard across the street, people were already moving stuff around with forklifts. The day had begun. 

My bus left at 7:20. I didn’t need a ticket or a transfer or anything. It was all very informal. I paid the cash fare in Bangor, and the driver in Ellsworth knew I was coming. Not surprising, really, since I was the only passenger.

“You do know we go to Stonington first, right?” the driver said. I replied that I did, and that I was in no hurry. It was a fine day for a scenic tour of the Blue Hill peninsula, overcast but clear. The view from Caterpillar Hill, virtually unchanged since my childhood, stretched to the horizon, the Deer Isle bridge in the foreground illuminated by a ray of sunlight.

An older woman and man got on in Stonington. They were regulars; the driver knew them by name and picked them up at their houses. He picked up another two passengers in North Deer Isle, and after a short delay for a jackknifed truck, he dropped me at the Brooklin General Store right on schedule at 9:20. I had another three miles to go, but that’s why I have a bicycle.

This may seem like a long and convoluted way to get to a destination that’s only an hour and a half away by car, but nine bucks is less than the cost of gas to get there, not to mention all the costs associated with car ownership. When my family moved to Blue Hill in my tenth year, we were called “straphangers” – people who rode buses and hung onto straps – and it was not a term of endearment. Public buses were foreign and therefore suspicious, From Away.

The bus seems to be used primarily by senior citizens on the peninsula to get to Ellsworth and back, though the driver said he sometimes picks up kids going to school. It makes a return trip in the afternoon, reversing the morning route. Thus a person could board the bus in Brooklin at 9:20, spend a few hours in Ellsworth, and be home by early afternoon. 

Though public transportation in this rural area may be skeletal, that this service exists at all is something of a minor miracle. And it is imperative that those of us who believe in the future of public transportation use what’s here in the present, however infrequent or inconvenient. It may take longer and require some planning, but it demonstrates demand, and paves the way for more and better transportation options down the road.

The Dying Year

Hank Garfield

In these dying days of 2022, I find myself thinking of people who didn’t make it through the year. Famously: Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher); the first ballplayer to steal 100 bases (Maury Wills), and the last leader of the Soviet Union (Mikhail Gorbachev); the Queen of England (Elizabeth II), and the queen of country music (Loretta Lynn). This year, mortality hit close to home: my mother, my girlfriend’s father, my sister’s boyfriend – and my college friend Martin Wooster, a writer and thinker of some note, and one of more than seven thousand American pedestrians killed by automobiles this year.

Martin wrote a column called “First Principles” for the Beloit College newspaper while I was its co-editor. He went on to be an editor and frequent writer for Reason magazine, and a contributor to many other respected publications. He sent me a note several years ago when I had a story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was brilliant and provocative and funny. And he didn’t own cars.

That last part I didn’t know until he died, and I read it in one of the many on-line tributes from people touched by his singular wit. But I remember the frequent sight of his tall figure walking along the campus paths with a book in front of his face – the same thing that almost got Stephen King killed along a rural Maine road. Martin was run down while attending a convention in Williamsburg, Virginia and walking from one event to another. The person who hit him drove off and has not been found.

He died alone, but he was not alone in the manner of his death. Sadly, pedestrian deaths on America’s roadways have been rising, even as total driving miles have decreased in the pandemic’s wake. In 2021, an estimated 7,485 people on foot were struck and killed by motor vehicles in the United States. This year’s total could be even higher.

What can be done about these avoidable tragedies? 

Drivers are quick to point out that pedestrians can be hard to see. But they say the same thing about bicycles. Yes, people out walking at night should wear brighter clothing, and yes, cyclists should exercise caution. But the onus for safety has to be on the operator of the lethal weapon that is a car. Perhaps one reason that drivers have difficulty seeing pedestrians and cyclists is that they aren’t looking for them. 

But the necessary attitude adjustment goes farther than that. Until pedestrians and cyclists are treated as equal users of the public right-of-way, they will continue to die in unacceptable numbers.

For whatever reason, I’ve witnessed more belligerent behavior behind the wheel this year than in years past. I’ve had close encounters in crosswalks, where drivers are required to stop. I’ve seen people running red lights, speeding, and taking dangerous chances in congested areas. I’ve seen people pull in front of the bus so suddenly that the driver has to slam on the brakes.

I don’t know why people are in such a hurry. But perhaps it has something to do with an economy that wants us rushing to and from work so that we can make our car payments so that we can drive to the store and our gigs and our night jobs. An economy that extends little incentives to drivers, like the widespread expectation of free parking, and the tacit “right” to drive up to nine miles an hour over the speed limit. 

The long task of steering people away from cars must employ both carrots and sticks. Carrots include well-maintained sidewalks, expanded bus service, and cycling infrastructure. Sticks include correcting ingrained bad behavior. When a downtown speed limit of 25 miles per hour means just that, and police ticket drivers for going 28, maybe there will be fewer close calls in crosswalks, and fewer senseless deaths like my friend’s.

Hopeful

Hank Garfield

This year Spring arrived all at once, over a weekend that rolled Good Friday and Easter, the Kenduskeag Canoe Race, four day games at Fenway Park, and the Boston Marathon all into one four-day package. The Red Sox are playing as I write this, and it’s not even noon. My bicycle has a new chain and fresh air in the tires. The sun is shining. Today is Try Transit Day in Bangor, and the already low fares for the Community Connector buses are halved, in an effort to attract new riders.

I’m having trouble finding the necessary focus to write about all this, so please forgive me if this entry seems to be about a lot of things. I usually write a baseball piece around Opening Day, but I’m sad that the inevitable has finally happened and the designated hitter will now be standard across both leagues. This follows the election of David Ortiz, the greatest DH the pro game has yet seen, into the Hall of Fame. Never mind that he was half a player – if you’re going to have a DH, it might as well be someone with an outsized personality who repeatedly rose to the occasion, and happened to play for your favorite team.

But if pitchers (except Shohei Ohtani) aren’t going to hit anymore, they should at least be allowed to pitch. Someone needs to tell this to Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ll always love Roberts the player for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World. But Roberts the manager has pulled a rookie from a no-hitter in progress in his first major league start, and earlier this month he removed Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game. Insanity.

Baseball is no longer America’s game. We prefer the belligerence of our brand of football and its obvious military underpinnings. Television buries the World Series at night to accommodate the fall football schedule. The Super Bowl is our big annual sporting event, and it happens in February, the bleakest month of the year.

I’m old enough now to let most of this stuff go. Easter is a time to celebrate, not to whine. Baseball will survive. In the first inning I caught on TV this year, the Red Sox started a six-run rally with a walk, a single, a sacrifice bunt, and a sacrifice fly. Three straight doubles followed, but small ball opened the door. It put a smile on my face when I went to pick up the bicycle from the shop, in preparation for cycling along the course of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race two days later.

This year I had friends in both the canoe race and the Boston Marathon. I’ll never run a marathon, but I’d like to do the canoe race before I run out of “one of these years.” I suppose what I like best about the canoe race is that it’s first time all year I see a bunch of boats on a body of water. My own boat has a mast and two sails, and requires a bit of preparation before it floats in the spring. But the canoe race tells me that it won’t be long.

Maine is the best place to live in the United States. Having lived in several other places, I’m convinced of this. Sure, our winters are long, but they’re not that stressful if you don’t have to drive in them. Spring, summer, and fall are magical. And Maine is mostly filled with friendly, reasonable people who care about their community and quality of life.

Try Transit Day is an example of this, as public transportation slowly bounces back from the pandemic. The skeleton of the new bus terminal is rising in Bangor’s Pickering Square. When it is completed later this year, it will be a centerpiece of the downtown. Everyone who visits Bangor for an event will see it, and will know that Bangor is committed to a future in which public transportation is a fixture, and not something to be “tried.” We did that, fellow Bangorians, and we should be proud.

More challenges lie ahead, as we navigate the Late Automobile Age in our mostly rural corner of the country. But after an Easter weekend filled with buses, bicycles, boats, and baseball, it’s hard not to be just a little hopeful.