I came home after nine months in Bulgaria, to find that some things have changed and some have stayed the same.

There’s a new parking garage on Main Street, further obstructing the public’s view of the public waterfront. But the Community Connector, Bangor’s public bus system, still stops running at six in the evening. And though friends tell me that there has been progress on this front, I’m left wondering why it takes only nine months to put up a parking garage, but more than a decade to extend bus hours into the evening.

Bulgaria is a former Soviet Bloc communist country whose present economy is about the same size as Maine’s. Blagoevgrad has twice Bangor’s population, but because it was built more vertically than horizontally, its geographic footprint is similar. Like Bangor, it serves as a regional center for surrounding small towns. Yet local buses run well into the evening, seven days a week. Bangor’s bus service doesn’t run at all on Sundays.

If an impoverished Eastern European country can offer comprehensive public transportation to its citizens, surely the Bangor area can do it as well. I’ve lived in Bangor since 2006. In that time, I’ve hard a lot of talk about the obvious need for extended evening bus hours. I’ve also witnessed the construction of three parking garages, all on bus routes.

Parking garages are at least marginally better than the sprawling parking lots spawned by the shopping mall craze of the 1970s, from which downtowns across America are still struggling to recover. But they are still eyesores, monuments to a car culture we must begin to move beyond.

The problem with parking garages, in addition to obstructing the view, is that their mere existence incentivizes driving and car ownership. Incentives ought to run the other way, encouraging people to leave their cars at home, or to downsize from two vehicles to one, or to even give up car ownership altogether. This requires a commitment to better public transportation, by both private and public sectors.

The greatest “green” challenge of this century is to coax people out of their cars – not everybody, but enough to make a significant difference in the demand for oil and city real estate. The single most significant green initiative Bangor could undertake for the immediate future would be to extend the bus hours into the evening, so that people could get to and from work and attend events with some flexibility.

Looking farther forward, commuters from Winterport, Hermon, Eddington, and Orrington currently have no realistic options other than driving their own cars to work. Bus service should eventually be extended to these outlying communities. In Bulgaria you can get almost anywhere on a bus. Many people drive and own cars there, but it has not been made a de facto requirement by the elimination of all alternatives.

But too many well-intentioned Americans have bought into the mindset of car-as-necessity, and we have allowed our transportation system to be designed around it. And too many well-meaning environmental groups continue to dance around the central issue of automobile overkill. Bicycle paths and walking trails are fine things, as far as they go, but when you drive your bike to a trailhead to ride along a trail carved out of the woods, how much are you really doing for the environment?

People will argue that this all costs money: more buses, more drivers, publicity and community outreach. But all over the world, wherever public transportation is made readily and easily available, people use it. There is a growth curve, to be sure, but as people discover how much money, time, and aggravation they can save by becoming less reliant on their cars, public transportation always becomes more popular over time. It’s an investment – and far less costly and much more sustainable in the long run than continuing to subsidize cars and car infrastructure.

So let’s get it done, Bangor, sooner rather than later. Find the funds to extend the Community Connector hours into the evening. After that, think about Sunday service and extended routes. Perhaps a fleet of mixed-sized vehicles, smaller buses for less traveled routes and less busy times, would be a way to allay some of the initial cost. Get more employers on board with a system of parking offsets and free passes for employees who take the bus to work. If we are to be serious about saving the environment, we need to get serious about public transportation.

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I’m wrapping things up in Bulgaria. In a couple of weeks I’ll be going back to the United States, a place I haven’t seen or felt for eight months. A bus or a train will take me to Sofia, where I’ll spend the night before flying out. Lisa will ride a bus to Boston and meet me at the airport. From there we’ll take a train to Portland and a bus back to Bangor. No cars will be involved, except perhaps a taxi.

I haven’t driven a car since I’ve been here. My driver’s license disappeared on the Athens metro in January. When I get home I’ll have to get a new Maine Card from the University so I can ride the Bangor bus system for free again. I’ll get my bicycle out of winter storage. I’ll drive down to the coast to see my mother.

What an interesting part of the world this is. Bulgarian politicians are talking about the development of a new “silk road” trade route, linking the European countries along the Danube with China. (It was the interruption of this commercial pipeline that led to the European sailing voyages of the late 1400s and early 1500s and the colonization of the Americas.) The countries that comprised the former Yugoslavia are still working out their relationships with one another, and with the European Union. Languages, currencies and cultures seem to co-exist in a fragile balance that somehow works.

What have I learned? The title of this post is a lyric from a George Harrison Beatles song, “The Inner Light,” which first appeared on the flip side of “Lady Madonna,” when individual songs were released on 45 rpm vinyl records. The Beatles were popular in Bulgaria, as they were everywhere else. I’ve learned a Bulgarian song from the 1970s that references them.

But I haven’t learned nearly enough about this historically dynamic, physically beautiful, oddly introverted country where I’ve lived for most of a year. I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ve learned enough Bulgarian to order a meal or buy a bus ticket, but not enough to hold a real conversation. I don’t understand most of the customs and rituals, and I’m baffled by the politics.

And again, I’ve developed a deep empathy with immigrants to the United States, for whom every transaction is an effort, as it is here for me. The difference is that in Bulgaria, and throughout Eastern Europe, you can usually find someone who speaks English to help you out at the post office or a bank or almost any other place of business. A few signs are in English; the same is true of product labels. Occasionally you’ll hear English on the street and be able to understand a conversation in your native language. Immigrants to the United States have almost none of these advantages.

Yet in eight months in Bulgaria, no one has ever berated me in public for not speaking the language, for failing to “assimilate.” Is it any wonder that ethnic minorities in the U.S. tend to congregate, to draw support from people who understand them?

Europe is a melting pot of languages, and this monolingual American is constantly amazed by how many people speak two or three or more of them. Why aren’t we doing that in the United States? Why aren’t we, at the very least, teaching Spanish in kindergarten? Why do we instead push for English-only legislation and the adoption of an official language? Why do we want to build walls instead of bridges?

Bulgarians seem surprised that anyone wants to come here, let alone learn their language. Two million Bulgarians have emigrated since the collapse of communism in 1991. Many of my students will work jobs this summer in places like Nantucket and Old Orchard Beach. A lot of them want to live and work abroad after they graduate.

But others tell me that they want to stay, and help lead their country into a global future filled with possibilities for people everywhere. I’ve written in this blog that we are living in the Late Automobile Age, the waning days of the mindset that we should all own cars and drive them wherever and whenever we please. Likewise, the world is witnessing the last desperate gasp of nationalism, the idea that we can wall ourselves off from one another and live by our own rules regardless of what happens on the other side.

Neither regime will go quietly, but go they must.

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