Maine

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.

Snow Day

Hank Garfield
The Bus must go through.

23 January 2023

Snow Day. Schools closed, government buildings closed, along with a lot of restaurants, bars and retail businesses. Cars buried in driveways, streets unplowed. My dentist’s office called early. Several appointments had opened up before my scheduled afternoon time. 

A quick Internet check confirmed that the Community Connector buses were running. I pulled on my boots and trudged down to the new, indoor, heated Transit Center, got on a warm bus and rode it out Stillwater Avenue and disembarked half a block away. Soon, I was reclining in the chair, enjoying a deep gum cleaning and some pretty good anesthesia. 

I could have canceled the appointment, like most of the patients that day who had probably planned to drive. But thankfully I live in a town with public transportation. Thanks to the drivers, and thanks to the City of Bangor for recognizing the bus as a vital service, and keeping it running on a day when most of us would have rather stayed home.

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.