We took the 27 the way you take a local bus when you are not trying to “get somewhere” so much as trying to be somewhere. The bus as method. The bus as ritual. Travel defined by attention rather than distance. – Ben Yeoh

I used to love riding Albuquerque’s blue buses. Not so much any more. They trigger my motion sickness. Without evidence, with no way to falsify (Karl Popper would call this a meaningless assertion), I hypothesize that the drivers are more pissed off – they accelerate fast and stop hard, pushing me to the edge of comfort, sometimes over.

Before we had the blue bus, there was the “Rapid Ride”:

Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque….

Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?”

Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.”

I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a beat up paperback Beowulf. “It’s a poem,” the guy says, opening it randomly, pointing to text. “Old English” – he points to the left page, then to the right, adds – “translation”.

They both got off the bus.

You don’t learn shit like that when you drive.

In one of those essays that rockets through the discourse these days, Jasmine Sun offered a riff on parkour:

To most citydwellers, stairwells are stairwells, and walls are walls. But hostile architecture is no deterrent to the traceur. They develop what’s called parkour vision: “walls become nothing more than ‘vertical floors’ for example, there to be run up or along; metal handrails seem to morph into intricate pathways to be walked; gaps in architecture become spaces to be filled with dynamic jumps.”

In reaching for the riff, Sun seems to have missed the point of parkour, which is to create one’s own puzzles out of the urban furniture for the puzzles’ sake. But it’s a good riff nonetheless, I would have tweeted it in the olden days, cheerfully ripping it out of its context and repurposing it for my own needs, like a piece of parkour urban furniture.

The practical value of Albuquerque’s blue buses for me is in service of my old man legs: my bike rides take me down to the river, and if I’m tired I can just throw my bike on the bus to get back up the hill. The blue bus has low overheads, no need to really worry about the schedule, a through line between the downtown/river neighborhood and my neighborhood. The low overhead means I never have to wait long, and the wait is always interesting – my mental parkour, making my own sense of the urban furniture of the beer place turned coffee place across from the Sixth Street stop, or the tourists out by Old Town, or the urban circus that is the Alvarado Transportation Center.

Alvarado is the best, but there’s always a risk that by the time I get there the bike slots on the bus will be full, so I usually pick an early stop just to be sure I can get on.

On a Sunday, if I go to the Alvarado and I’m lucky, the randomly timed Amtrak is up on the rail platform (there is a “schedule”, but it’s loose), which is my favorite bit of mental parkour, and I’ll go watch the tourists de-train and re-train and on the best days, if I’m not too hungry and can stay, I get to watch the Southwest Chief pull out, headed for Chicago.

The route of the bus is so deeply familiar that there is nothing new to learn, which is part of the mental parkour too, because there is always something new to learn, that is the puzzle. And the people-watching on the bus is precious, a shared humanity as we all nestle together in a big tube of metal, our separate purposes converged for a few minutes on a shared purpose before pulling the yellow cord to ring for our stop and going our separate ways.