To and From Home

CHICAGO—By the time I finish working this summer, I will have spent almost 12,000 minutes traveling to and from my job. When I tell people that I commute an hour and a half each way, every day, I get a variety of responses. The most common is outright horror. “Oh my God,” they say, “Why would you do that to yourself?” which is a bit disconcerting, since it would seem more appropriate if I had just declared that I was going to spend my summer break chewing off my own arm, not living in the suburbs.

The second reaction I receive is pity. “Oh you poor thing,” they nod, “I’m so sorry you have to go through that.” This is probably my favorite, given that it’s the most pity I’ve gotten since Hubert, the hermit crab that illegally adopted my Grays room as residence for three months, passed away in January.

The third response I’ve received is complete disinterest. A “hmph” or dismissive nod might indicate a slight acknowledgement of the hassle of getting up at 5:30 a.m. in order to be at work at eight. Yet other than that, the response is one of “tough luck.” But as much as I like taking on the role of martyr, the fact of the matter is that I enjoy my commute to and from work as much as I enjoy the job itself.

Whereas a native Bostonian might look on an hour-long trip to Providence as a trek, I see nothing unusual about the fact that my family regularly jumps in the car and drives seven hours to see our family in Kentucky. Therefore, spending 60 minutes on the train from my town to Chicago in the mornings and evenings barely seems like an inconvenience at all. Sure, walking twenty-five minutes to work makes the walk to the Quad seem like a hop, skip, and a jump, but after sitting on the train for an hour, it feels great.

My mixed commute is like a win-win Catch-22—which is a reference I now feel alright using, considering I’ve actually had a chance to read the book this summer. Thanks to the train ride, of course.

Commuting has a unique culture; a strange, exclusive social order open only to those who live inconveniently far away from their workplace, with a euphemistic jargon of its own. For instance, “commuter shoes” are the flip-flops you take off in the elevator before jamming your feet into heels, “listening to music” is “the only way to drown out the noise of the screaming family of four”, and “this is my half of the seat” is the appropriate translation for: “Stop opening your Wall Street Journal into my face, you suburban asshole.”

Commuting with someone, especially if you don’t know them, is a shared, yet completely isolated experience, unparalleled outside of the confines of a bus or train. Everyday, I sit across the aisle from a man with a Brazilian flag sewed onto his backpack. Over the weekend, I was at a music festival with 36,000 people when we walked right past each other. We didn’t exchange a word, but a creepy sense of recognition was definitely there.

But besides reading time and a freakish connection with Mystery Man From Brazil, three hours a day of transit have given me valuable perspective. Working at a nonprofit social services agency designing a pre-employment program for low-income youth living in public housing (and getting to and from it), I have come to realize my situation is, well, quite ideal.

I’m lucky enough to have a stipend to pay for train passes, and I’m lucky enough to not have any pressing responsibilities outside of my job. On the other hand, the youth I work with are enmeshed in a Catch-22 of their own, much graver than mine. They need jobs in order to support themselves and stay afloat in communities where adult unemployment rates reach as high as 95 percent.

Businesses, however, refuse to open stores in these poor, dangerous neighborhoods, and so teens must commute in order to join the workforce. Unfortunately, when you also go to high school and have to care for your children (in some of these communities, one-fourth of teenage girls are mothers), commuting across town is an unmanageable time commitment. The necessity of commuting out of certain communities in Chicago in order to gain employment is perpetuating a cycle of unemployed and impoverished youth; it is a problem that must be addressed on the grassroots level.



The social problems framed by the culture of commuting are deep, complex, and without apparent solution. However, these issues demand that we recognize their presence and meditate on their impacts, even if it’s only as the buildings and trees whiz past us, faster and faster, away from the city, closer to home.



Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. She also spends her commuting hours resenting the need to dress professionally, especially when the alarm clock rings at the crack of dawn.