Despair Management: Thoughts on commuting

17 hree years ago i was stuck on a New Jersey Transit commuter train under the Hudson River—we had been stalled on the tracks for forty-­ five minutes, the lights periodically flickering on and off—when I looked at my watch and realized my two hour and twenty minute commute, from the college where I teach in central New Jersey to my home in Manhattan, was entering its fourth hour. Four hours. The number had a certain awful grandeur. In four hours you can fly from New York to Dallas. I’d left the campus at 8:30; it was nearly midnight, and I still had to wend my way through the wretched, deserted corridors of Penn Station, try to make an express A train, and stumble home past the revelers on MacDougal Street. My wife and I are both college essay Despair Management Thoughts on commuting Jess Row T 18 | Jess Row professors: she teaches at New York University, and we have an apartment in faculty housing, the only reason we can afford to live in Manhattan. I wanted to laugh, or cry, or at least groan, but I just sat there, unmoving, not quite feeling all of my limbs. There was no cell coverage or Wi-­ Fi; no one could find me, and I couldn’t send out a distressed text, a tweet, or a post. I had my laptop and books with me, but I couldn’t read, or work, or even sleep. The bodies and faces of the few other passengers in the car were similarly still, drawn, unreadable, like a reenactment of George Tooker’s The Subway, if we think of that painting as less about existential dread than about the ordinary everyday faces of New Yorkers learning that the D train is running local every other stop on the C track, or that the second train to Ronkonkoma has been canceled. How long can I stand this? is the commuter’s default question . Deciding that enough is enough can mean giving up work altogether—lack of transportation is one of the main causes of American unemployment—or, as in my case, abandoning public transportation and getting back into the car. Not long after this episode, I decided to start driving to work, the more expensive, more dangerous, and less ecologically justifiable option, because it was faster, more direct, and more predictable. I didn’t want to drive; no one wants to drive on the New Jersey Turnpike. But it was the better of two bad options. And that is a good description of how most Americans feel about their commute: a sense of vague resignation and helplessness , tinged, I’ve noticed, with an element of shame, as if the issue were not even worth talking about. 2 every commute tells a story. For those of us who suffer long commutes and would rather forget them as soon as they’re over, the story often begins with: I never imagined my life would turn out this way. But there’s more to it than that. In his 1980 study The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau calls adapting to the Roland Tanglao, Paris Metro, 2015 20 | Jess Row unpleasant realities of our environment “making do,” or “tactics,” as opposed to “strategy.” Strategy is the way a highway system is designed; tactics are the shortcuts commuters use to skip the tolls, circle the bottlenecks, skirt the speed traps. Of course, there’s an enormous industry built around helping American commuters develop better tactics for their miserable commutes: AirBuds and gigantic coffee cups, audiobooks and memory-­ foam car seats, podcasts , Siri, Waze. And more productive ones as well: bikes, bike lanes, public bike-­ rental programs, carpools. “Without leaving the place where he has no choice to live and which lays down its law for him,” Certeau writes, the commuter “establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in-­ between, he draws creative results from his situation.” I have friends who, when I ask them, admit they look forward to their commutes: they can work uninterrupted on the train, or become absorbed in one audiobook after another, or just decompress...