Reporting beats a few habits into you, like asking follow up questions and recording names when something’s unfolding nearby. A few years ago, when on vacation in Mexico City, an earthquake hit; it took longer than I like admitting to shake out of my “I’m not working” mindset and start filing timing and details and copy to the relevant desk.
But! This is an off the books newsletter, a place where I can just describe stuff that happened, like a normal person. This is my first edition of Normal Anecdotes.
I landed in Baltimore because Trump voters made me. It’s more banal than it sounds. I knew nine days ago that I would hand off my piece of Georgia runoff reporting and head back to DC on January 5. This was part habit, and part strategy: I don’t anchor stories from election night events anymore, and I wanted to be in DC to write about the ramshackle coup attempt that everyone’s so excited about.
So, my plane landed at 5:15, too late for me to make one of the convenient trains home. (On the slower pandemic schedule, none would get me home by 7.) I figured it would be easier to get a cab home from the train station anyway, and if I lucked out on a delayed train, well, neat.
I boarded the 5-minute bus to the rail link. It was the first crowded bus I’d boarded in months, and being used to standing on the buses in DC, I put down my suitcase and stood up. I’d left my obnoxious over-ear headphones on, so didn’t notice the driver telling me to sit until he stalled the bus.
“You can play with your toy when you sit,” he said.
This trip had been packed with minor indignities, so I added that to the stack and moved to the seat that a middle aged man had just vacated for me. I was about to thank him when he interjected:
“You should have just sped up and let him fly to the front,” he said. “Teach him a lesson!”
That was obnoxious, I thought. “That was obnoxious,” I said. When he didn’t react, I stared directly at him for a few seconds until he locked eyes with me. “You okay?” he said. All I needed to see was his stupid smile fade, and it had, so I answered honestly: “Yep.”
Only then did I realize that my seat Samaritan was wearing TRUMP branded sneakers. Aha! Of course, there are three airports with easy DC access, and I wasn’t the only person who went for the cheap option. (Probably the only one who did so on a work trip, but this is a learned habit I’ll never break.) A good number of the passengers were heading to protest the election results.
You can see why I didn’t say anything. We didn’t get off to a good start, and I was off the clock for a few hours. Plus, I’d be talking to Trump voters the next day. Two hours earlier I’d been just as irritated by a TSA agent who insisted that my shaving razor needed to be thrown out for me to board a plane, so my beef wasn’t political. (I’m too easily annoyed, a subject for another newsletter.
I grabbed “Names on the Land” and started to read. The man and his seat mates, who he’d apparently struck up conversations with before I got on, picked up their thread. Eavesdropping isn’t optional in close quarters, so I was going to hear their conversation anyway.
It went like this. One woman was worried about what would happen to the ability of restaurants to stay open “if Trump doesn’t win.” Another worried about antifa disrupting the DC protests; a man across the aisle, next to me, confidently said that they would be outnumbered.
The bus stopped again. “The lady in pink!” said the driver.
There was some shared confusion on the bus. Most of us couldn’t see a woman in pink.
“Lady in pink. Put on your mask. You wear a mask on this bus.”
That explained it. The bus started moving again, and a man I could see stood up and began yelling.
“Fuck you, asshole,” he said. He wasn’t talking to the driver. The man sitting in front of him had, it sounded like, muttered something about the woman not wearing a mask. “Don’t fucking tell my wife what to do. Stop the bus! Get the fuck off the bus.”
The bus didn’t stop. “Sit down,” the busybody said. “It’s over.”
The angry man, who to his credit had never taken the mask off, sat down, simmering. The conversation near me changed to “mask assholes” and how much worse things would get if, as is inevitable, Donald Trump stops being president, and whether the train would dump them somewhere dangerous in DC.
Reader: I don’t like cliches. This scene was so hackish that I couldn’t believe I was watching it. I talk to voters all the time, I see charter online, but the shared commitment to acting out roles on this bus was excruciating.
I accidentally started to think too hard about it. The brio heavily outweighed anyone’s desire to act. The guy who’d got on my nerves had tried to get the rebound after someone *else* had joked about me. The Wife Guy had no plan whatsoever after the failure of his “yell until his nemesis leaves the bus” plan. Everyone filling a role, in an enclosed space, with chips nobody wanted to knock off their shoulders.
The bus stopped. I got off near the end of unloading. “Sorry about that,” I said to the driver. “I live in DC; I stand in the middle of the bus all the time.”
“All good,” he said. “Don’t forget your toy!”
The next train wasn’t coming for another hour. The waiting area would be an eavesdropping Shangri-la. I got a cab.
As someone that worked in Baltimore for a year then moved to DC/lived there, it is so very odd traveling to Baltimore after a few years in DC. They are wildly different. Both police forces are inadequate but I feel like maybe someone would care more if you got stabbed in DC, but don’t hold your breath. Especially if you take the red or green line.