The Green Line

I want to put a disclaimer on the beginning of this post. I have not done extensive research on the Chicago public transit system. After today, I'm thinking maybe I should. The disclaimer is that this post is based almost entirely off of my own impressions from riding the Green Line and the things people I know have said to me about it, and not on any empirical data.

That being said, I'm not technically living in the city right now. I'm living in Oak Park, which, if I remember correctly, is the first suburb west of Chicago. I did not understand that it was a suburb until I really went into the city. For the folks back home, Oak Park reminds me a lot of Concord. From what I've seen of it so far, it's pretty similar in terms of size and how much stuff is going on. It feels like a city to me, but I came out here to experience Big City, so I go into Chicago pretty frequently. I've mostly stuck to the Hyde Park area so far, because that's where Ellie lives and I haven't spread my wings enough to stray too far from my guide yet. The easiest way to travel from Oak Park to Hyde Park, an hour to hour-and-a-half journey, is to take the Green Line.

This isn't something I thought a lot about when I first got here. One of the first things I was eager to determine was how to get into the city, and the Green Line, with a station about a ten minute walk from where I'm living right now, seemed like the obvious choice. The first time I headed into the city on Friday, I had the luxury of riding there in Ellie's car. After Ellie and I had our deep dish, she took me to the nearest subway to take the Red Line to hook up with the green line. She helped me get a Ventra Card (the Chicago equivalent of a Metrocard, a nice little piece of plastic that scans you into public transit) and sent me off with instructions about where to catch Green Line and to text her when I made it back.

The Red Line was a tense trip, not because of the Red Line itself, but because it was the first time I had taken public transit in a very long while and I was nervous about missing my stop. I had my headphones in to stand as the universal sign for "don't talk to me" and to make myself feel like I looked like this was more routine for me than it actually was, but I didn't dare play anything in case I missed an announcement, even though I could see the next stop displayed clearly on a screen in the train. It was a relief when I got off and found I had made my way to the correct connecting station. I got on the Green Line, sat down, and within a few stops I had relaxed. There were plenty of people in the car, nothing obviously sketchy was going on, and I was sure I was headed in the right direction to go home. When I finally played audio (the Blues Brothers soundtrack) and settled into writing my first burst of blog posts on my phone, I actually kind of fell in love with public transit, especially the long stretch on the Green Line. It felt like a nice place to get some writing done.

Yesterday morning, I got on the Green Line again to head into the city and meet Ellie. There was a man on the train sitting across from me the whole time I was on it. He was sort of half slumped over two seats. I could never quite tell if he was asleep or not. He never did anything creepy or violent, so I don't know why that unnerved me quite so much, but it did. Another group of people got on the train, decided they didn't want to be in the car we were in, and pushed up a box that said "FOR EMERGENCY ONLY" to open the door between cars and move, while the train was moving. This shocked me enough that I texted Ellie about it, only for her to assure me it was a relatively common experience. All that aside, it was still a mostly pleasant experience. I didn't have any writing to do that morning, but it gave me a lot of time to listen to podcasts, and people watching was fun.

Connecting to the bus at the station at 51st street reminded me that this was all still strange and new. I knew I had to connect to the 15 bus, but there were three bus stops I could see from the train station doors that all purported to be for the 15 bus. I had to walk to all these stops and read the signs before I understood that it was the 15 bus going in two opposite directions, and the stop right in front of the station was the one I had needed all along. There was no reason to be nervous; the neighborhood seemed fine, at least to my inexperienced eyes, but I was all too aware of how obvious my little loop of the bus stops made it that I didn't know what I was doing.

When I got on the bus, I realized I didn't know how that worked, either. In theory the bus had predetermined stops. I watched the screen at the front of the bus showing the next stop, and I felt good because that was familiar from the trains I had taken. Then the name of the next stop was replaced with the words "STOP REQUESTED". I was no longer sure the bus would automatically stop, and I wasn't sure how to request a stop. I watched as stop names rolled by without the bus slowing down, and I realized the bus wouldn't stop unless someone requested it or there were people waiting to board. I watched the other passengers and eventually saw a man pull a yellow cord that ran along the window, and "STOP REQUESTED" flashed again. I managed to get the bus to stop at my own stop and felt good about myself for figuring it out.

Ellie and I had an impromptu sleep over that night, because our plans ran late and it seemed like the thing to do when I was going to have to come back into the city to job hunt today, anyway. I spent the day working on an application for a dog walking app, figuring out other places to apply, and hanging out with Ellie and Julie. Ellie and I had dinner with her dads tonight, and then we played Mario Party in their living room. Around 9:20 or 9:30, Ellie's dad came in to tell her that we should stop playing and she should drive me to a downtown station, because he didn't think I should be taking the Green Line after ten at night. This gave me pause, because I had already taken the Green Line past ten on my first night in Chicago. That night while I was on the train I had gotten a text from Ellie warning me, on her dad's behalf, not to get off at any stops before my destination because the Green Line passes through some questionable neighborhoods.

I was kind of nervous the whole ride to the station, because we were cutting it close to her dad's deadline of when I should be on the train and it was definitely in my head. I half-joked half-worried to Ellie that public transit would be how I died, the way you do when trying and failing to make light of a real fear. I wondered aloud to her if maybe I should have stayed home where there weren't as many opportunities, but at least I knew how things worked. That was not my proudest moment. Ellie reassured me as best she could, joking about how long it had been since her dad had used public transit and pointing out how many plans we'd made that we hadn't done yet. I did my best to smile at her when I got out of her car and headed to the station.

When I got to the platform, I immediately felt sort of better. There were so many people around, and they were talking and joking with each other. I figured maybe I just really had made the last safe train. When it came, I got in a car with a decent amount of people but still plenty of space, and sat in the back of the car where I could see everything that was going on like Julie had told me to earlier. I couldn't quite bring myself to take out my phone and write like I had the last trip, maybe in part because I was still processing, but I did fire up my podcast. I couldn't help but settle into the trip after a few stops. I didn't feel unsafe or threatened at all. In fact, I had felt more sketched out on the trip I had taken yesterday morning in broad daylight.

Once I felt safe enough to take out my phone again, I googled (maybe foolishly since I was still on the train), "is it safe to take the Green Line?" I got super mixed results from that search. Some people said never to take the Green Line at all, because it went through a lot of high crime neighborhoods. I noticed this time when Austin, the one neighborhood pretty much everyone I know here has told me to stay out of, came up as the next stop. Other people said never to take the Green Line at night but during the day was fine, and someone else said only to ever take the Green Line during rush hours. Between all of this I managed to glean that you should always keep your belongings close to you, be aware of your surroundings, sit near the back of the train if you can (shoutout Julie), and make sure to get in a car that has at least a handful of other people in it. That's not to say there's no credence to hours of the day arguments; obviously it's easier to avoid sparse cars during a rush hour. Still, it seemed like, so long as I didn't push it to a ridiculous degree like taking the train home at one in the morning, the Green Line was a viable option.

I feel like the Green Line has sort of become symbolic of the complex relationship I have with feeling safe living in a city. Earlier today I took Ellie's dog, Jake, and the neighbor dog, Cosmo, to the park to help out Julie. While I was walking them back, a guy started walking next to me trying to run a scam. I felt perfectly safe even though I knew I wouldn't have normally because I had two medium-sized dogs attached to me. I mentioned in an earlier post that I felt safe in a way I wouldn't back home open-carrying a pride flag. Walking back from the station in Oak Park, a good neighborhood, makes me nervous because there are still people around, but not like in the city, and people go from a protection to a potential threat the fewer of them there are. My instinct is to smile at people when I see them on the street, and sometimes I still do without thinking about it and it works out, but I learned walking around on the first day that if you do that it encourages people to try to solicit things from you. The city feels weirdly safer and less safe at the same time, just like tonight the Green Line sounded like the best and worst option, and I can't figure out how to reconcile yet that they might be both at the same time.