A woman boards the 82 Westheimer bus at the intersection of Westheimer Road and South Shepherd Drive Friday, Jan. 22, 2016, in Houston.
Michael Ciaglo/Houston Chronicle
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I took the Route 20 bus to watch (and write about) the Astros. A string of buses, along with the Red and Purple line light rails, ferried me to World Cup festivities across the city, from East Downtown to Reliant Stadium. The 82 deposited me near my apartment after several raucous nights in Montrose. I took Metro to Memorial Park and to Buffalo Bayou Park. And there were some afternoons and evenings when I took it nowhere at all, boarding with a book in hand (those bright overhead lights on the bus make for great reading, after all) and no destination in mind.
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When you aren’t driving through Houston in a car, staring through the windshield mechanically the way many people stare at phone screens (perhaps even while they’re behind the wheel), the part of your brain that spends every moment of your commute cautious of who is about to merge without looking or calculating braking distances or wondering why that angry-looking little dude in the big pickup is on your tail, simply goes quiet.
You see the city differently when the senses are no longer on edge. You look out the window at the wispy clouds making a backdrop of the downtown skyline or of a water tower or even of strip malls. At all the people braving the summer sun to walk to work, to the grocery store, to school, to the park. Kids dribbling a basketball on the sidewalk. Older folks in church clothes.
You notice that the wildflowers and weeds on the overgrown medians have wilted in the August heat, and that the steel beams holding up the highways you drive every day are so, so rusted. You notice that the underpasses are teeming with life, with people sleeping under the roar of the cars overhead as others hawk flowers and water bottles and fresh fruit.
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Then, you start listening. Because the bus is full of people who know each other, who board at the same stop every day and pick up conversations they left off yesterday. Women asking each other in their language, “How was work, doña?” as they hug tote bags filled with the leftovers of that afternoon’s lunch. A sweaty man covered in paint and dust is watching videos on his phone at full volume to catch up on the day’s news.
Nothing is demanding your attention except the city going by, the people going by.
I learned to look at the city this way from the late Janis Scott, a woman known for decades in Houston as the “Bus Lady.” I met her years ago while reporting a story that had nothing to do with Metro, but we stayed in contact because, somewhere along the way, she stopped being a source and became a friend who thought I was not seeing enough of my own city.
Janis Scott at the Houston Latino Film Festival on March 16, 2023.
Gary Fountain/Contributor
She treated the system not as something to endure but as a portal to the social and cultural life of the city. As a way to reach museums and lectures and plays and concerts, yes, but also simply a reason to explore a part of town you had no other reason to visit.
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Janis saw riding the bus not as a burden but as a rite of passage, an introduction to a way of getting around that most Houstonians abandoned when the streetcars were scrapped and the city rebuilt itself around the automobile.
She died in December 2024, and I never did get to ride the bus with her. But she is on every bus I take because I have spent the time since trying to ride Metro the way she rode it: with a sense of genuine curiosity for the place we call home and, often, for no good reason at all.
Plenty of people ride because they have no other choice, and no essay can make that romantic. But I have started keeping a list of things a person ought to do if they want to be a true Houstonian, and making a habit of riding Metro, even if you don’t have a reason to, is near the top. Just to see what is out there.
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What are Houston’s rites of passage, the things you would tell somebody to do before they got to call this place theirs? Email me!
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