Love and Basketball

I've just completed my first nocturnal DART trip. For reasons that I'll make clear later, I decided tonight to go carless, to traverse Dallas from northeast to southwest using only mass transit. This required about 10 minutes of waiting at a bus stop and roughly 1.5 miles of walking.

My trip began at 5:50 p.m., when I began walking from my apartment in Oak Cliff to a bus stop about a mile away, on DART bus route #1. Fortunately, the bus was 2 minutes late, so I got there in plenty of time. I've discovered, in my DART experience thus far, that it's best to get to a bus stop about five minutes before the scheduled stop, and to allot a window of about 5 minutes for the bus to be tardy. This generally has eliminated any missed-bus episodes.

I took the bus to a stop near Greenville Avenue, Dallas' hardiest bar scene, for a meetup with buddies to watch the Mavericks beat the crap out of the Hornets, which they did with gusto. The Billiard Bar has become a sacred spot for Mavs Watch Parties since last year, when we watched Dirk & Co. get robbed by referees in the Finals fiasco.

I took my leave at 9:45 p.m., knowing I needed to hightail it to the bus stop at Munger and Live Oak. The bus may have stopped somewhere closer, but I was relying on a route #1 map I managed to obtain on the way to the bar. DART schedules give the approximate times for a few select stops, not every stop, and this was the closest guaranteed pickup I could find. I got to my stop 15 minutes early, watched a man in a cowboy hat hold vigil aimlessly outside an apartment building, and boarded my bus at 10:06 p.m., four minutes ahead of schedule.

It's difficult to time the stop on a bus when you're riding a route for the first time. I was trying to time my stop to the intersection of Beckley and Davis. Stopping the bus required pressing a horizontal strip that runs just under the window on each side of the bus, which causes a dinging sound audible, most of the time, to the busdriver. I saw my intersection's traffic lights approaching and rang the bell, only to find I was to be let off a block short of my destination. Close enough. It was about 10:40.

At 11 p.m., I was home, walking through my front door after checking my mail, a task which, in my fulltime driving days, was an afterthought for one accustomed to exiting his car and entering through the rear door of the apartment. My walk home had been uneventful, and I won't be ashamed to admit a small bit of relief for that. I live in a developing neighborhood, by no means crimeridden but certainly not a gated community.

I will talk more about my neighborhood, about my bus rides and about my mission, if you could call it that, in subsequent posts. For now, I just want to feel good about this fact: I had a few beers and took mass transit home in Dallas. I'll consider that victory for the evening.

Oh, a footnote (or an epigram, really, overheard on the bus home): "Grand Prairie is a great place to meet women. A lot of their men are locked up or deported."