I\u2019ve known some folks on the South End who didn\u2019t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They\u2019d hitchhike or walk, they\u2019d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren\u2019t making some ecological, enviro \u2018green\u2019 statement — they were just poor. And without transportation, they kept getting poorer since there weren\u2019t many local jobs.<\/p>\n
A lot of us South Enders commute. Seriously commute. After my one night at the Twin City Food assembly lines and a mangled arm, I quit and found myself in a familiar predicament: unemployed with no prospects for work. Just about when I hit rock bottom and figured I\u2019d need to move to Seattle just to keep my homestead, I got a graveyard job at Everett General Hospital as an orderly two nights every weekend. 40 miles one way. I thought it was a trip to Oregon every week, an adventure in my old \u201960 Chevy Apache pickup that needed constant mechanical attention, often on the side of the road.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s an indication of just how paradisical the South End is that we\u2019ll drive to Hell and back just to live here. The missuz drove 75 miles to the University of Washington Library in Seattle for her job. I knew folks who drove to Tacoma, over 100 miles away, to find work that paid enough to keep their piece of Shangri-La-La. Course, they probably never saw it in the light of day —- mostly just imaginary real estate, sort of exactly like Heaven. Maybe without the streets of gold.<\/p>\n
My own commuting days are about over. Walk down the hill to the workshop, fire up the woodstove on cold days, go back up for the third cup of coffee and wait for the place to warm up. Sure I miss those drives through the farmlands, the tulip fields, over the rivers and past all those Puget Sound views and the volcanoes and the mountain ranges. But my truck\u2019s gonna last a decade or two longer and if I get real nostalgic about the good old days of commuting, I just take a road trip, you know, without the 8 hour shifts at the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve known some folks on the South End who didn\u2019t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They\u2019d hitchhike or walk, they\u2019d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren\u2019t making some ecological, enviro \u2018green\u2019 statement — they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[2268,2269],"class_list":["post-12327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-commuting-on-the-south-end","tag-long-distance-employment"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12328,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12327\/revisions\/12328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}