I live in the Mission in San Francisco. I work in tech. I’m that stereotype.
But this past weekend, my boyfriend and I got to escape the rhythm of city life and spend a few days up in Mill Valley. We were dogsitting for a friend.
Our stay with with Darcy — the sweetest, chillest golden — spanned a couple work days and the weekend, so we got a taste of both the commuter routine as well as the suburban Mill Valley lifestyle.
Commuter bus culture is pretty fascinating, mostly because it’s so different from my regular day-to-day (which consists of a full five minutes on bart). The evening buses had a handful of people — commuters — who knew each other from taking the same route together every day, who spent the bus ride casually catching up about the workday, reminding each other where in Not San Francisco they lived, your run of the mill small talk. Others kept mostly to themselves — these Golden Gate Transit buses have fancy ass seats that recline and free (pretty reliable) wifi. You have your newspaper-reading folks, and others with their nose in big books, ambitious souls who dare to push the boundaries of motion sickness. There are your observers, people who spend the commute seemingly lost in their own thoughts, appreciating the scenery outside as you cross the bridge.
It’s interesting to take stock of how others spend their travel time.
I was pretty impressed with how punctual the buses were, too. However, bus schedules are fucking stressful. Google Maps never tells you the correct departure time. And at one point, it tried to direct me through a wall to a bus stop on the 101. Only after pacing back and forth across a bridge over the highway (and missing a bus in the process) did I find a small path along the on-ramp which led me down to the bus depot.
While I’d like to believe that having a longer commute would make me more productive — think of all the things I could do on the way to work — I’m not sure I have the discipline for it. Taking the bus into the city makes you so dependent on a strict, external schedule, which would just cause me lots of anxiety. Though it’s very easy once you get the hang of it, being totally reliant on something completely outside of my control — and having few alternatives — is not the business.
But that’s only part of the story — the commuter work week.
The other half is the suburban weekend.
Once we took the Friday evening bus out to Mill Valley, we were free from the gridlock of the 7 by 7, the noise along Valencia, the ridiculously overcrowded Dolores Park, the stupidly long lines of Tartine — all of which would have been exponentially exacerbated by Pride weekend.
Instead, we got to spend our weekend in a beautiful single family home, with a big backyard, a garden (overflowing with zucchini, which has ~flowers~ who knew), a car, and a cute ass dog.
We were seated immediately at brunch.
We didn’t have to take uber once.
We spent our afternoon surrounded not by other people on filthy concrete sidewalks, but on the grass of Mill Valley Dog Park, around a bunch of pups and their owners and toys.
We gave Darcy a bath. (The water was muddy.)
We soaked up some sun in the backyard.
We took regular walks.
It was completely silent when we went to bed at night.
tbh I was thriving. Mill Valley as a lifestyle — not counting having to work in the city — was supremely enjoyable.
The weekend came and went. The familiar feeling of malaise on a Sunday evening swept over early in the day, due to the nagging sensation that suburb retreat was over.
At one point on my final ride back into the city, the bus driver gave us an update on the route: “Civic Center station is still closed. We will not stop at Civic Center. The next stop will be First and Mission. After that we’ll continue our regular stops, commuters.”
To which the entire bus echoed, “Got it, thank you sir.”
The language struck me. I had no idea what the regular route was. I felt like a fake commuter.
The entire bus ride, 20 some miles, cost me three dollars, and took about 40 minutes to get into the city (Van Ness and Sacramento).
Then I got an uber the rest of the way home. It was double the price to go a fraction of the distance. And took more than half the time.
Welcome back to San Francisco.
—written on golden gate transit, finished in uber, edited at home
