Nathan Vass
Nathan Vass is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and author by day, and a Metro bus driver by night, where his community-building work has been showcased on TED, NPR, The Seattle Times, KING 5 and landed him a spot on Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the 35 Most Influential People in Seattle. He has shown in over forty photography shows is also the director of nine films, six of which have shown at festivals, and one of which premiered at Henry Art Gallery. His book, The Lines That Make Us, is a Seattle bestseller and 2019 WA State Book Awards finalist.
I pull up to the Third and Pine island stop, outside McDonalds. We're in the vortex, the nerve center. Every major city has an intersection like this, but few are as colorfully and ferociously egalitarian. Class and status groups rub shoulders an onion-skin hairsbreadth from each other, a melting...
I see her brighten the bus stop as I pull up. Third and Union southbound, some time before midnight. Hers is a smile which renders her ageless; you see the girl she used to be, echoes of a happier time. She's thirty-five and thin, ready to go home now,...
I'm riding the bus home tonight, racking my brain for particulars. He had a helmet, I'm thinking. It's just after 1am, and I'm sitting forward on the last bus to my house. Today was the Torchlight Parade, and a detail from the night of madness is nagging at me....
I recognize his face and gait, but what happened to the mangy hair? He's still scruffy, but his haircut looks like that of just a regular joe. In my head I called him Grizzly Alan, and I haven't seen him in more than a year. A smart fellow, about my...
At Letitia I put the lift out, saying goodbye to a couple I haven't seen in some years. He's a Vietnam vet with a summer job transporting convicts between different prisons cross-country. She remembers me from the 5 and likes my attitude. They're on their way to the hospital and...
Two years ago I posted the first of these stories, which now number in the hundreds and stem from seven years of bus driving. The story was from a page in a journal which I never intended to share, but there was something about the exchange I very much wanted...
As I woke a scruffy older sleeper at the U District terminal, he grumbled out something I think he intended to be derogatory. Something about "you know what you and your coworker, buhuuuh uuh," a remnant from that zone between dreams and wakefulness. I couldn't understand his slurred speech...
We're headed out to the Valley. I pull up to Martin Luther King Way, across from Franklin. It's a dingy gloom tonight. The dealers are on both sides of the street. Various shapes lumber about in the periphery, shifting figures in front of lights, signs of life at the...