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 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,...
We won't tell anyone I took it for a test drive.
As I pulled my 358 into the layover at Second and Main, I noticed someone had forgotten their bicycle on the rack. It was definitely on the junker side of things, a red jalopy of a bicycle with peeling...
"Next one is Aurora," I announce from the 44 route. "Aurora Avenue, where you can get the E Line. That's the old 358."
People get on, and people get off. As we pull away, I say, "here we go!"
I always say something like that. Variations on a theme: "Hang on...
A woman in her twenties with a terrific, full-bodied Afro boards, all smiles and legs. It's nighttime on Capitol Hill during Pride week. The white girls at the front see her walk past, and one almost falls forward as she hollers out,
"Don't ever ruin your beautiful hair!"
Meaning, of course,...
Josh is in his late teens, African-American and something else, tall but not too tall. In our youth we sometimes oscillate between dialects, particularly when we have multiple backgrounds. Regional dialects and generational slang can surface on will for people of any age. Lyndon Johnson would speak differently based...
Not all of the conversations I have on the bus are the gleeful bastardizations of syntax which I often record– and which are no less legitimate uses of the English language, mind you.* Here's a sample of a perfectly grammatically acceptable discourse.
"So what's playing at the Benaroya tonight?" I...
This guy stumbles on like a rock tumbling through an unstoppable river. An imposing physical presence. We're somewhere at the bottom of Rainier Valley. He's clad in a white oversized T-shirt that would be a dress on me, the shirt peeking out from under a puffy black jacket of colossal...
Let's see, where were we. Continuing our exploration of what trolley buses are, from the previous post~
All other trolley systems in the US have backup motors for dewirements or reroutes, and Metro's new fleet* will as well. But the fact that we have to drive without them now makes...