Some Sundays the bus to Santa Cruz, the Highway 17 Express, is crowded with students returning from a week-long break, or the Holidays, towing huge suitcases behind them. Other times it’s crowded with fun-seeking people heading for the beach. But today at the San Jose Diridon Station it is a regular kind of Sunday, and the young people informally sit on the retaining wall to make an informal kind of line. Yet they don’t hesitate to jump ahead when one didn’t react quickly enough – let’s blame cell phones on that one too. The driver greets everyone of us in the way they seem to actually enjoy their job.

The bus fills up, so at the one but last stop the driver warns the guy boarding that there may not be any seats left. A fair warning, considering that some people would then ask to be refunded if they found out there’s standing room only. But if your alternative to standing in the aisle for an hour is standing at a bus stop in San Jose for an hour to wait for the next bus which may just be as crowded, anyone would choose to stand. Or I would actually walk to the station in order to be first in line for the next one.

At the next stop he warns the young woman carrying a strange pair of pink horns who responds with “I’m not waiting an hour,” then moves towards the back, realizing the driver told her the truth. Then she throws a fit. She screams for everyone to know that she has “equilibrium issues” and the driver looks at her in the mirror saying “then sit on the floor.” He may have known her already, and another driver may have told them about her doing the route today, because he’s not really letting her take the bus over. A woman with her hair dyed purple starts defending her by saying some drivers like him are being strict about it, and that the sign above the front seats says it is for the disabled and the elderly. Right, well, I guess one can be mentally challenged and qualify. However, at the first sign of her madness, a student who was sitting quietly on the first side seat, the one jolly people in the old days used to take to have a jolly conversation with the driver, gets up to leave her the seat without hesitation.

“I’m going to report you!” she shrieks at the driver, who responds that she can, and will. Then I put on my headphones and try not to be involved, mouthing to the driver who doesn’t see me anyway, “let go.” I worry that the driver is being sent negative vibes and that his driving could be affected by the shrieking and the threats. She’s definitely mad, as she screams that she’s going to commit suicide over this incident. Obviously there’s no psychiatrist on board, or if there is, he or she isn’t volunteering a syringe to put her to sleep for the hour-long trip.

Meanwhile I’ve realized that my neighbor carries a dog in a bag, and unzipped the bag on my side to let the dog’s head hover over my lap. I actually don’t like the sensation of a dog’s nose or – gasp! – tongue on my skin, so I squeeze against the right wall while listening to an episode of “To the Best of our Knowledge.”

After we passed the summit, the driver gets on his phone, and the young and mad woman screams “what are you doing?” As if, of course, the world revolved around her, and he’s calling for reinforcement, to report a mad woman on board. Actually he was calling for the manager to be there at the station to take the report she asked for. He seems to be telling her that, and that seems to calm her. She later becomes apologetic… So there you go, another sunny day in Santa Cruz. They’ll write a report, and it will be clear that she had issues, but not necessarily other than her own.
It was just another Sunday on the Highway 17 Express. I guess I could drive, but I’ve noticed other people driving developed a kind of madness of their own, becoming angry at the least inconvenience and obsessed by their gaining over others. Imagine if drivers used public transportation, they’d be mad all the time, mad that their favorite seat was taken by someone whose race, gender, or appearance didn’t qualify them for the seat. Or mad that the driver just missed a green light, or let a car cut in front of the bus. They’d be worst than the mad woman! I think I’m going mad at the thought!