The privilege of getting from Point A to Point B

I hang up the phone, and it hits me again. Even with certain limitations on my time and wallet, I enjoy a lot of privilege in life.

The person I spoke with is an alumnus of my workplace, Buena Vista University, and he was calling from two states east, where he lived both before and after attending BV.

When he came to school in the 1960s, he rode the Illinois Central right into town. (If you, like me, hear strains of “City of New Orleans” in your head — only because it mentions that railroad — you’re welcome.)

I try to imagine a young man leaving everything and stepping off the train with a suitcase (or two) and starting college in a place where nobody knows him. What an adventure.

My own train dreams took me from Omaha to Seattle on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and the Empire Builder from Seattle to Minneapolis on the way back. Not because I had to but because I wanted to.

Thanks to the power of advertising, train travel seemed romantic. Without a sleeper car, however, by the third day, the romance was gone. Still, that trip in the 1980s scratched the “see America by rail” itch and back then, it was affordable. I was just out of college and had no credit card.

For Mr. X from a Midwestern state, the train was the only way he could get to school. He didn’t drive and he never has. There are people in the world who cannot or will not drive, a fact I often forget.

He would visit campus more often because he has a deep love for our school, but the train stopped running before he graduated. Greyhound was the next best thing, which if you’ve ever taken one, that might make you laugh.

You’ll remember the racing dog painted on the side of the bus. Again, advertising at its most disingenuous. There is a reason folk singer Harry Chapin called it a “dog of a way to get around.”

Like a dog, it would trot here and there, stopping at little towns all along a route. For people with less means — or no car — it provided a way to get around. For Mr. X, the bus would get him to Storm Lake and within striding distance of campus, until that, too, stopped.

In college, I once boarded a Greyhound in Hospers, Iowa, on a summer Sunday morning and rode it to Minneapolis. It was a long hot bus ride, and it took all day, rather than the usual four hours by car.

None of my trips on public transportation were necessities, and that’s what I mean about privilege. My life and livelihood did not depend on those modes of getting around.

For Mr. X, the closest he can get to Storm Lake now is a bus stop in Fort Dodge, and because he doesn’t drive, that isn’t close enough. The bus doesn’t come anywhere near Hospers anymore, either.

People with heaps of privilege may wonder what the fuss is about. “Get a car, and get on with it!” As if it’s so easy for someone with health challenges or little means.

We, the privileged, whizz by and don’t give our mobility a second thought.

In her book, Paper Girl, author Beth Macy travels to her Ohio hometown to find the world she once knew long gone. Rampant social problems and NAFTA eroded the fabric of a once-vital manufacturing town. Its young people are beset with adult problems and few resources to assist them toward a better life.

Macy follows a few teenagers who yearn for more education following high school, but getting to the nearby community college is itself a big hurdle. One girl has no car but  determines to ride her bike 20 miles (one way) every day — even in winter — until a teacher points out the improbability of that.

One young man starts his classes, but immediately his car dies, and he has no money to replace his wheels. Coupled with a family emergency, he drops out in the first weeks of the term.

How much harder do these kids have to have it, I wonder. How much longer are legislators and fat cats going to haul out the old saw about bootstrap pulling when cruelty and lack of understanding have cut those frayed ends long ago.

For her part, author Macy also came from a hardscrabble existence and knew firsthand “how much a crap car limited a rural kid’s ability to improve their lot.”

She had to work her tail off for everything she had, but she had one advantage that the current crop of kids in her hometown don’t. She received a Pell grant that paid for her schooling, her room and board, and her books.

It was the difference that gave her a chance in life, a chance she would never have had otherwise. Without such chances, Macy “recognized the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community [she] loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place.”

Today’s Pell grant doesn’t come close to filling the bill. The maximum award for the current  academic year is $7,395. That’s less than $3,700 per semester.

Base tuition at Iowa’s regent universities is $9,852 at University of Iowa, $9,816 at Iowa State University, and $9,054 at University of Northern Iowa.

There are loans, you say? Sure, but what if, like the kids Macy met, you can’t get from Point A to Point B to begin with? What if you can’t afford a car loan? What if, for whatever reason, you don’t (or are unable to) have a driver’s license?

Most of us take getting a car, getting an education, building a life, so for granted, but poverty makes the slightest movements toward a better life seem insurmountable.

The way towns and cities are planned (I would argue NOT planned), you are screwed if you don’t have access to public transportation.

Once upon a time, you could get to Storm Lake from two states away without a car, but that was long ago in a world far, far away and gone.

In her perfect world, Joan Zwagerman would be able to fulfill all her needs on foot or by bike. The world is so imperfect.