Field Study

With the new job, I am often taking CalTrain to work. I catch one of the morning “baby bullet” trains down to the Mountain View stop. Technically, the baby bullets don’t travel any faster than the regular trains, and they certainly don’t warrant a comparison to the bullet trains of Japan. They save time merely by not stopping at nearly as many stations as the regular train. But I’m not complaining; the baby bullet cuts the regular train trip in half.

Once the train gets to Mountain View, I get on the shuttle van to Apple. There are a multitude of shuttles at the station for the expected assortment of high tech companies in the area; Google, Apple, Yahoo, NASA, Microsoft. When I see them, I can’t help but think of the expression “riding the short bus” and all it implies.

Over the short time that I’ve been doing this routine, I’ve begun to identify a few regular faces on the train and the shuttle. One pair in particular fascinates me. There is a youngish couple, a guy and a girl, who ride on the shuttle beside each other. They most often have books and are quietly reading during the ride from the train station to campus. I have never seen them chat, with each other or with other folk on the shuttle; they just sit there silently. The shuttle reaches its first stop and disgorges some portion of the riders. When the bus turns the corner for the last block before the next stop, the boy and girl pause in their reading, each holding a place in a book with a finger. During the next block, they kiss. Not a prolonged movie kiss with tongues and gyrating action. And not a peck on the cheek. They have a long lip-to-lip kiss, like you might see at an old-fashioned carnival kissing booth, or one of those radio contests involving which couple can hold a kiss the longest. They hold this kiss until the stop, where he gets off the bus silently, and she returns to her book.

Sometimes I wish I understood this ritual better. Do they have nothing to say to each other, that they ride silently every morning? Is this kiss something they talked about, negotiated and now perform every morning? Are they both still enthusiastic about it, or has one of them secretly grown weary of the routine but is afraid of saying anything about it for fear of hurting the other, or causing a fight? Maybe they both feel that way. Or maybe they both belong to some strict religious sect, and this one expression of their shared passion is as much as they are allowed to indulge. Whatever the motivation, I am fascinated by the regularity of it, the routine, the coordinated precision.

But mostly I accept that this is a ritual I simply do not understand, and likely never will. I watch it much like someone would watch a female mantis devour the head of the male during mating. It is a ritual I can study closely and speculate about wildly, but the true motivations will remain unknown and alien to me. perhaps that makes it all the more intriguing.