Art Feature: A six hour tour

Published September 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 8

by Ross Evertson

All but one stop. After going all the way from ‘Aspen Grove’ in Littleton, past the Rossonian in 5-Points, and all the way down to wherever-the-heck it is at the end of the F Line—I couldn’t bear to take the last leg over to 9-Mile. While the C/D Lines  briskly take you through the industrial corridor of Santa Fe Blvd, the F Line is slow, starting in a concrete valley west of I-25 and gradually turning into a tour of office park sprawl with bits of the prarie that said sprawl is consuming.

It  was a strangely exhausting experience, as it often is when you give yourself over to transportation for multiple hours.  I started around 10a.m. and was done at 4:30p.m. I explored some stations, such as the tiny, strange island of Oxford. Others I skipped over, like the confusing concrete cave of the Convention Center station with its parking garage feel.

There was a time when I commuted on the D Line.  It was supremely convenient, though it was an experience I was never fully inolved in. Always with a bike (people with bikes don’t make friends on the light rail) and an ipod, I was very insulated from my fellow passengers. This ride, though, with my eyes and ears focused on what was happening in the train, I realized most everyone else was insulated as well. The main exception being teenagers still out of school for the summer—they seemed to love to co-opt the train passangers as their audience. Everyone else was buried in a paper or behind a wall of MP3s.