eCat

New Job. Actually my first bonified “job” since about age nineteen when the music industry gave me a pile of money, confirming my identity as a songwriter or “talent”. Over the years my bandmates and I survived between intermittent injections of money from music, various other gig work (moving company, concert production work, computer programming, renting out rooms, etc…) and the occasional stroke of luck but at fifty-six with two teenagers it’s gotten too expensive and undependable. The job hunt has been daunting and the ideal jobs elusive so I started this past Monday in a low paying part time role at a small local franchise run by a new mother. Cool. Easy work.

The locations unfortunately is on the opposite side of town, ten miles away, and wouldn’t you know it our car showed need of repairs the Friday before my first Monday and wasn’t ready in time. Ten miles is a long bike ride for me, particularly in two directions on a commute, so on Monday morning I decided to–after twenty hears as a Pensacola resident–try out our public transportation system, ECAT which stands for Escambia County Area Transit, and here’s how it went.

We live in Brownsville by W and Jackson Street and the job is near University Boulevard and Nine Mile Road. Apple Maps says it takes an hour and a half to get there by transit (it’s a twenty minute car ride) via two busses: the 2 and the 45. Not so bad. I need to be there at noon and work will seven pm.

My first mistake was reading the bus schedule in rows instead of columns so that at a glance it appeared there was a bus about every fifteen minutes and I though there was one just after ten o’clock which seemed like plenty of time. After about twenty minutes standing by a green metal bench at the corner of Cervantes and U street I looked again at the schedules for the 2 and 45 buses and realized there was no way I was going to make it to work on time, while Apple Maps said that cycling it was an hour trip. So I went home and got on my cool fixed gear bicycle, donned the helmet and set out in the mild, windy, fifty degree late morning with determination.

The bike route to Davis and Fairfield was familiar with S street being pretty quiet to get north. St Mary between Pace and E street by the County Jail, Sherrif’s and Habitat for Humanity office has a lot less trafic than her northern sibling Fairfield but feels a bit precarious as the driving lanes seem like they are a mile wide. This time I tried taking the Tajar bridge by the Board of Education office which features a less grueling train overpass than Fairfield (in terms of the incline) but a pretty smelly underpass to follow. Also you lose out on the benefit of the northeastern diagonal Fairfield provides.

Nearly half of the ride was up Davis which headed north is mostly uphill, the wind was blowing against me (I stopped and confirmed it standing still) and on the interminable incline leading up to the intersection of Langley I was pondering the trajic French hero Simone Weil (pronounced “vay”) who in notebooks published following her untimely death beautifully espoused the divine power of affliction. Props to cyclists in mountainous cities like Birmingham, Alabama and San Francisco.

Like most major traffic routes in Pensacola Davis features relatively continuous bike lanes but I there is some anxiety that having cars and trucks in the eleven foot highway width lanes roar within three feet of you at forty to fifty miles an hour. And what I hadn’t considered was that at seven pm this time of year it was going to be dark.

Luckily you can put your bike (if the rack isn’t taken already) on the front of the bus, so I decided for the trip home to do just that. Finding the Johnson Avenue bus stop by West Florida Hospital in the dark was fun. It’s a mostly unlit strip with no sidewalk. After following Apple Maps around for a while fruitlessly I stopped into the nearest open hospital entrance. The first two people I met were semi-toothed inpatience in the mental health wing. One of a couple of workers leaving for the day thought she had maybe seen buses stop over by a port-o-potty at the edge of the parking lot and I finally found the sign by the midblock crosswalk, only to, after finding the online schedule PDF (a file who’s name in 2025 contains the year 2016) determine that the last bus had been at six.

If it had been light out and without deadly traffic the trip home would have actually been pretty enjoyable as it was almost all downhill and mostly fairly well lit. There was just one frightening strip along the north side of Fairfield by the animal shelter where there’s no light and a pretty unmaintained sidewalk. I petitioned for the bike lanes along Pace a few years ago when the state repaved it and certainly appreciated them on that last leg of the trip.

Tuesday I actually made it to work via the bus system. I still hadn’t quite figured out the schedule and having left the house three hours before work ended up calling ECAT and after listening to a brief message offering the input of a direct extension was on the phone with a helpful fellow who told me where the 2 but currently was and confirmed that though the bus was running late there would be a fifteen minute window at the downtown transfer station within which to catch the forty-five. Nice. It seems like it wouldn’t be terribly challenging in these modern times for there to be a mobile app that could monitor and display bus locations and I wondered about this on the phone to my spouse.

The downtown transfer station consists of two free-standing plexi-glass bus shelters. Ridership seems to be about seventy to eighty percent people of color, none of whom appeared hispanic which may be due to fear of the current wave of aggressive deportations (we’ve lost two lovely Mexican neighbors over the last three months). Inside the shelter is a vinyl sign dated 2016 and showing its age which also invites you to download a bus tracker app. Look at that! There is one. Sadly when you follow the link or QR code you discover that it is not currently available. I stood behind the shelters where a guy in a Biggie Smalls T-Shirt was enjoying some sunshine. True to the schedule in fifteen minutes the 45 showed up and wound through downtown and up to Davis for the bulk of its route. The drivers are very helpful and at my exit the woman explained that on returning I’d be able to catch the last forty-five at six twenty. Fantastic but to be sure, with a few minutes to spare after my walk up the beautiful seven foot wide sidewalks of University (comfortable for two people to easily walk together or pass one another) I called ECAT and again quickly had my friend on the line who explained that while the last 45 left the Johnson Ave stop at 6:20 it would be too late to catch any other buses out of the righteously named Rosa Parks Transfer Center, the big central depot next to the county jail at Fairfield and Pace.

Most of these buses seem to run just once an hour and only between some morning commuter hour (seven maybe) and six in the evening Monday through Saturday. No buses on Sunday. They accept cash in change, ones, fives, tens and twenties but they only give change in the form of cardboard “fare cards”. I left work early so I could catch the 5:20 which had four passengers for most of the trip.

A small young woman in a large, tight-fitting grey sweatsuit was engaged in a mostly one-sided dialog with an older woman across the isle, talking about having grown up in a local neighborhood called either Shantytown or Shinytown and they realized the older woman knows her uncle and father.

I had been hoping this bus would take me back downtown, but apparently it didn’t–perhaps because of the time of day–so I got on another bus, the fifty-five, for its final round and it dropped me off a block from the back of the Saenger Theatre where I am volunteering with the Pensacola Children’s Chorus for their Christmas concert this weekend.

Not sure how often I’ll opt to spend this long on a ten mile trip but am “optimistic” that I’ll have another opportunity at it tomorrow.

10/12/2025