Stop Log, East Riverside, No Roof Included

2:47 p.m. The pole is hot enough that I lean on it once and then never again. It has a sign, a route number, and a QR code bleached the color of weak tea. No bench. No roof. A shadow roughly the width of a broom handle that moves east at the pace of civic progress.

I am here because the truck's AC compressor died Saturday, which longtime readers will recognize as the third act of the thermostat treaty saga. The mechanic quoted me a number I won't repeat in a family blog. So: the bus.

2:51 p.m. The app says my bus is "4 min." The app has said "4 min" since 2:44. In heat like this, four minutes stops being a measurement and becomes a mood.

2:53 p.m. For anyone just checking in, here's the news. About 1,400 CapMetro bus workers voted to authorize a strike, and 99.5 percent of them voted yes. Their contractor and their union are still deadlocked over wages and training. KUT reported it Monday. An authorization isn't a strike. It's the part where people formally say they've had it, which in Austin is usually done on Nextdoor with worse grammar.

Ninety-nine point five percent. I have lived in this city a long time and I have never seen that many people agree on anything. Not breakfast tacos. Not Franklin versus whoever you're mad at this year. Not whether Lady Bird is a lake or a reservoir. The council couldn't get 99.5 percent agreement on what time it is.

When 1,400 people who drive forty-foot buses through Austin traffic in July line up that tightly behind one idea, the idea is probably not "we're greedy." It's more like "we noticed."

2:58 p.m. Company has arrived. A woman in a nurse's-aide scrub top, an insulated lunch bag, and a towel folded over her head like she's about to deliver a sermon in the desert. We nod at each other. That's the whole etiquette at an unshaded stop: you nod once, and then you both look up the road like you can make the bus appear by staring.

"Every summer," she says, to nobody. It's a complete sentence.

3:02 p.m. Here's a survival guide for the unshaded stop. I worked it out the hard way, as a man whose only qualification is suffering:

• Stand in the shadow of the sign, not the pole. The sign casts about eleven square inches of mercy. Share it.
• Do not touch the trash can lid. It works as a griddle.
• Your phone will overheat before you do. That's how you'll know you're next.
• If a building nearby has an awning, it belongs to a business that will not let you stand under it. This is called "activated street frontage."

3:06 p.m. Across Riverside, a new building has a rooftop amenity deck. I can see the shade sails from here, white triangles taut as a yacht. Somebody up there is lying on a lounger at an angle I would describe as aggressive. The rendering for that building surely had trees. The rendering for my stop had me in it, smiling, in a light jacket.

3:09 p.m. "4 min."

3:11 p.m. A kid of maybe fifteen joins us with a skateboard and the serene indifference that only someone whose body hasn't started keeping score can manage. He is wearing black jeans. In July. He is stronger than all of us and he will learn.

3:14 p.m. Let me be clear about where my irritation goes, because it's too hot to waste any.

It doesn't go to the drivers. The drivers sit in a box of glass on asphalt while the rest of Austin honks at them for existing. They deal with the guy who wants to pay in Sacagawea dollars, the scooter that pops out of nowhere, and the tourist asking if this goes to "the Rainey Street." From what I can tell, they want better pay and better training. Those are the two things you'd most want the person driving you to have.

It doesn't go to the riders either. Riders are the woman with the towel on her head, the kid in the black jeans, and me with my dead compressor.

It goes to the setup. A public agency hires a private contractor to run the buses, then acts a little surprised when the contractor's workers bargain with the contractor. It's like hiring someone to babysit and then being shocked they want to be paid. Wages and training, deadlocked, in the hottest stretch of the year, with the whole system resting on the people at the table agreeing to agree.

Meanwhile, sometime soon, there will be a press release with the word "mobility" in it at least four times.

3:19 p.m. The nurse's aide tells me her shift starts at four. She tells me this the way you'd mention the weather, because it is the weather. If the buses stop, she says, she doesn't know what she'll do, then laughs. That's the laugh of someone who absolutely knows what she'll do: she'll figure it out, the way people who ride the bus always figure it out, at their own expense, in the heat.

That's the part that sticks to me worse than my shirt. Anyone who can afford to treat a bus strike as an abstraction already isn't at this stop.

3:23 p.m. I recall, without being asked, the old armadillo-era bus shelters, or at least the ones in my memory. Some had roofs. One on South First had a bench so carved up it could've been a yearbook. Was there more shade back then? Probably not. Probably there was the same amount of shade and fewer people needing it, and I've just aged into a man who thinks every bench used to be better. Still: a roof. A roof is not nostalgia. A roof is a roof.

3:27 p.m. The kid takes off his skateboard shoes and stands on them barefoot so his feet aren't on the concrete. This is genius. It's also the kind of innovation a city should be embarrassed to make necessary. He doesn't need a co-working studio with membership tiers named after trees. He needs one actual tree.

3:31 p.m. "Arriving."

3:33 p.m. "4 min."

That's how it'll go in the history books.

3:38 p.m. The bus comes. Of course it comes. Somebody drove it here through Riverside traffic, in this heat, for wages that 99.5 percent of their coworkers just called insufficient, by vote, on the record. The doors fold open and the cold air rolls out like a blessing. The towel comes off the nurse's aide's head, almost ceremonially. The kid puts his shoes back on.

The driver says "afternoon" to each of us. I say thank you, and mean it more than I've meant anything since the mechanic said "compressor."

3:40 p.m. Final readings, from my seat by the window:

If those 1,400 people do walk off, I won't blame the people walking. I'll blame whoever thought a heat-dome summer was a good time to find out how little the people in the driver's seat can be paid while the city keeps moving. Pay them. Train them. And, while you're at it, put a roof on the stop.

The nurse's aide gets off two stops before me. On her way down the steps she tells the driver, "Hang in there."

He says, "You too."