玛丽亚•沃克
From the operator cab of a light rail train, life passes at both rapid and incremental speeds. 车站无处不在, 的信号, the maintenance of way employees dispatched to fix a track issue. Subtle changes include the colors of the landscape with each season, 新安装的艺术品, the office buildings and homes that rise further from the ground with each new run.
This is the awe-inspiring view that RTD operator 玛丽亚•沃克 has beheld since 2016, when she decided to step away from driving casino-bound buses for something that was literally and figuratively bigger. There’s an adrenaline rush from operating a light rail train, 她告诉你, as it flies down the tracks with the scenery of life laid out ahead. Walker has had a lifelong fascination with big vehicles – she considered driving 18-wheelers – and says that operating them is thrilling.
Generally speaking, she said, “You don’t have anyone in front of you or on the side of you. You’re just soaring, you’re just going down the track, looking at everything.”
The wide-open spaces Walker now sees are a sharp contrast to those of her childhood, when the 纽约 native traversed her dense, 步行到布朗克斯区的市区, 骑自行车或, 有时, on the 纽约 City Subway – the largest transit system in the United States. It was nothing for her to jump on a train to go see family living in another borough, 从曼哈顿到布鲁克林, 或者从布鲁克林到皇后区. 作为一个青少年, when she went to live with her maternal grandmother in Brooklyn, Walker was on the train every day to get to school in downtown Manhattan, 或者去西班牙哈莱姆见她父亲.
我已经习惯了这个交通系统, 沃克说:, she was struck when she traveled outside of 纽约 and saw how different other people’s environments were. She moved to Colorado in her 20s on the suggestion of a friend, 谁告诉她这个州是“美丽的”, 而且不冷.”
“You visit other states and it’s like, how do they get around out here?沃克挖苦地说. “Everything there (in 纽约) was just so fast-paced. 你只要走，走，走，走，走. 你不能因为任何事而放慢速度. 来到这里，感觉就像，好吧! 我只是住在乡下，不是吗?”
Now 45, Walker is quick to add: “I love it out here. I love that it’s not so fast, and I love that I can slow down a little bit.” When she returns East to visit family, she said, “after two days, I’m ready to come home.”
Walker relishes the outdoors and loves her quiet neighborhood in Aurora, where she has covered her corner lot with planter boxes of petunias, 三色紫罗兰, 老虎百合, 万寿菊和百日菊. Gardening brings a beauty and order that she loves – and calls to mind the countless hours she worked in her granny’s backyard in Brooklyn as a child.
Walker continues to be influenced by the now-83-year-old matriarch and grew up around people her grandma’s age, “所以年长的人喜欢我.” Most of her friends in Colorado are elderly, Walker notes, and she loves that. “Those are the best people I have,”她说。. “他们的头脑是正确的. 没有什么愚蠢.”
Walker acknowledges that she leaves an impression on people. An older man calls her “princess” every time he sees her. Customers riding in wheelchairs smile upon seeing her approach, 回忆起她在以前的旅行中的好意. 一个女人, a casino bus passenger from many years before, recognized Walker immediately upon boarding her train and shouted, “嘿, 纽约!”
Another woman had lost everything she had, 沃克说:, although she didn’t know that until later. “她没有钱回家, 我想, 你知道, 反正我也要往那边走, 回到车库,”她说。. “I told her, I can just drop you off, and she had to walk a block or so away. 我再见到她的时候, she told me that she couldn’t believe there were still good people in the world. 直到今天，我们还在交谈.”
“You just have to be kind to people,” Walker added. “You never know what people are going through.”
Her work never feels repetitive, she said, because something happens on every trip. And while she often operates trains on different lines, 她喜欢长度, 变化速度和动态的R线, 从奥罗拉一直延伸到孤树镇. “It’s an hourlong trip,” 沃克说:, “but it doesn’t feel like it.”
在大流行期间, Walker has spoken with her passengers about their reliance on transit – how so many people continue to work at essential jobs, and how they don’t have their own vehicles. She said she has been thanked by customers who have told her, “We need you to be here to get around.”
Operating a light rail train has led Walker to open up more to others. It constantly affirms the importance of courtesy and customer service. It has demonstrated the respect others hold for her work when they call her “ma’am” – or, 在一个案例中, 甜美的灵魂.”
It has shown Walker that the Denver region is, in fact, very different than her community of origin. “It’s a pretty good region,”她说。, then corrected herself: “No, it’s a great one.”