I like to walk, and I liked it even more when I was in high school, so I didn’t think much of it when George (not his real name) told me he was late because he chose to walk. George was one of the students coming on a Boston Debate League trip to Rhode Island yesterday. He was supposed to meet us at 7:45 AM at Copley Square, the first of three train stations where our chartered bus would be picking up participants.
At 7:44, he was nowhere in sight, so I called his brother’s cell phone, which he was borrowing for the day. “What’s going on, George?” I asked, trying to give the impression that I was pretending, but only kinda pretending, to be annoyed. In other words, he wasn’t in trouble yet, but he had better get his ass in gear.
“Sorry, I had to walk. I’m on my way.”
“How far away are you?”
“Five or six minutes.”
“Alright. Feel free to run.”
Fifteen minutes later, the other latecomers had arrived, but George was still nowhere in sight. I called him again. “You told me five minutes.”
“Sorry, I’m almost there. I’m on Stuart Street. I’ve been running.”
“Stuart and what?”
“I’m almost there. Two minutes.”
“Hurry.” At the first of three bus stops, we were already twenty minutes behind schedule, and I hate being late.
George did indeed appear two minutes later, sweating despite the chilly air of a winter morning, out of breath, and with tie disheveled. “Sorry,” he panted while climbing the stairs of the bus.
“Where were you walking from?”
“Ruggles.”
“You live over that way?”
“Yeah.”
“You could have just taken the Green Line here. Or taken the Orange to Forest Hills, that’s where we’re going next.”
“Walking is faster,” he muttered, eyes fixed on the seat in front of him.
“There’s no way that’s true,” I told him, but let the matter slide.
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In part because we were late to arrive, we left Rhode Island nearly an hour later than planned, and it was well after dark as the bus approached Boston. “Where you getting off, George?” I asked him as we pulled into Forest Hills.
“Copley. I’ll walk from there.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” He wouldn’t be walking through a particularly dangerous neighborhood, for the most part, but just in general I didn’t like the idea of releasing a teenager from my custody into the street alone after dark. “Why don’t you get off here and take the Orange line.”
“I prefer to walk.”
“Alright,” I said with a resigned shrug.
Thankfully, a teacher sitting across from me was a bit more savvy. “You mean you prefer not to pay for the train?”
“Um… yeah,” he admitted, a bit embarrassed.
For me, the $1.70 train fare is a trivial expense. Sometimes I choose to walk because it is a nice day or because I feel like it, but the cost of the train is never a consideration.
Although this isn’t the first time it’s been brought to my attention that a kid from a low-income family doesn’t think this way, I don’t generally pay for kids’ train fare. The thing is that I pay for a lot of other stuff. At a typical tournament, I’m buying breakfast and lunch for the participants and paying for the awards we give at the end of the day, not to mention volunteering my time to organize and run the event. So even though I know that the cost of transportation can be a real barrier to participation, I usually leave that cost to the kids anyway. If they want to debate badly enough, I figure, they can find a way to come up with train fare no matter how broke they are.
But now I was faced with a new realization. George enjoys debating, and I had no doubt that if he had to take the train, he would have come up with the money. In other words, it wasn’t a matter of him not caring enough about participating to make the necessary sacrifices. But if there was any way for him to do both, to come to Rhode Island and avoid paying $3.40 for train fare, he was going to do it, even if it meant bookending a long and demanding day with a mile and a half walk through the cold to and from the bus stop. And there was nothing I could do but blush, hand him $2, and thank him for coming.