Observations riding the Cambus at the University of Iowa on a Friday, heading to work.

Trees with clumps of snow nesting in the Y formed at each branch. Street lights, flag poles shooting like frozen rocket trails into the lead sky. Workers in round brimmed hard hats and green vests, sullen, grizzled, hard-weather faces: 14th century foot soldiers. Fake balconies fronting faked arches of fake doorways high on the facade of the football stadium: architectural homage to the sport’s parasitized host. Women bolts off a bus and up the stairs in an incredible calf length coat, a motley patchwork of suede and leather squares, with fur along the seams, and a long conical hood hanging from her collar down her back to waist level: a priestess, a midwife, a herbalist, a hunter. Silver SUV racing between banks of grimy snow. Yellow-jacketed bus driver stowing gear behind his seat, standing to rest his back, doffing his jacket onto the dashboard; takes his seat, checks his passengers over his shoulder, pulls away from the curb, but he has no passengers, he pulls riderless away from the curb.

I sit on a bench in the glass-walled terminal, looking down a vacant street, walls of brick buildings to either side, tall, silent, sidewalks empty, too. Rush hour’s over, where’s my bus? Escalators running, no one riding them, humming hidden motors drive their cycles. Eventually there will be riders, eventually a bus will come: calm trusting patience of the traveler. Now and again a person appears. Down the escalator, alone: gray-haired, slightly stooped man with walking stick, but he steps along quickly and well.  A jogger running down the street, clenched fists and horizontal forearms out in front, swaying sideways in unison to the alternating, forward thrust of his shoulders driving him forward.

A bus comes and it comes like it always comes to the place where I’m using to getting on, and I do. Riding again. Bird life: two tall cranes standing long-billed above the new hospital wing, and the Hawkeye logo on tghe stadium scoreboard. Over a bridge on Melrose Avenue, look down into a yard stick straight gouge dug out over a century ago for a railroad that today rarely runs. They had to cut through the hills because the trains could not climb them. Farther down Melrose, the empty Finkbine golf course parking lot, banked all around with pushed-off snow. On the driving range, a yellow flag on a tall pole striped black and white surrounded by acres of  untouched snow. Married student housing: international students huddled in the cold at the bus stop, get on and sit together, bantering easily one to another like young couples do when they are friends who share their youth and new families in common.