Around Town: The Tourist and the Metro Car Doors

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YOU KNOW IT'S CHERRY BLOSSOM season when you arrive at a Metro station and find every faregate clogged by someone who doesn't understand how to input their farecard. In my case earlier today, it was a family of four who were bodily blocking the three entry gates at Capitol South.

I thought about explaining to them how the cards work. The fact that I didn't might make me a terrible person. But I was in my heading-to-work mental zone, so I slid past them, touched my SmarTrip and plodded down the steps to wait for an Orange Line train out to Court House. I noticed there was a Blue Line train to Franconia-Springfield already at the platform.

That's when Dad, a blond man in his 40s who bore a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, figured the dag-gum faregates out.

"There's a traaaaaaaaaaain heeeeeeere!" he shouted as he bounded past me, scampered down the stairs and lunged for the train. Mom and the kids, mind you, were still disentangling themselves from the faregates above and didn't have a prayer of making the train.

So Dad proudly, triumphantly, skidded onto the train, stood in the doorway and defiantly stuck his foot in the path of the railcar's doors. The doors closed in every entryway but his. In his, only one of the two doors shut, as if the car was winking.

With visions of a busted train delaying my commute dancing in my head, I sprang into action.

"Sir," I said, careful to scrub any hint of condescension out of my voice, "you can't hold the doors like that."

He paused for a moment, then sheepishly stepped away from the car.

"But it worked," he said, incredulously. It's true. It had.

"Yeah, but Metro doors aren't like elevator doors," I said, repeating the mantra I'd heard countless times over the subway's public address system. "They'll break if you do that."

The doors closed and the train sped away. Dad said nothing more, but stared at me with the intensity of a man who truly believed I had just ruined his vacation. As I walked away, I heard his family finally descending the stairs, about two or three minutes after our conversation began. Which is far, far longer than Dad could have kept those doors open.

An Orange Line train came five minutes later. Dad and the fam hopped on. And all was right with the world.

It's going to be a long next few months.

— GB

File photo by Michael Lutzky/The Washington Post