As my shift came to an end and I parked the bus back at the depot, I took off my mask and took a deep breath of fresh air. The pandemic had stripped away the normalcy of the job, but it had revealed the quiet resilience of the people riding my bus. I signed off the terminal, left the sanitized cab behind, and headed home.
It was a crisp autumn morning in 2021 when I pulled into the Kalmar depot to start my shift on Line 405. The air was thick with the scent of industrial sanitizer, a smell that had become all too familiar over the past year. I grabbed my personal protective equipment from the dispatch desk, logged into the vehicle terminal, and walked out to my assigned bus.
By afternoon, the grey clouds broke, and weak sunlight filtered through the large windows of the bus. Driving Line 405 gave me a unique vantage point of Kalmar. I watched the quiet streets, the closed shopfronts, and the masked pedestrians walking their dogs. It was a lonely time to be a driver, isolated behind a plastic shield, but it also came with a profound sense of purpose.
