Vass is paying attention to everything happening around him from the conversations he’s having and the regulars who show up every day. And he’s written and compiled the stories of those interactions into a new book, “Deciding to See: The View from Nathan’s Bus.”

The book is a collection of dozens of narratives of daily interactions across the city, touching on loss, joy, and connection on a King County Metro bus. Vass drives routes like the E line, which runs down Aurora Avenue and the 49-7 combo, which goes from the U District, through Capitol Hill, downtown, and up Rainier.

These are some of the most high-passenger volume routes and also some of the ones with the most reported safety issues.

He’ll admit that they’re the routes, “everyone else hates to drive.” But he likes them because he tends to find a stronger sense of community in those areas.

“It's nice to be driving the bus where it's loud because everyone's talking to each other, catching up, asking about each other's kids. It feels like you're part of something," Vass says. "I prefer that to the more stereotypical Seattle freeze type situation, where everyone's dead silent.”

He also prefers to do these routes at night, because he thinks it’s easier as there’s no traffic, construction, or school zones to push through.

He says that challenging nights occur a few times a year, but the rest of the days of the year are "great days."

"And if the Metro bus is sort of a mobile living room where everything glorious and terrible about humanity is packed into that space, there's a lot of goodness there," he says. "And that's what I'm trying to highlight with the book.”

Vass grew up loving buses as a child because they were huge like dinosaurs. But as he’s gotten older, he found that it was an opportunity to give back to and participate in the community.

“There's something really gratifying about being out there on sort of ground zero, we might say the vortex of the city," Vass says. "Also, it's the best artist day job because it pays well and it doesn't intrude into your off hours. You have no Monday morning deadlines, so you have time to go home and write your book about bus stories. You leave the bus, and it doesn't follow me home. Thank goodness.”

Vass says when he started driving, he was quiet.

“But a few years in, I realized this job becomes dramatically more rewarding if I treat everyone as if they're already friends of mine," he says. "It really changes things from a safety perspective. If I'm making eye contact and greeting everybody who comes in, it defuses them. It stops a lot of security things before they even happen. People love being seen and respected and heard, and for that reason, it seemed like a great thing to do.”

Vass witnesses many people going through challenges and often not having their best days. Even though he knows he can’t solve their problems, he can bear witness.

“I try to just be there as a smiling, respectful, friendly presence," he says. "Hopefully that makes them feel better for five minutes. If I can do that, it's worth it. It's rewarding to have someone tell me you're the first person to say hi to me all day today. It can make a difference.”

Capturing stories for his book requires a lot of scribbling on paper transfers at red lights.

“I'm the only bus driver who wants there to be red lights,” he jokes.

He tries to get down the specific quotes of passengers, what tone of voice they used, their body language and how they choose to say things.

“It shares a lot about a person. When you're looking at transcripts of real people talking, it's different from fictional dialogue," Vass says. "We repeat ourselves all the time. We interrupt ourselves, we interrupt each other, and there's a sort of music to that. And I try to have the poetry of that spoken word in there, because I think it's interesting.”

He knows there’s a risk that phoneticization of how people talk with accents could appear as satirizing them, but his aim is to present a truthful and respectful portrait of the folks who talk with him.

Vass is conscious that he doesn’t know the full context of what people are going through and he’s just seeing a glimpse of them in that moment. He believes a thread through the book is people’s ability to have optimism even in dark places. One story that exemplifies this features a passenger talking to Vass about “taking a sabbatical.”

It becomes clear as he keeps on talking that he had been in prison for years, been released, violated his parole, and had to go back to prison.

“This guy seemed like a decent guy, talked about making mistakes, turned his life around, and just seemed to have an amount of self-awareness that I had a lot of admiration for," Vass says. "And I couldn't help but wonder what compelled him to break parole and continue breaking parole. His way of framing this as, ‘I'm gonna go on a sabbatical.’ He's choosing to see this not very great situation he's in in a positive light.”

After 18 years of driving, he’s watched technology like earbuds and video games become ubiquitous. He credits the pandemic for accelerating the use of technology and creating an environment of suspicion with making the public bus space more isolationist. But he can feel the desire to connect slowly returning.

“We are the social creature, we humans, and that's not going to be eradicated in the space of one generation," Vass says. "We all use these devices more than we know we should, and I try to break away from that. Often, maybe half of the passengers don't respond to me because they have earbuds in or they're looking at their phones, but I still say hi to them. They don't have to do anything, but I'm doing my best. I feel like those of us who are fighting the Seattle freeze are doing it like one lonely soul at a time.”

Vass speaks of beautiful moments on the bus, but there have been some heightened safety concerns for Metro bus drivers in the past year, especially after the murder of bus driver Sean Yim in the U-District.

Vass says he hopes the discussion that incident prompted is not just about safety for drivers, but for passengers as well.

“Installing a heavy duty, militarized shield to protect drivers does absolutely nothing for passengers," he says. "There needs to be some sort of shift in our understanding of what constitutes acceptable behavior on the street, much more than just protecting drivers.”

He acknowledged there are incidents where his positive interaction is not returned and there’s random-seeming aggression and violence, which can be frustrating.

“But the world is a place where sometimes things go well for us and sometimes they go badly, and part of this book is trying to wrestle with the size and the scariness of that reality and to figure out a way to look at it that doesn't involve turning away from that difficult truth,” Vass says.

The book is full of discrete stories, but Vass says they are interlinked and feature many recurring characters. Readers get to meet them when they’re not doing so well and again at a different time and will watch their lives change.

He points to the story of a woman who at the beginning of the book had recently stopped taking drugs. She was desperate to find her daughter in Minnesota. She was going to risk being homeless to reconnect with her.

Vass says he frequently hears people talk about enthusiastic plans but often they don’t work out. In this instance it did. The woman found her daughter.

“It was a miraculous truth. Stuff can be crazy in the negative sense, but also in the positive," he says. "There's some intensely beautiful things I see out there.”

His favorite thing to see is people who have been homeless, sleeping on his bus at their worst, and then years go by and while he barely recognizes them, they come up to him to tell them they have a job, an apartment, a child.

“I noticed that it’s so important for them to tell me, which is weird, because I'm just the bus driver," Vass says. "I was probably just a stranger to them, but I was the person who saw them when they were at their worst, and they wanted to tell me, 'Look, I'm better than that.' And the humanity of that is very moving to me.”

Nathan Vass will be at Elliott Bay Books on Friday, May 30th, at 7pm.