A long-lost article about Greyhound-ing around the U.S.
America Unfiltered: 45 Days on the Greyhound
My forehead is oily and my ticket is sticky in my pocket before I get on my first bus. I'm an hour early, but the line is already snaking around the once-velvet ropes. There are families camped out: children sitting on suitcases, women evil-eyeing me as they huddle plastic sacks. There's a three-year-old girl with lollipop-stained lips who seems somehow fascinated with me, her big eyes wax as she watches me watch her until her mom pulls on her shoulder and makes her sit down. 10 minutes before the bus is supposed to leave, a woman rushes up with her young son. They have three large pieces of luggage plus a lot of pillowcases packed with everything they can hold. It's 12:30 in the morning, and she's wheezing from running to catch this bus. The son seems disoriented; he doesn't even know where they're going. She has two fresh black eyes.
I'm not your normal traveler, not this time. I've bought a ticket that most people don't know about -- Greyhound's unlimited travel pass, bargain-priced and good for 7, 14, 30, 45, or 60 days, based on how much of America you want to roll over. My ticket is for 45 days, and I'm going to stay on as much as I can endure. I say endure, but this is no David Blaine test of my willpower and capacities. No, I'm riding the bus because I believe in the bus. I used to ride a lot; by the end of college I would have logged enough frequent-rider miles to get a free ticket to Europe -- if anybody had been counting, and if you could ride a Greyhound to Gatwick. But this time it's different: I'm not trying to get from A to B, not riding the 'hound because it's cheaper, because I made my plans at the last minute, because I'm afraid of flying (which I'm not) or incapable of driving (ditto), because I'm leaving my abusive husband at 12:30 in the morning son in tow, or for any other of the typical reasons people find themselves busboard; I'm riding to listen, to listen and to look. Every time I've ridden the bus for more than 24 hours, something memorable happened, something tragic or comic or most likely both, something beautiful, if you can see it that way. And that's what I want to do, to see it that way, this country, its people. America, unfiltered.
She's open-armed, this nation of ours, and not too pricey. The ride-all-I-want 45-day pass, off-season (the summer is the only high season) puts me back $439, no tax. My provisional itinerary has me travelling 11,000 miles, which works out to 4 cents a mile -- pretty much the price of gas if I was doing it in a Geo. Greyhound calls its unlimited travel tickets the AmeriPass, and though I expect to see foreign teenagers using such tickets to do the U.S. bus version of Eurail-ing, in fact nobody seems to know the AmeriPass exists, even the drivers, who give me suspicious glances when I show it as my ticket. They seem to be thinking, "I get paid to be on this damn thing all week; what the hell are you doing it for?"
The simple answer is that when you're sardined in with people for a day or two or three, they tell you things -- things to pass the time, tales of joy to expose their identity, stories of sorrow to create complicity. On the long hauls, people tell you things they probably don't tell their close friends because they're going to see those friends again. But not me; they'll never see me again, so they let it roll, all the long, lovely, bitter, back-breaking truth of it. For hours I listen.
By Miami I have no ankles. From New York it's a straight shot down I-95, 31 hours Greyhound time, barring flats or missed connections or passengers popping caps in each other. But I'm holding so much water that from my calf muscle to my foot it looks like a loaf of Wonder bread. Still, I want to keep riding; I've got a friend in Atlanta where I can crash, and it's only another 24 hours. Waiting for the bus to depart, I meet an evangelist from Cameroon. He's surprised I know where Cameroon is; I'm surprised he's here. He says he's supposed to be taking a religion course in Ft. Meyers, but he spent all his money just to make it to Miami. Nothing left for the bus to get him there or for a place to stay when he arrives. "But God will provide," he says, and seems calm. To me it looks about 50/50.
*****
Crossing Florida along almost any latitude line is an invitation to depression. Depressed economy, obscene scenery -- or lack thereof -- just blankness, vacancy, and sugar fields wedged between once-exquisite coastlines, now poxed with cheap motels. It doesn't get worse than central Florida, and apparently everyone agrees, because I was the only passenger on the bus from Miami to Tampa. I sat in the front with the driver, a steady hand who had driven for Greyhound 25 years already and had a lot of stories to tell.
Greyhound drivers, as any regular passenger knows, are predominantly a no-frills, Bryl-creamed, sterling-haired bunch of tattoo-sporting tough guys, Navy guys and marines, would-have-been cops who needed stable income with less risk (apparently) since the missus probably had a bun in the oven. And so it starts, that story, and it doesn't end until 30 odd years have passed and they've seen and lived through more human psychology than most New York shrinks, hands down. I love bus drivers; I love how they run their ships tight, how they punish the smokers even though they're the first ones out and puffing at each rest stop (read smoke break, for, as it turns out, cigarette breaks on the bus are a form of social control). A friend of mine, regular rider of the Dog as he calls it and a marine himself, was recounting to me last year's news story about the driver who got his throat slit while driving (no lie). He managed to kill his assailant and crawl away from his rolled bus, one hand stopping the blood flowing from his throat. "Those guys," my friend says, "You don't fuck with them. They don't take no shit from nobody."
So this driver in particular is incarcerated with me for 6 hours or so and tells me a few highlights of the better part of three decades at the big wheel. "I could write a book," he says, as most people who should but don't write books say. "I seen everything. I helped give birth to a baby on the back of my bus one time. Had guys die on it two other times -- natural causes, mind you." Two piloted into the darkness in his 60-seat Charon's skiff, one brought into the light -- that would still leave his score at minus-1, unless you count the very moments of conception fleetingly witnessed in the 15-square-inch reflection of the rear-view mirror. "I seen lots of couples cup-u-lating in the back," he tells me. And when I ask what you do when you catch the cup-u-lators in flagrante, he waxes wiser than the saints, "Well, I hate to come down too hard on two people just looking for a good feeling."
Of course I've still got to know how an onboard death-scene goes down, and I ask if someone just starts screaming from the back: "The guy next to me just bit it! The guy next to me just bit it!" or if an older lady walks slowly and quietly to the front and leans over her cane to whisper in the driver's ear, "Sorry to disturb you sir, but my husband just passed." But it turns out that neither scenario proved to be what happened in either of the cases my new friend had experienced. No, both times, everybody just thought the guy was zonked-out, asleep out of Pittsburgh, still asleep in Plattsburgh, not to be awakened.
In fact, it takes longer than you'd think to figure out that a sleeping man is dead. "I don't try to wake anybody anymore," my driver tells me, "I've been punched too many times. Damn if it isn't their stop and I'm just trying to wake em up so they don't miss it and I shake em by the shoulder and they wake up swinging. No more." So the ones who would need a good sight more than a shoulder shake don't get found till the bus needs to enter a depot to get cleaned and refueled -- about every six or eight hours on most routes -- and then whoever's still asleep gets a cautious poke. "When a few of those don't do the trick," says my cautious friend, "I call a supervisor."
*****
Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, San Diego. If you watch life long enough out of a window, it all starts to look like a miracle. It's a makeshift frame in a moving museum, the Greyhound window, but if you can see the photo behind it, see the hand of the artist and all the beauty writ, you really will have seen a kind of America.
And then you turn your gaze back in, to the older man sitting beside you, who stands to stretch his leg. "It gets a little stiff," he explains, "even after all these years." He had been a painter, and was up on a "spider" painting a water tower when the spider's cable broke and he fell 80 feet straight to the ground. And lived, and today walked onto the bus cane-less and with barely a limp. I want to know what it feels like to know you're falling, to know that if you feel the ground you'll probably never feel anything else. What goes through your head when you hear the cable break, feel the lurch, then the air on your face? But in a measured, mellifluous voice he tells me, "It didn't take but a second. I don't think I thought anything at all. I just put out my arms and when I woke up I was in the hospital and my family and friends were all there and I just looked at em all and said 'Where's my car and my cash?'" I laugh and he looks at me with infinite, old-man's eyes and says, "You think that's funny -- now when I come back home all my old friends have died. I fell 80 feet and I'm still alive and they're all dead."
*****
The coast of California is about as beautiful a place as you can drive anywhere, but the bus doesn't go that way, no Highway-1 or 17-mile drive past the rocks and seals of Monterey. No, it goes inland, through the farms of Fresno, through Modesto (aptly named) and the unlikely capitol Sacramento before turning in again to San Francisco. It's ugly country, but the bus is packed. The seat next to me, so often the last one taken, is overfilled by a young woman with a warm, enormous smile. I'm tired and barely speak, just ask if the light will bother her if I read. She says no, she normally reads too, and I sit with my book quietly for awhile, then put it down and shut my eyes. She asks if she can read it while I sleep and this is enough to make me curious about who she is and what she's doing. Her answers are somewhat predictable: college student, visiting her mom. We talk for a while; she's interested in me being a writer, she likes the idea of me taking the bus around just to hear people's stories, and after a while she looks at me a bit harder and says, "You want to hear the real reason I'm going to see my mom." Of course, I say, and then she tells me, "Because I just gave birth to a still-born child and never knew I was pregnant."
You hear stories of it, always second or third-hand, of obese women giving birth never having suspected they were carrying. The tales are hard to believe, of course; Don't they notice when they don't get their periods or when they start throwing up all the time, etc. etc. But apparently it can happen, and in the girl sitting next to me's case, she says she didn't notice anything was going on. (I don't ask strangers about their menstrual cycles, under any circumstances, but I guess she just got used to not getting it -- if we don't want to know the truth of something, it's amazing what we can keep from noticing). But then she said, "I wasn't able to go to the bathroom for three weeks, so I finally went to the doctor." (If it took three weeks of not going before she saw a doctor, you can see why missing 8 periods in a row might seem like no big deal.). "So I go in and he thinks I've got a kidney infection and gives me all this Vicadin and other stuff and two days later I'm in the tub and I go into labor and they rush me to the hospital but the baby ends up being born dead. And they think it was 36 weeks -- only a few weeks from full term. He was 7 lbs 10 oz" (the same weight I was, I'm thinking). "I used to joke with my friends that I had a tumor inside of me and it was moving around, but I never thought I was pregnant. We're suing the doctor for not giving me a test, but I don't know what's going to come of it. I've been really upset, you can imagine. I've been talking to people at my church and at the hospital, and I decided to go see my mom and take it easy for a little bit."
*****
America is enormous, and between the coasts, seems almost empty. In the Midwest, each horizon seems to have only one farmhouse in it and one tree, that's all. That's where I grew up, and that's where I'm heading back to now, the bus having turned, Seattle behind us, to head back East.
There is no longer leg one can take on a Greyhound than Seattle to Chicago. Over 2000 miles with only Spokane, an occasional ellipsis of Montana or North Dakota roadmap-dot towns, film-famous Fargo, the twin, tunneled-cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the cow-country of Wisconsin in between. After Spokane, almost no one gets on or off the bus till Minneapolis two days later. You get on, you stay on, and those who do can't help but get to know each other. Of any place I've taken a bus, this is my favorite: the pressure cooker, the exposedness of us all to each other. I take a seat just in front of the back row, so I can witness all the back of the bus phenomena without disrupting anything. The back seat of the bus, as everyone knows, is a universe unto itself, and I just want to wait and witness.
On this trip, the 25 or so of us in for the long haul could fully cast a comedie humaine. Everybody I get to know deserves a book of their own (and, at the end, I find myself thinking: shouldn't that be true of everyone?), but at least I can give you a few sketches. There's Chuck, a 6' 5" former hell-angel who lost most of his right leg in a hay bailer; Dee, one-time Seahawk cheerleader and recovered drug-addict, has all the men abuzz; Mike, a pot-bellied truck driver chock-full of stories of going down on overweight women; Kenji, 20-year old gangbanger from northern Alabama, sweet as anyone could be; an emaciated Southeast Asian man who sleeps 23 straight hours; a young white guy who risks his life by reading Mein Kampf in plain view and calls Dee and Kenji "ignorant niggers"; Gary, the independent philosopher, carrying his manuscript in which he rewrites the history of western thought because, as he says, "The Greeks were wrong"; two Amish brothers, Abe and Clem, who Dee tries to scandalize with sex stories and who tell me they don't really care to travel outside of Montana much because "all cities look the same"; Joan, the cross-bearing 71-year-old grandmother, who doles out humor and foil-wrapped sandwiches in equal measure; a Native American woman whose ankles swell (mine, by now, have gotten used to it), and who gets asked out by the driver; a woman returning to her boyfriend, even though last time the police had to put her on a bus after he tried to blow her up in her own home because "this time it'll be different. He hasn't had a drink in three weeks"; a fourteen-year old set free by her parents who immediately gets in with Herr Kampf and his pregnant girlfriend surreptitiously drinking Smirnoff Ice; Xavier the drunk, middle-aged wiseacre, who wants to meet God so he can ask him why he didn't just kill Satan and why he made so many planets with no people on them; the young, insane guy, who fakes a diabetic seizure (I'm not making this up) so we have to travel and hour backward to get him into an ambulance, then, after our bus breaks down in Beach, North Dakota (irony of ironies, where did they get off calling a town there Beach?), he rejoins our bus in Fargo, then starts using his water bottle as a machine gun every time we pass a cow, scrunching up his face behind his black sunglasses, looking back at all of us with bared teeth and booming out the sound effects, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ..... DA-DA-DA.... , DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ... DA-DA-DA, all the way through Wisconsin. It becomes a kind of soundtrack, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ... DA-DA-DA-DA-DA.
For two and a half days I sit at the back of a bus with what to most extents and purposes is a random group of people, and yet, like anyone who endures hardship together, we become a group, a community. We're together long enough for me to watch the hair grow on the shaved head guy; I call him the Chia pet of our trip, but he doesn't take offense. Even Dee and the White Supremacist end up getting along, despite his prejudices. It's impossible for me not to think of us all together as a kind of family, diverse as we may be. As the hours passed, the analogy feels stronger and stronger: we don't choose our families, and most of the time they drive us crazy, but we endure them and typically even love them. And so with my busmates, even the "diabetic" -- he would gun down each passing quadriped and we would all just laugh, holding our water bottles too, firing away.
*****
I continue riding. Chicago, Memphis, Portland, Burlington and eventually south once more and to New York City, a kind of home. Coming into New York from the North on the Greyhound, you slide down through the commuter traffic of New Jersey, then through the eerie orange light of the Lincoln Tunnel. You emerge into a city like no other (despite what Clem says), a city so full of so much it's easy to glaze it all over. Within an hour, I'm back in my apartment, and the next day, I'm already back in my New York rhythm, buying groceries in Chinatown, on the subway going to and from a meeting. But something has changed, I feel it on the 6-train. I am looking more, listening more. I still have my window. America is everywhere.
