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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
| Greyhound You meet a better class of people on a Greyhound. Apart from the fact that the Greyhound bus is traditionally the way to see America, it also enforces a camaraderie that cannot happen on an airline flight. Being strapped down into one's place within the sardine can that is the modern airliner tends to work against meeting any of one's fellow sufferers. And anyway, everyone is just gritting their teeth and longing for the journey to be over; no thought of human interaction crosses the mind on those slingshot rides through the upper atmosphere. Not so on a Greyhound. A bus forces its passengers to unite in a common goal of endurance and resistance against the endless miles, the whims of baggage handlers and the desperate weariness of sleepless nights. As varied and random a selection of humanity as you may be, the long distance bus journey will reveal each one of you as a person with a story to tell. Not that airline passengers are without stories; but these will never be known. The relative brevity of journeys by air allows us to maintain our protective cocoons of silence for the duration. The bus will break you down, like it or not. The bus company is a willing partner in this process of erosion of interpersonal barriers. Almost invariably, the bus driver will be a stickler for the rules and make this clear from the beginning. No negotiation is possible; he has seen it all and will brook no dissension. And the penalty for any infringement, consisting of being left in some unfrequented stop in the wilds of Indiana, seems too awful to contemplate. The passengers will grumpily accept this, only sharing their rebellious urges in whispered comments when well out of earshot of the driver. But thus begins the welding of disparate personalities into a united front against adversity. The baggage handlers complete the process. It takes only the first disaster to some hapless soul to ensure that one becomes paranoid about baggage. Everyone learns that their first priority at each stop is to watch what happens to their bags in the hold. Are you continuing on the bus to the next stop? Be assured that a baggage handler will remove your bag and try to put it on another bus. Are you changing to another bus? Better grab that bag and keep it with you; otherwise, it will stay resolutely on the bus and head off to parts unknown. So at every stop a gaggle of watchful and jumpy passengers will form around the opened baggage doors of the bus. And, inevitably, tales of previous mishaps and near-misses circulate, bringing everyone together and creating new alliances. Most of the travelers are young but all age groups are represented. And, once the journey has begun and seating arrangements been decided, unlikely pairings and teams emerge. As time and distance extend, some leave and others join and new mixes are formed. We are all grist to the Greyhound's mill. And so the stories emerge. There is the young guy joining at Oklahoma City, already exhausted by the miles from San Diego and on his way home to Maine - from the south western corner to the north eastern end of the States, about as great a distance as it is possible to make on a Greyhound. A young African American with all the gear, trendy and hip, travels to Chicago to care for his father, desperately ill in hospital. A retired steelworker makes the short hop from Pittsburgh to Allentown, going home after visiting his girlfriend. And some good ole boys from Missouri swap lies of their exploits as they spread out on the back seats. All these and more, bound together by the need to be elsewhere, brought together by chance and co-existing in harmony as they travel. Days and nights of movement follow, interspersed with occasional waits between buses, and the little community changes gradually as it crosses the face of America. Soon those who began the journey with you have disappeared, their faces replaced with others, and you begin to feel like an old hand, accepting your new role of intrepid traveler and occasional help for the newcomer. Outside, America drifts past, always the same yet subtly different. The open plains give way to hills and mountains, the dry ranches of the south west to the hill farms of West Virginia. Great cities like St Louis, with its gateway to the west, that soaring arc towering into the sky, is succeeded by greater cities yet; and always the bus heads for the center where the skyscrapers crowd together as though huddled for protection against the vast emptiness of America. Nothing prepares one for the sight of New York City at night from the New Jersey shore. Here is a landscape of bright lights rising to the sky against the dark backdrop of night; a landscape stretching around and extending arms to engulf one as we draw near. I am not one for great cities yet the Big Apple lives up to all its promises - from a distance. I will say no more of the places I saw; this is, after all, a celebration of an institution that has receded from view as air travel becomes the norm. But the Greyhound bus remains as a reminder of its literary past. And still there are those who prefer it to the convenience and speed of flight; I met a tough little old lady who had plied the Greyhound routes for years and, though she complained as loudly as any other about the waiting and discomfort, she would not dream of going any other way. Word count: 945 |
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