Riding the Greyhound

If you’ve never ridden a Greyhound bus – or FlixBus, or whatever the current incarnation is – your stereotype is probably true. You have no control. Some of the people around you are questionable. You don’t know when you’ll arrive. Sometimes there’s a to-do and you get nervous and clutch your things. People are loud and shameless, talking at length about things you’re supposed to whisper. Meth, psychosis, DUIs, felonies, cancer, rehab, and always, ultimately, money.

Sure, we all talk about these things, but perhaps aside, to a close friend, in a corner at a party or over the phone, in tears. We talk about them and we read articles on them, trying to be well informed about policies that might help, thinking with care about who to vote for. We try out the theories of the day on the problems before us. They’re suffering from trauma; he would be better off if he had health insurance; if only she could afford a counselor; if only they had gotten the right education. All true, perhaps. But how easy to forget that we too are caught in a life beyond our control. Something will happen, we don’t know why. We will respond, we don’t know how. Who can, really, get their bearings in such a world?

My first bus ride was in Annapolis. It was a city bus. I was a freshman in college. I needed a hoodie and thought I’d take a trip to the mall. Knowing vaguely that a bus went to the mall and being impatient with routes and schedules I walked to the stop closest to campus and stood until one came. It must get there eventually, I thought. I climbed on and off we went.

The atmosphere was thick, breath and bodies and voices melting and congealing, squeezed together between the walls and creating something – I did not know what – greater than the sum of its parts. Who could tell what would happen? Eagerly, I watched. I had to catch the customs of this place. I saw someone go up to the driver to inquire about a stop, leaning in a little to ask his question, the driver responding at amicable length as he bounced us along. I saw, despite the yellow pull-cord, people shouting out when they wanted to get off. “Next stop please!” I saw everyone thanking the driver as they left, sometimes bidding goodbye to the rest of the bus too. “Have a blessed day!” I saw everyone greeting the driver as they got on, the “sir” and “ma’am” of formal acknowledgment and receipt of acknowledgment threaded elegantly through the warmth and good cheer. And I got to be part of it. I was proud, humble, giddy, amazed.

The bus stopped at the mall. I bought my hoodie and came out for the return ride, again getting on the first bus that came. It veered into the suburbs, then out into the forest, and stopped with an air of finality in a parking lot, the late summer wall of green beating around us. We had reached the end of the line, it seemed. I had to make a move. “Sir, how do I get to downtown Annapolis?” I asked the driver. “Take the purple to Eastport and switch to the orange,” he said. And so I learned to ride the bus.

I didn’t tell anyone about these rides, which were after all not remarkable in themselves. People around the world take the bus every day. But for the two years I spent in Annapolis the bus was my “other world,” accessible at any time, a world where I didn’t know what I would hear or who I would meet, a world where I was a part of something. I loved shouting “Next stop!” and I loved saying “Thank you, ma’am!” as I stepped down and “Good evening!” coming up, and even, if I dared, “Good evening!” to everyone else too (usually I was the only white person). Later I learned that not all city buses are like this. There was a Southern quality about those rides, the friendliness and decorum shaped over generations. But years later, in Chicago, taking the bus down Cermak, I could still feel the stir, the hum, the buzz, the rustle, that extraordinary extra thing you only get from the friction of bodies trapped together, relentlessly creating a community despite itself, if only for a moment.

You’d think those city bus rides would have nothing in common with the hurly-burly of the Greyhound trips I started taking in my thirties, where everyone was from all over and some people, as my grandmother would have said, didn’t know how to act. But I see now that the “other world” I’d stumbled on was only different from my own in being one of necessity, a world where people must relate to one another because there is no choice. They’re around the people they encounter as inevitably as each of us is trapped in our own bodies and just has to figure out how to deal with it.

Why don’t people ride the bus? It’s obvious, of course. Because it takes so long. Because you have to be around all of those people. This is true. Who wouldn’t avoid it if they could? But perhaps, to those who do ride it – or do any other activity that is rapidly going out of fashion – life simply is this hanging around other people in however much time it takes to do it. Cutting it out – wouldn’t this be an amputation of life itself?

I left Annapolis. Years passed and I got a car. I launched myself on road trips, saving up vacation days so I could take off around the country. I drank at bars, slept in fields, washed up at gas stations, swayed in Pentecostal churches, swam in rivers. I loved the feeling of not knowing what was going to happen or where I would sleep that night. I had an itch, and I scratched it. Adventure! I thought. I’m living! More years passed. I moved to New York and gave away my car. I’ll take the Greyhound, I thought. New adventures. If I want to see my mom I’ll just get on the bus.

Photograph by ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo.

I see now that in all those years of manic driving there’s one thing I didn’t learn. Sure, I met people, had experiences, told people my stock of stories as if I had really been somewhere and done something. The world was before me – but I was not fully in it. I could always take off to the next spot when I got irritated or bored. It was like I was trying to learn a foreign language by listening to people speak it. But you only learn it when you have to, taking your first tentative embarrassed steps in the dark, trying to make yourself understood

Life is other people. Life is realizing we need other people – then working out what to do about it. That was what I felt so mysteriously on the Annapolis bus. It is what made the experience rich with that richness you can’t get any other way. This is what so many of the riders of the Greyhound know, because they are poor. They know we only have each other in the end. Why hide problems when they’re everywhere? Why not, in fact, share them? So the problems become visible. Crack pipes and talk about crack pipes. Jail time and talk about jail time. Talk about trying to quit, and really trying, right now, to quit. And, filling every corner, following every story, generosity, grace, a kind gesture. Once you let your eyes get accustomed to the light it is these things you see rise to the surface like cream.

And why not? In a world of problems, giving and receiving is the only way through. I saw this with a start when, on my second Greyhound ride, I realized I was in debt. I had been given several things that day. A burger, a stick of gum, a soda. I had not given anyone anything. Or had I? I flipped back through the time. I had watched someone’s bag when they went to the bathroom. I had sat by people’s phones charging when they walked to the gas station. Had I done enough? It was hard to find my position in such a haze of deed and promise and expectation, everyone doing and being done by. Maybe that was the point. You couldn’t find out where you stood. You were already implicated, already defined, and everyone else was, somehow, defined by you. I rustled through my bag looking for a gift. I found a cigar, a nice one, itself a gift from my cousin. One of the young guys might like it, I thought. I offered. He accepted. I was learning the customs. I was starting to catch on.

The bus straps you down to time and place. You’ve given up your right to choose who you’ll see and where you’ll go. You are forced to be with these people, in these places; you must endure every bit of it as you must endure every second of your own life, no skipping. What will you do? How will you act?

Some of us can escape more easily than others, it’s true. Some of us have bank accounts, and some of us even have money in them. Some of us have family who will support us no matter what. Some of us have degrees. These things make a difference. Indeed, they make such a difference we forget what this difference means. It is a vile, wicked breach, and it is growing. And yet – we cannot in the end control our lives. Life will always come back around, knocking. Maybe we can learn something from people who know this down to the ground. People who throw away a twenty on two buck lottery tickets. People who know what it means to say “The Lord will bless us!” in the face of a lifetime of apparent misery. People who know we have to help each other.

I get on the bus wanting so many things. I want my mother to live forever. I want that one person to write me back. I want love. My heart stirs madly. I get on the bus, strapped up with all these other crazy people, their own desires sloshing within, sometimes overflowing and spilling out grossly before me, all of us caught in the jaws of fate, knowing it, saying it, living it. Riding with the poor. The poor, the so-easily-bereaved.

The poor, that is, us.