Flashback 1988: The little Greyhound that couldn't
Flashback to the year 1988. I'm a high school junior on a major (budget) trip through the U.S. and traveling on a Greyhound bus. After visiting New York, I hop on the first available bus and head west to California. We'll pick it up from there.
From the moment I boarded the Greyhound, I could hear Paul Simon's immortal words in my ears. Like him, I counted the cars on the New Jersey turnpike. I wondered how far Saginaw, Michigan was. I lived off cheese balls and Pepsi, the breakfast of champions. And for long stretches, I just looked at the scenery, sometimes looking at nothing at all. New Jersey, coming from New York, was industrial and made me want to consider my choice of traveling by bus. The Midwest was flat and little less than strip malls, truck stops, and silos. Some people on the bus were like me, just along for the ride, just watching the landscape rush by. Others were more desperate, a few single mothers with their kids re-locating. And then there were those on the bus who were visiting friends or family. People who were there for a brief two-hour drive and ready to get off in Toledo, Ohio or Davenport, Iowa.
In the Midwest, the barns and silos then gave way to never-ending cornfields. I hadn't watched "Field of Dreams" yet, otherwise I would have imagined (the way I would on future trips) a gang of former professional baseball players lurking in the cornfields. Cornfields weren't a place to harbor people yet, merely something to conceal them as in the horror epic "Children of the Corn." One traveler was less philosophical about the situation, remarking that it all looked like "a lot of nothing."
It was the same routine everywhere. Quick stop to stretch in the small towns, lunch or dinner in Columbus or Omaha. In Omaha, the rain started coming down hard, which was a welcome change to merely blue skies and endless cornfields, picturesque though it all looked. What we didn't count on was the fact that the bus had a mind of its own. Approximately 50 miles past Lincoln, there was a quick sputter before the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road. Unfortunately, this wasn't on the Interstate, either, so that we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. This was the year 1988, so no cell phones and no connection via radio to home base, wherever that was. The bus driver announced that the bus had "a little mishap" and that he needed to go out and "find a payphone."
There were rumblings, a few moaning passengers...and partying like it was 1999 once the bus driver left. Out came the concealed booze containers, out came the hash pipes, out came the baked goodies. Everybody chipped in, everybody shared, the broken down bus became a Kumbayah producing free-for-all. None of the passengers even tried to hide any of the evidence when the bus driver returned an hour later. The driver announced that a new bus would be picking us up and gratefully accepted a cold one from one of the passengers up front. Try that type of anarchy today.
Eventually, the bus came another hour later, by which time all passengers were buzzed, stoned, or both. The passengers on the bus slept well that night. This was my not-so-formal introduction to partying in America. You wouldn't find that in any Paul Simon lyric.
0 comments