"Earthlings have no sense of direction!"
-Marvin The Martian
From the Port Authority Bus Terminal on West 42nd St it’s
only a few busy blocks to the Lincoln Tunnel, and to freedom. The concrete tube cares souls safely under
the Hudson River to Weehawken, New Jersey and all points west. The Greyhound Bus lunges up the ramp beneath
the river and points its flat face into the fall colors of places called East Orange,
and Parsippany-Troy; final destination San Francisco. Martian sits midway astride the bus as it
gathers speed on Interstate 80 through the Delaware Water Gap. He looks out the window at the Eastern fall
he loves, the only fall he has ever known.
A few miles out of the city he swings his feet off the seat next to him,
finally assured that no other traveler will try to muscle in. Martian is wearing his best
clothes. This really means ones that
help him best blend into the rest of the riders on the bus. Blue Jeans, a Clemson Tigers t-shirt, green
fleece, and green Nike hat are his disguise.
The rest of his worldly possessions are below him in the belly of the
bus. Everything he owns fits in one
duffel bag. In his pocket is roughly one
hundred and twenty dollars; the money they gave him to start a new life.
Instead he pulled out
the Sports Illustrated he had procured at the bus station news stand, the one
with Kevin Faulk shreding Florida's defense on the cover. It helped ease the tension within him as
the bus surged across the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. It was late October and the year was
1997.
Greyhound is not the preferred mode of cross country travel! It is largely left to those who cannot afford
the safe passage of planes, trains or automobiles. As a result the bus can be an unfriendly
place to be introduced to the real world.
After a few hours the toilet becomes unbearable, and the smell of
cigarette smoke and McDonald’s hamburgers permeates everything. Stops are always in the worst parts of every
town and city. Hours pass as the ‘hound
pulls in and out of Rust Belt places with names like Youngstown and
Cleveland. At each stop The Martian
pulls his long legs up onto the whole seat, pretends to be asleep, and prays
that the bus doesn’t fill up. Night
falls somewhere in Ohio as The Martian struggles to get into a comfortable
sleeping position on the high backed seat.
The smells of shit and fast food are joined by cheap hard
liquor. Someone moans from near the back,
The Martian feels very alone.
Morning arrives like a gray shawl across the Great Plains of
Middle America. The spent bus is
discarded for a fresh one and Egg McMuffin’s in Joliet, Illinois. The Martian finds a new seat and stares out
the window at the flat fields of corn stubble that crowd the freeway on both
sides. Every word of the sports mag has
been digested long ago, and the fast food isn’t sitting right. A shower and bed are at the forefront of his
mind. This flat, foreign landscape is
new and disconcerting. The unease is
briefly replaced with intrigue when the bus crosses the Mississippi River into
Iowa on the Fred Schwengel Memorial Bridge.
Years of learning about that mighty river in school, and there it was
flowing under the wheels of the bus. It
reminded him of his native Hudson River; The Martian was homesick.
He briefly takes up smoking somewhere around Des Moines. It’s all there is to do at the endless string
of rest stops out on the prairie. Plus
everyone else on the bus is doing it so why not. Those menthol lights make him feel even filthier
as each one burns down. Trying to
freshen up in those dingy stainless steel sinks is a losing battle. The second night catches up with them somewhere
near Lincoln. The Martian doesn’t know
how lucky he is to be experiencing Nebraska at night.
He must have slept, because the lurch of the bus slowing
down on the off ramp in Laramie, Wyoming welcomes him to the third day of bus
life. After breakfast two kids with
respective green and pink Mohawks who had been on the bus since the start,
climbed over a fence behind the McDonald's to play with a tribe of goats. The rest of the passengers crowded around the
fence with warnings of angry ranchers and shotguns. This was Wyoming afterall and these people don’t like
weirdos from New York. A new, fresh bus
did little to ease the ever increasing demand that his body displayed for a shower
and clean clothes.
Everybody on the bus goes out drinking in Salt Lake City. It
turns out to be the only way to survive the last and most arduous leg of the
journey, across the salt flats and the sands of Nevada to the promised land of
California. Still the humor in getting
blasted in SLC is not lost on the Greyhound crowd. The bus disgorges its charges in the heart of
downtown, and passengers are given ample time to wet their whistles at the
“clubs” prior to the dessert voyage.
The Martian, unaware of the need to take the edge off wanders the city
in the warm sun. Salt Lake is by far the
nicest stop on the western trail. Wide
clean streets slant up from the lake to the base of the Wasatch Range; already
dusty with a sugary coating of fall snow.
At the Temple Square he gets his first introduction to this strange
thing called Mormonism. Who are these
dudes the Angel Maroni and Joseph Smith?
Why are teams of young women trying to convert him? It will be years before those things are made
clear.
Back at the depot the crowd waiting to board is alarmingly
large; sharing a seat at this point in the trip is unthinkable. From Salt Lake the bus overnights straight
through to Sacramento across the dessert.
The thought of being trapped in a cramped seat during those dark lonely
hours is enough to make even the hardiest road warrior nervous. And indeed those fears are realized for The
Martian and every other traveling soul as the bus pulls out of the terminal
completely full. The Martian ended up
bunk mates so to speak with a twenty something German kid who was using the
‘hound to see America. Nobody needed to
tell him that was a dumb idea. A month
on the bus had been a hard way to learn!
The vast empty west ratchets up the vast emptiness as the
bus lumbers along through sage and sand, interrupted only occasionally by a mine
or a crappy town, pimping its casino’s to the weary traveler. The bus pauses in Wendover one such lonely
place, as if to say to its charges that this might be the last
place to turn around. The Martian and
the German follow seasoned riders across the street from the bus stop to order
chimichangas from a weather beaten woman at a window. It feels like a last meal.
He awakens to a different sound, the one a bus makes as it
drags its huddled masses up mountain roads.
The Sierras divide the land of milk and honey from the hells of Reno and
the desert. The Martian is glued to the
window as this strange new landscape rolls by.
At Donner Pass the angle of his view tilts as the bus descends the
foothills to Sacramento. Next stop San
Francisco. What would the Martian do if knew what the future held? What would he think when he was met at the
final stop by two gay men? Did he know
he would live with and become lifelong friends with both of them? Or that he would fall in love with a city, a
state and a woman? So much was left to
put together to create a new life in a new world. And the burritos, oh Lord the burritos!
