Leave the Driving to Us

For several years now, as my husband has spent more time at the house he built in Maine, I have taken Greyhound bus rides, either north to see him or back south to Connecticut. It is clearly more pleasant to ride shotgun with him but my schedule does not always allow me to leave when he wants to go or to stay as long as he wants so we coordinate our time one way and I use public transport the other.

Greyhound, the only way to get to northern Maine (other than exorbitantly expensive airfare) has a disturbing tendency to strand you far from where you want to be. In the past, I have railed against the vagaries of public transport and I could still do so.

Indeed, I could inveigh against a company I see as poorly run, callous to the chaos it creates for its customers and dodgy in its ethics but that is not the intent of this column. Instead, I want to talk about the slices of human experience that one can encounter on a 10-hour ride from Point A to Point B.

Some of these exchanges have been pleasant. A simple comment on the attractive boots my seat mate was wearing on one trip led to a short but revealing conversation relevant to us both. She liked Colorado where she and her boyfriend currently lived but he had a lucrative job offer in Maine and she was traveling to see him.

Where were they going to settle? She was in her 20s, I much older, but we were both negotiating “couplehood” and divergent needs. The conversation lasted maybe ten minutes but we both understood the dilemma.

South Station in Boston is, in my estimation, an abomination that can even make an airport lounge look attractive. In the main waiting room only one charging station allows transients in this totally electronic world to refresh devices. It is installed in a bank of former payphone stalls, and you must stand there while your phone, tablet or laptop rejuvenates. With no way to walk away, you are necessarily privy to the conversations around you.

On one recent trip two young men were next to me, one sitting on his duffle bag on the floor, flipping through messages on his phone, while the other called his apparently estranged girlfriend. “You’ve got to come and pick us up,” the young man demanded. She was having none of it.

He whined, he wept, he swore, he literally howled his protests. By turns he cajoled and verbally abused her. She hung up. He called back and repeated his efforts. “We only have $50 between us,” he revealed. “What are we supposed to do?” Then he swore at her some more and demanded her help.

Meanwhile, patiently charging my phone next to them and fully imbued with my own Puritan ethic, I thought, “Why don’t you get a job?” Finally, the call ended. Weeping, he turned to his friend and said, “She told me to get a job!”

It was hard not to laugh.

Other vignettes are more poignant. On a frigid ride north last January we paused in Lewiston, the last stop before my destination. It is usually a quick stop because, by ten o’clock at night few people are coming and going. But this time the minutes stretched on. The driver appeared perplexed and kept checking his list of passengers. Someone was missing.

Finally, a man halfway down the bus said someone had gone into the bathroom a long time ago and not emerged. The driver used his key, only to discover a middle-aged man, dead. There ensued the arrival of police and an in situ investigation of the poor fellow’s demise. His meager, somewhat battered, belongings were searched and we were all asked what we had witnessed. We were, after all, a rolling crime scene.

We sat in the cold for more than an hour before the body, pathetic in its vulnerability, was lifted over our heads and down off the bus. It was clearly that of a man whose hard life had been cut short. I heard them say his name and his destination. Guessing his age by the grey in his beard, I sought him on the Internet. It had, indeed, been a peripatetic life, ended just before he reached his home.

As if that were not enough, on my most recent trip we became a rolling boozy bash. Before each trip the driver instructs the passengers on bus etiquette. This always includes admonitions to respect fellow passengers by using earphones for phone calls, to keep the volume down for personal conversations and the like.

On this particular trip, the amount of alcohol consumed before the trip overrode the instructions. There was very loud, very profane talk emanating from farther back on the bus. The men wanted to get off at every stop so they could top off their buzz (alcohol and tobacco are prohibited on the bus) and the driver, a woman, was quite brusque telling them she would say when they could get out. Finally, at Portland, there was a twenty-minute stop and they were free.

When they got back on, the boozy haze on their faces had increased. She warned them to be quiet. They weren’t. Infamous Lewiston loomed before us and I texted my husband, waiting at the next stop—fortunately not in the cold this time—that no one had died and I should be on time. Alas, not true.

A few people ended their journeys and dismounted. Then a grim-faced driver got out with her phone. She boarded again and told the men to come outside. Suddenly there was great agitation as she told them they were thrown off. The angry men confronted her, voices and fists raised.

The worst offender insisted he had to get his cellphone from the bus even as he brandished a fist clutching the phone. “Don’t you touch me!” she warned, just as the police arrived.

They were not quite drunk enough to confront the police and we left them standing forlornly in front of a darkened bus station with no place to go and probably not much money in their pockets. I wondered what would happen to them and even felt a little sorry for them. They had been having a such raucously good time—but sadly at everyone else’s expense—and now it had crashed down on them.

One of the other riders that night was their exact opposite. A gentle little woman, she was a massively inexperienced traveler. We got on together in Boston and she said she was going to Portland to see a niece who was gravely ill in hospital. We chatted for a few minutes and I learned that she had booked her bus ticket but had no arrangements for accommodations or transportation in Portland.

She asked how far the hospital was from the bus station and I explained to her the “bus station” was a dark parking lot far from anything. I encouraged her to book a room and to have a taxi waiting for her.

“If it’s only a ten-minute walk, I’ll just walk,” she said. I asked her where she was going to walk to as she had no accommodations and offered to use my computer to search for a room. She ignored the advice and the offer and as we pulled into the parking lot, she said apprehensively, “You were right.”

She disappeared into the night, and I am still worried about her. She was a perfect target: small, inexperienced and totally unfamiliar with the area.

Public transport is environmentally friendly—the fifty-fifty-five people on each journey must equate to at least 30 fewer cars on the road—so it is a concept we should all embrace. It is relatively economical but it is also a wildly inefficient, inconvenient, unpredictable way to travel—unless, of course, you enjoy people watching. Happily, I do.