It’s possibly a combination of socioeconomic factors, and the arrant distance involved, that causes some eccentricity on the long-distance Greyhound buses. America is big. Really really big. Trying to quantify it with comparison to the UK is fruitless; the culture relating to distance is so starkly dissimilar as to make any correlation hopelessly skewed. Driving from London to a far-flung location like Cornwall – just over 200 miles away – is considered a huge undertaking in Britain. 200 miles is the sort of distance that – as Bill Bryson once pointed out – most Americans will happily drive to get a taco. Even in major cities Americans will willingly drive for an hour just to get between bars.
So when Greyhound say long distance, they mean long distance. The journey from New York City to San Francisco takes around 72 hours. There are prison sentences shorter than that. Major cities are often a thousand miles apart, and the slightly annular nature of American population distribution means that routes are often torturously circuitous.
Plus, well, it’s mostly poor people that ride the bus. Many American states have little in the way of automotive legislature relating to a car’s physical state, and the ones that do are normally less rigorous than the UK. There’s nothing really comparable to an MOT, and so you occasionally see some absolute clunkers driving around. As long as a car looks OK from the outside it’s unlikely to be pulled over. The sheer scale of the American landscape –even if you live in a town of smallish population you are unlikely to live within walking or cycling distance of everything you need – means that car ownership is almost ubiquitous. You have to be pretty damn poor to ride the bus.
Every American I met who was travelling domestically was doing so by car. In Austin, TX I ran into a guy named Joey from NY whose beaten-to-shit Nissan (affectionately referred to by anyone who climbed inside as ‘Ol’ Blue’) had assumed the status of a spirit vehicle, so often was it miraculously resurrected. It looked like an idiot’s crayon drawing of a car; the sort of vehicle you’d take in to part exchange and come away clutching a Magic Tree air freshener, feeling like you got a good deal.
So riding the Greyhound involves traveling with a cross-section of the lower economic brackets of American society. For a very long time. The natural instinct to ignore everyone around you begins to sputter out after 19 hours without human contact. Add the fact that Americans are generally less reserved than British people and your outcome is that if you travel on the bus long enough, something notable will happen. It’s not that the Greyhound is intrinsically weird, it’s more that you have to spend such a long time on it that something weird is statistically likely to occur.
The drivers themselves are not immune. There is a required speech they must make at the start of each leg, for the benefit of new passengers. It details where the bus is going and what time they are expected to arrive (often to muffled comments and cries of derision), and runs through the Greyhound ‘in-flight’ policies. These mostly consist of things that are prohibited, a list which roughly runs as follows:
• No guns
• No drinking
• No drugs
• No smoking
• No smoking out of the window
• No smoking in the bathroom
• No disabling the smoke alarm in the bathroom and trying to smoke unnoticed in there, seriously guys
Drivers have to repeat the same spiel at every stop, and so begin to add their own spin and vocabulary. A wizened old black guy who sounded remarkably like Droopy listed what sorts of cellular and electronic music devices he did and didn’t have a problem with us listening to. Some of them put on accents, which you would only notice if you ride the whole journey with them.
If you are caught breaking the rules you are dropped at the side of the road in the custody of a state trooper. A vivacious and amply proportioned driver on the last leg of Roanoke, VA to Atlanta, GA would enunciate this warning and then supplement it with: “And I’ma whoop yo’ ass, too,” an offhand threat that drew occasional cheers. She drove at least ten miles below the speed limit the whole way there, “For the sake of the chillun.”
A stern and slabby old geezer behind the wheel in Alabama encouraged people to remain in sight of the bus at all times during rest stops. “If you have to go inside, you look at us out the window,” he advised. “You got 20 minutes, so you can smoke 20 cigarettes. No need to go nowhere.”
Between Phoenix and LA the aisle seat next to me was filled by a rotund guy in a heinously bright shirt that made his sombre, Eeyore-esque voice seem like a wind-up. Raymond had the diabeetus (a term that I had heard college kids say in jest but never heard spoken in truth until then), and carried himself with the resigned, slightly absent gravitas of the long sober drug addict.
Raymond had what I choose to believe was a powerful grasp of scripture. My knowledge of the Bible is essentially naught, and so for all I know the words could have come from fortune cookies, but he said them with sufficient weight and distance that they seemed universally applicable, which I suspect is the point of most scripture anyway. He dissected my life over an eight hour period and told me that either I would be saved or I wouldn’t, a remark which seemed remarkably fatalist for an evangelical, until he told me that his problem was that he knew he was already saved, and so he needed to turn me to the path of righteousness for his own peace of mind (which I thought was pretty generous of him). He was bemused to find I was in the US to mostly look at windfarms.
By the time we arrived in LA I was refereeing a three-way argument between Raymond, his son and his daughter-in-law, a position I considered overloaded with responsibility seeing as Raymond's reason for coming to LA was to reconnect with his partially estranged son. I didn't want to be the guy who clumsily blew out the flame on his rekindling relationship. I must have done OK: he gave me a packet of Ritz crackers (“I’m not supposed to eat them anyway, they could kill me”) which proved useful in dealing with the psychic fallout of a 30 hour bus ride.
Across the whole trip I spent more than a week on the Greyhound. That’s a lot longer than some other experiences that I consider life-changing or defining. I’ve been in relationships that were shorter than that. It ought to mean something, but I'm not sure if it does yet.
