HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS! The green flyer on the campus bulletin boardpromises the greatest little cross-country bus “ride ever. There’s no bus terminal, though. To get a reservation you have to shove $10 and a return address under the front door of an anonymous San Francisco connection. Even then, just where or when to find the bus remains a mystery. A note in the mail a few days later tells you to turn up, with a sleeping bag, at an intersection in the Haight-Ashbury district by sundown Wednesday. Says a friend: “You might end up riding with a bunch of goddam freaks!”
The intersection turns out to be an entrance to Golden Gate Park. At sundown 40 people are crowded around a beat-up purple and white bus. Jeez, how will they all fit? Adam, a frizzy-haired, forlorn-looking grad student in an orange serape, says at least six passengers can bunk in the luggage racks. It begins to rain, and soon sleeping bags are turning to mush. There was no receipt for that $10 either. Will there be a seat? The woman was pretty evasive on the phone. All this secrecy, the whole scene, in fact, brings back college days in 1967 when you jammed a rug under the door and opened all the windows before you lit a joint.
A young black woman named Sapphire needs three friends to drag aboard a heavy wooden crate, a cross between a coffin and footlocker. Just in from Sonoma, Linden Brolin, a skinny, blond woman in jeans and a black T shirt, with her three-year-old son Bjorn in tow, keeps asking around for a place to park her camper till she gets back from Tucson. “You won’t believe this,” she confides, “but I’m 37.” You were about to guess 35. Laid-back Dennis Watkins says he’s “going to Baja to see the whales.”
As passengers climb aboard, the driver collects their $65 balance. In cash. “Travelers checks are too hard to handle,” the voice on the phone had said. Only 20 people get on; the rest are waving goodbye. Instead of regular rows of seats two sofas face the aisle up front. Beyond that, amidships, is a card table, one side supported by a length of nylon rope tied to a metal ceiling rack. A long, cushioned sleeping platform, raised about 2 ft. off the floor, fills the whole rear half of the bus. The ponytailed bus driver (there are two drivers aboard) tells people to take off their shoes, so the sleeping platform will stay clean. He says his name is Monk-see and he even spells it out. He also explains there is no smoking on the bus and no Interstate Commerce Commission license, so please don’t tell anyone along the route you are a “paying passenger.” The brochure promised that the drivers never drink or take drugs “while behind the wheel.” It also made clear that passengers travel at their own risk. Bjorn is already swinging like a monkey from the luggage racks, while 8-year-old Leah, bound for North Carolina with her mother, purrs and mews to imitate a cat.
There is no bathroom. A funnel in the semiprivate stairwell up front is supposed to serve the truly desperate. Thank God, rest stops are frequent. There is a tape deck, though, with speakers fore and aft. As we pull out, the Beatles pump out Here Comes the Sun. And supper starts as some kind of spontaneous combustion. “I’ve got organic carrots,” says Linden, rummaging in a satchel. Before you know it, dates, French bread, salami and a bottle of Mr. Wente’s best Grey Riesling are passing from hand to hand. Monksee announces that he will be too busy to count heads after every rest stop, but he doesn’t want to leave anyone behind. A buddy system springs up as spontaneously as food and drink. Dennis, the whale man, is matched with Linden and Jerry, a large, long-haired Texan who is taking the trip, he says, because he “just can’t stand the craziness in San Francisco any more.” It is Jerry who produces a deck of cards, and the first hand of what turns out to be a five-day rolling poker game gets under way, wooden matches serving as chips.
All this is oddly troubling, for it stirs memories of nippier times, the sweet side and the irritating side, that kind of compulsive counterculture togetherness so full of pressure to conform in nonconformity, everybody maddeningly casual about who owns what. Ungenerously the traveler decides to keep special track of wallet and money while aboard.
People start falling asleep early. By flipping a few panels, the sofas and card table turn into more sleeping platforms. By 2 a.m. there are sleeping bags as far as the eye can see. As the passenger stumbles among them a voice hisses, “There is room here!” It’s Adam. He whispers that he is a biologist from M.I.T. Maybe that explains the scrape. He was “designing an incurable virus,” he says, when he realized what he was doing. He’s been on the road for several weeks sorting things out. Daybreak and breakfast in Arizona. Sleeping bags are rolled. The poker game reconvenes. Jerry cheats theatrically. When someone pulls a hidden card out of his pocket, Jerry acts flabbergasted to see it. Everybody laughs. Dennis proudly reveals that he has been an art-class model for five years. “I try to give them more than others do.”
So does this underground Trailways. Last year its buses delivered low rates and lots of laughs to more than 1,000 coast-to-coast passengers. The prototypewas a VW van on the Portland-to-Berkeley run ten years ago. Its success prompted a flock of imitators, which still crisscross the continent summers and during the Christmas break. “We all know we’re working on borrowed time,” says one of the owners, who also doubles as a bus driver. “One of these days we’ll be found out, and it will be over.” At Big Spring, Texas, we have to trade drivers with the westbound hip pie bus. Dave, the night driver, has to get home to Portland. He passes a tequila bottle around as he leaves. “Well folks, it was really organic.” Sniffs his replacement: “Smells kind of moldy in here.” Very true.
In West Texas the bus enters a stretch of icy country that turns out to last some 2,000 miles, almost to New York, in fact. Wrecked semitrucks and skidded cars begin to litter the roadside. At one stop, a shocked, trembling trucker keeps saying: “There were cars all around me, and this little one pulled right in front of me.
I couldn’t stop. I ran right over him.”
Depression sets in as the bus is stranded in Arkansas for the night. But Monksee uncorks some wine, and soon the bus is rocking to the sound of Bob Marley, everybody chanting “no woman no cry” right along with Marley. Jerry and Sapphire dance in the aisle. “What would happen if we were on Greyhound?” some one wonders. Sapphire reaches for the zinfandel. “Gimme that infidel!” Jerry is blowing his harmonica as the bus fills up with the sweet smell of marijuana.
Sunday morning. Slab ice forces the bus off the road again in Carlisle, Ark. (pop. 2,000). As we stumble out, most of us disheveled and collectively smelling as ripe as backpackers three days out, we learn that more than 300 people are al ready stranded here from all over the U.S. and Canada. The Emmanuel Baptist Church has opened its doors to offer shelter, and this morning the church ladies are dishing up a free hot meal in the auditorium. “When we realized there were no rooms at the motel and bad weather in all directions,”recalls Church Mem ber Russell Thrift, “we told the boy down at the gas station to let folks know they could stay at the church. We did the same thing last year. Every time this happens, when folks are gone we find checks here and there, tucked into the pulpit or the music stand.” A sign in the church foyer reads NO MAN IS AN ISLAND.
Memphis, Greensboro, N.C., Balti more. When the bus finally pulls into New York City we are close to three days late. But no one is eager to say goodbye. It does not seem to matter that the whole experience seems as corny as a 1940s movie. Roughing it, sharing everything from spare cash to toothbrushes, has formed bonds unheard of on Amtrak. Jerry, Ted and Susie stay aboard, heading for the last stop in Boston. As the bus pulls out, the traveler, walking away in the snow, hands jammed into pockets against the cold, finds that someone has slipped her the jack of hearts.
— Janice Castro
