Anthropology of a Greyhound Bus Trip
Part I. Frog
His name was Frog, I would soon learn, and he was returning to Memphis for the first time in nine years after being locked up in some northern Wisconsin penitentiary. He was a black man of maybe 45 years of age. He was eventually talkative and quite clearly giddy with excitement. One can imagine the excitement, the prospects of reuniting with his children and his "baby mamma” (as he would put it), but one can also imagine the apprehension. A lot changes in nine years. Love can be lost, kids grow up all too quickly, the world evolves.
The bus left downtown Chicago's W Harrison st. Greyhound station around 10 pm. It was packed full. One of the only seats left open was the aisle seat on the left side of the furthest back row. Frog had already been on board when I got on—he was coming down from Green Bay—and so he had laid claim to the window seat hours prior. I sat down next to him and we pulled out from the station in the silent uncertainty of not knowing who the hell this new person was and what it was going to be like sitting next to and trying to sleep aside a total stranger. It was simple and yet uncanny: two lives brought randomly and yet intimately together for the twelve-hour bus trip to Memphis. Without words spilt between us, there was no room for even a meager scrap of trust. Frog broke that silence quickly.
"Boy am I excited to get back south of the Mason-Dixon line again. Cold places make cold people. I am fed up with them Wisconsin motherfuckers.”
Now, that was a fascinating thing to hear. The Mason-Dixon line separated free states from slave states before the outbreak of the Civil War. Nowadays it lingers on in the American vernacular as a crude way to demarcate the cultural boundary between the North and the South. And so here was a black man expressing his excitement about getting back south of that line—a line that so many slaves and later freed black Americans desperately sought to get north of in the pursuit of either freedom, pre-Civil War, or better economic and social opportunities, as was the case during the Great Migration of the Jim Crow era. Time changes everything. In my experience of the American South, black and white communities are much more closely integrated these days than they are in the North, despite the South's historic resistance to such integration. I'm not saying everything about that integration is flawless by any means, I'm just saying that black communities are much more confined to urban centers in the North than they are in the South. In the South, black and white folks have simply had to figure out how to live together, like it or not, in the cities and the suburbs and even the countryside. In the North, geographic isolation has more so been the rule, even nowadays. Take from that what you will. I don't mean to get all sociological, but the man's words intrigued me. They resonated with some of what I had seen on previous journeys across the southern U.S. I had only just sat down, and the world-expanding experience that is riding Greyhound had already begun.
“This'll be my first time on Memphis streets without a glock on my hip,” he told me, while looking pensively out the window as the Chicago skyline began to fade from view into the mid-March night. As the city's glowing prisms of light and metal were humbled by our increasing distance from them, our own reflections on the dirty glass became all the more noticeable. I looked down at the floor while we spoke to avoid awkwardly meeting his eyes there on the window pane.
"Damn. That's gotta feel weird,” I replied, not having any idea how it might feel to be back in Memphis for the first time in 9 years without the customary glock on one's hip.
The conversation was wide ranging. Frog spoke in short, and yet meaning-infused little anecdotes. At some point I grew unsure if he actually cared about speaking with me in particular, or if he just had musings he wanted to get off his chest and proper social etiquette forbade him from doing so out loud to himself. That is to say, I came to feel like an empty vector through which his own self-administered therapeutic processes might flow. Frog was readying himself for a significant moment in his life. I can't say I, in particular, helped him in any way, but I can certainly say I enjoyed the opportunity he afforded me to peer into his world.
We both woke with a start at 5 AM when the screaming began:
"¡AYUDA! ¡AYUDA!”
An older man was having a seizure two rows in front of me, and the guy sitting next to him was a Latin American immigrant that had no idea what to do other than scream for help. I was half-asleep and my heart was pounding and it took me a while to even realize what was happening. Well before I was able to get my wits about me, Frog jumped into action. He leapt over me into the aisle, helped the man down onto the floor, rolled him onto his side and assisted the man through the seizure. It was something he'd seen before in prison, and there wasn't a moment of hesitation in his actions. The orange dawn radiated through the left-side windows, and Memphis was rising in the front windshield. Frog, a man who will never be bestowed with honors or recognition by greater society, was bent over the recovering man administering water to him in small sips as the bus rumbled steadily south. It was heroic.
I've since wondered about him—wondered how his return treated him. That morning we stood together outside of the Memphis Greyhound station awaiting our respective rides. My little sister was coming to get me. I let him borrow my phone to make the calls he needed to arrange a pick up. He had to call a few people. It sounded like there was some friction, some tension. I don't know who was coming for Frog. When my sister pulled up, we shook hands, and parted ways. As we pulled out of the parking lot I saw the old man, not 40 minutes out of a seizure, smoking a cigarette on the curb. The crisp morning light illuminated the curling smoke like a hologram from a world without form.
Part II. Florida Woman
Her puke reeked of boxed wine. Several passengers seated in front of her now wore it on their shoes and pants, and did so with understandable dismay. But you couldn't hate her. She was pitiful.
I was on a great American Greyhound bus trip from Chicago to Memphis to Charlotte to Miami, and then from Miami all the way to Waco, Texas, smack dab on the path of totality, to watch the moon eclipse the sun with some dear friends. From there I'd catch a ride back to California and the hippie kingdom that is the central coast, where I'd visit old acquaintances at the aptly named "Rainbow Creek Ranch." It was my way of reuniting myself with both loved ones and American culture at large after nearly two years outside of the country. The plan was to visit family scattered across the southeast and then bomb straight west across the country to the Lone Star state. In Memphis I would hike through beautiful, springtime riparian forests that straddle the Mississippi and there my younger sister's deaf dog would prove itself a solid morel hunter. Later, in the Appalachians my bus would be turned around due to inclement weather and I'd watch as furious passengers shouted down our poor driver who was also having a bad night and just wanted to play it safe. In Miami I'd see my favorite artist Oumou Sangaré, "The Songbird of Wassoulou,” in concert and my initially skeptical older sister and brother-in-law would find themselves dancing to kora music in no time. In Texas I would watch a vulture swoop across the obsidian face of the eclipsed sun, and I would have the sensation that my mind was short-circuiting. But between the kora music and the transient death of the sun god, I would watch Florida Woman yack her brains out onto the bus floor and onto the shoes and pants of a few unfortunate fellow riders.
We had picked her up in Kissimmee, just south of Orlando. She was already drunk when she boarded, and our driver audibly considered not letting her on. He let his empathy get the better of him, and decided otherwise. In about 2 hours, he'd be cursing himself for having done so.
It was a 5 hour ride from Kissimmee to Tallahassee through beautiful moss-laden forests of pine and oak and palms, as if the world couldn't decide between temperate and tropical climes and so settled on this chimerical compromise. About 30 minutes in Florida Woman was asking if we were in Tallahassee. An hour in, she was stuttering through strange phone calls and offering vague complaints about the route's itinerary of stops as if the driver were making them out of sheer pleasure or wanderlust. 2 hours in, she keeled forward and vomited.
"God damnit! I knew I should never have let that b**** on the bus!”
The driver made a quick exit off the highway, and in no time my fellow passengers and I, some wearing her lunch on their sneakers, stood and watched in silence as she was hydraulically loaded into an ambulance strapped to a stretcher—the apparent protocol for blacked-out Greyhound riders. The two paramedics acted nonchalantly, chatting back and forth as the lift hummed and the woman slowly rose. She protested weakly, swinging a limp arm around with her head tilted back. I had never seen a person look so pathetic in all my life. Everyone must have been in unspoken agreement on that point, as no one trash-talked her despite the serious inconvenience she had brought to our day. No one said a damn thing. There was a certain solemnity to our observance of the spectacle—it felt almost ceremonial. Lighters were rolled under thumbs and sparked to life; American Spirits were used like snorkels to draw air in from beyond a veil of glowing embers. Smoke lofted and was lost in the pretty blue sky.
Part III. The Woman from Monterrey
Monterrey is a gorgeous city in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico just a few hours south of the Texas border. It sits at the base of the Sierra Madre Oriental, a mountain range of mythic beauty that stretches down the eastern half of the country. Near Monterrey cloud forests cling to its high peaks and cacti stud the desert around its base. I didn't get there on the bus trip currently being described, but I had been there just a year and a half prior at the very start of my long ramble down through Latin America. For that reason, Monterrey holds a very special spot in my heart. I saw it with fresh eyes. Mexicans will tell you that it is the most Americanized part of Mexico. While that is probably true, as I first rode into that city back in October of '22 through crumbling streets flanked with cinder block apartments I remember feeling myself to be in a new world entirely. I would go on to stay two weeks in that city.
I tell you all of that as a bit of a tangent. But these fond memories of Monterrey were buried somewhere in my mind when I met Fernanda, a 40-something year-old native of that fine city.
I woke to the smell of a brush fire. Smoke was blowing across the highway and our bus was stopped in the middle of the lane with its hazards blinking and zero visibility in any direction. People were coughing from smoke inhalation. It was 2 AM the day after Florida Woman lost her lunch as well as her ride to Tallahassee and I was by then in southern Mississippi making my way decidedly west. As I looked around startled and confused, I saw a dark haired woman in a black leather jacket standing up and peering out the windows similarly alarmed.
"¿Hay alguien aquí que hable Español?" she asked. I answered her in Spanish and we began conversing about the situation. We put together that we had driven into the middle of thick smoke from a roadside brush fire and that our bus driver was intent on not going anywhere until he had better visibility to keep moving forward. Fernanda and I both thought it was a terrible idea to be stopped there like that, and minutes after expressing that idea to each other—just as we worried might happen—a semi-truck came tearing out of the darkness and narrowly avoided rear-ending us. It managed to veer at the last second and sideswiped the lefthand side of the Greyhound, making a terrible screeching noise while everyone on the bus yelled, "WOAH!” Considering how fast it came in, undoubtedly the guys in the back few rows would have been killed if it hadn't swerved to the side.
Everyone was covering their mouths to try and escape the smoke filled air. Fernanda wanted to get off the bus and walk up the highway, but I told her I thought that was unwise as the bus would eventually move on and she'd be left alone and on foot near the flaming brush. Eventually some very kind highway patrolmen showed up and, with thick Mississippian accents and great wide-brimmed hats, took our names and asked if everyone was okay. The guys seated along the lefthand window of the bus where the sideswipe had occurred were beyond excited to write their names on the sheet, taking great care to provide all of their contact information as they imagined a hefty insurance payout was coming their way. The kind patrolmen said they couldn't promise as much but they would be sure to pass on their information accordingly. The semi-truck and our bus were escorted off the highway so that an accident report could be performed.
The whole early morning ordeal and the ride the following day to Baton Rouge gave Fernanda and I the chance to talk about everything under the sun. She was coming from Mobile, Alabama where she had lived with a gringo she was dating for a while. Only, he didn't speak much Spanish and she didn't speak any English so I could never figure out how they made it work. I guess affection can be like deep sea currents, circulating down beneath the realm of words and more readily communicable things with a logic all its own. Or the sex was great. One can only speculate.
On a serious note, he had died tragically the year before. Cardiac arrest at age 47, despite being in seemingly good health. She had come back to Mobile to collect some of her things and was headed to the border at Laredo, Texas and then on to Monterrey. She told me of her three boys, now in their twenties, from an earlier relationship. One of them was living in Canada and working as an auto mechanic. The other two were still in Mexico looking for work. She told me of her love of Kurt Cobain, and proved it by showing me that her middle name on Facebook was ‘Nirvana’. I told her about some of my excursions in and around Monterrey. She spoke of the cartel violence that almost brought Monterrey to its knees in the 2010's. The city once woke to bodies hanging from a prominent bridge. I had seen a safer Monterrey and came away with naive romantic impressions; she was still terrified of the place.
We parted ways in Houston. She was headed southwest to the border and I was headed up to Waco. It ended with a big hug, a joke about having almost been simultaneously burnt alive and hit by a semi-truck together, and then saying goodbye.
Part IV. Flower Children
Emma and Valen picked me up outside of a Denny's at about 11 PM the following night. They were super late, and the Denny's staff had started asking me if I had anywhere to go. I assured them that I would soon be out of their hair. It was April 6th and we had convened in Waco to watch the moon eclipse the sun in two days' time. Being back with friends again made me realize for the first time that I had in fact been lonely over the course of those two years traveling. I had the vivid bodily sensation that I could feel my soul thawing out after a deep freeze. I also had the revelation, after two years amidst very normal Latin Americans, that my friends were indeed hippie freakin’ flower children. And so was I—back amongst my own kind.
On the 8th, from a small Texas creek we witnessed the eclipse. It had been cloudy all morning but cleared just in time for us to watch those few minutes of totality with perfect clarity. Yes, the animals behaved weirdly. The frogs chorused in the false twilight and birds sang in the midday dawn that came afterwards. The eclipse was beautiful. I wasn't expecting so much radiance around the outside of the moon. It looked like a black orchid with its outer petals set aflame. The mind was not built to comprehend such things. I had come into the experience with the expectation that the event would serve as a metaphor for the eclipsing of that period of my life and the dawning of something new. In actuality, the eclipse taught me that such mental constructions are bullshit and that life never gives us what we hope for or expect or can even fathom. Life always eludes our conceptualization, and that is why being alive is so endlessly fascinating.
All told, the Greyhound journey was a weird one. If you want to gaze into a demographic slice of the American public that you're unlikely to encounter elsewhere, ride Greyhound. But unless you want to face inclement weather, delays, drunken Floridians, or simply an elevated risk of crazy shit happening, I'd just fly. It's actually cheaper for most routes nowadays. That being said, Greyhound, hand-in-hand with its many failings, will leave you with much more to write about.