After months of ratcheting up fares to keep up with fuel costs, the airlines are now contritely rescinding their most recent increases. Such was not the case two weeks ago, when I realized I had no choice but to go to Weird City to inspect some papers at one of the world’s most gloriously excellent and greedily acquisitive libraries. Not only was I up against a deadline, but I also had to see the papers firsthand, because I couldn’t quite articulate what I was looking for, so I couldn’t direct anyone I knew on site to look for it. I did find it, as well as the celebrated much much more, but at what cost?
Two weeks ago it was still May. Remember how young and carefree we were then? Yeah. And the cheapest airfare kayak.com could find to Weird City was $839. Fine: I had spent so many hours in airports in the past nine months that, I told myself, I was relieved not to be flying.
After all, my favorite way to travel is by train. Though Amtrak seems to be perpetually trimming its itineraries while raising its fares, I remain smitten with rail travel and would choose it at any opportunity. As “evidenced” by that episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie and Samantha suffer the indignities of showering over a toilet and sharing a club car with children as well as paunchy Midwestern dudes sporting wedding rings and unironic facial hair, trains are emphatically not fabulous. However, they are civilized: passengers can get up and walk around; they are all but forced to relax, an activity that may or may not include using one’s laptop or reading. (On a smaller scale, I remain convinced that cities with extensive mass rail systems have better-informed and -educated populations. Sure, you’ll see Blackberries sprouting up in every ear, but many passengers are also reading; even if they’re not, they necessarily demonstrate an awareness of etiquette unknowable to freeway drivers who risk offending no one but themselves.) What is more, trains take us through an America that we wouldn’t otherwise see: the back yards of Appalachia, eerie rocks once submerged in the ocean along the Pacific coast, graffiti sprayed apparently just for us in Chicago.
This past year, I had to arrange my eight (yes, eight) trips around my teaching schedule, and since I’ve never been on a train that departed on time—after all, they figure if you’re traveling by train, time is no object—I flew each time. Not surprisingly, then, I had fallen out of the habit of seeking out train schedules. By the time the train crossed my mind (heh), it was sold out.
Never mind, for what came to my rescue but the Chariot of the People, the Big Gray Dog? Yes, folks, I voluntarily took a bus on an overnight trip, twenty-seven hours each way.
My unsolicited advice to those seeking to save a few shekels by going Greyhound? Don’t do it!
When I was a grad student all of, um, four years ago, I used not to think twice about taking a bus on fairly long trips. It could be that I’ve become too old to sit still for that long, deprived of sleep. It could be that life on the fringes of the professoriate has finally coaxed my inner snob out into the open. But this last bus ride was my last, because hell really is other people.
.These other people were, I’m not proud to admit, truly other to me. My route to Weird City took me through the Deep South, where I had never been before. (I know: I’m as pure as the driven snow.) The bus seemed to stop at every little town, pop. 525, where teenaged mothers would board with their newborns—that is, if there was space. What with exorbitant airfares and unprecedented gas prices, Greyhound was (un)surprisingly popular. Every other leg (and there were many) of the trip was oversold, and a second bus had to be called into service, involving a delay of up to five hours. Not once did I have a pair of seats to myself. Indeed, I arguably never had a single seat to myself, since the person who plonked herself or himself down next to me inevitably either weighed upwards of 300 pounds or was laden with baggage. One particularly memorable seatmate was thus burdened in both senses of the term. This young woman had apparently brought the contents of her entire apartment with her and spent the whole five-hour journey with a blanket over her head as she sobbed into her cellphone at the boyfriend she had just left.
I had learned long before then not to ask anyone to mind the boundaries of their seat. Some ten hours before, a woman of robustly ample figure got in the seat in front of me and promptly reclined it as close to 180° as possible. She was practically in my lap, and since her head was only three inches away from mine, I thought I might as well ask her to move her seat upright just a smidge. She replied, not to me but to no one in particular, “If she bothers me again I’ll turn around and knock the shit out of her. I need my rest and I need my space.” Were I more certain of her grasp on civility, I would have retorted, “And if you do so I’ll have you arrested for assault.”
Of course she could have been bluffing, but then again she could have knocked the shit out of me before I could dial the authorities, who may or may not have taken seriously a call from a bus, so I wasn’t taking my chances. Throughout the trip I had overheard multiple passengers—all male—talking on cellphones to or about their parole officers, and I had sat next to one very young Army reservist on her way to her base. She was sobbing not because she was being deployed, but because it was her first bus trip ever, and it was frightening her. I tried to reassure her, though I couldn’t help being frightened about the frightened, inexperienced kids we are sending out to fight.
But then I couldn’t fault this young woman for her fright. It turns out that the police do in fact heed calls from buses, and for good reason: one man kept fondling his seatmate, so the driver pulled over onto the shoulder of an abandoned, possibly unmapped highway, where the police boarded the bus and arrested Mr. Hands. Astonishingly enough (well, I was astonished), this was not the only instance in which the driver was motivated to throw passengers off the bus. As we were pulling up to yet another bus station, a shouting-and-shoving match erupted between a skinny teenager with a bad complexion and a heavy-set, mullet-coiffed woman with a large, gelatinous forehead:
Skinny Teenager with Bad Complexion (STBC): Move the fuck over!
Mullet-Coiffed Woman with Large, Gelatinous Forehead (MCWLGF): You move the fuck over!
STBC: It’s not my problem your ass is so big.
MCWLGF: I’m not in your seat. Just put your bag on the floor. Then you’ll have more room.
STBC: No, then you’ll be sitting on me. Move the fuck over or I’ll beat the shit out of you.
MCWLGF: You move the fuck over, crack whore. I’m not your bitch.
Then the driver switches on the light and asks what’s going on, as if he couldn’t tell. The women reiterate their complaints in almost identically elegant language, except in the third person, and he threatens to throw them off the bus if they cannot behave themselves. Meanwhile, a voice from the back of the bus chants, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” to widespread snickers. I assume he was alluding to the Jerry Springer Show, which until then I had believed had gone off the air. (Note to self: there’s a pop culture tidbit that might prove useful in livening up a lecture on dull material, like scansion. Thus, “While ‘Jerry’ is an example of a trochee, ‘Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!’ is a series of spondees.” Yeah.)
It is hot out there. Heat makes people cranky. And smelly. Just ask the babies with sodden diapers. The crankiness and smelliness increase geometrically with the number of people. But these annoyances weren’t what dismayed me most. People were so inhumane to each other, and to my great surprise, I was. . . surprised. For years I’ve cultivated what I thought was a vivaciously curmudgeonly persona, but I wasn’t prepared to teeter off into full-blown misanthropy. Sure, I’ve encountered plenty of asshats on flights, but flights are relatively short, and not once has a flight shaken my defense of the so-called working classes. As if I didn’t already know, poverty is not ennobling. My fellow passengers may have fancier cellphones and handbags than I do, but these just exaggerated their performance of class. When brought beyond the abstract, I found my fellow passengers to be so irrevocably strange. The bus saved me more than $700, but at the cost of my liberal ignorance, my (yawn) faith in humanity.