About fifteen minutes in to my drive up from Boston yesterday I realized that I was going to spend the two hour stretch between South Station and Lebanon in a state of relative solitude. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't on a bus. No one would be sitting behind me talking dirty on their cell phone, no horrible period films would be awkwardly flickering through the only two working TV screens onboard, no rosy-eyed gang bangers would come lurching out of the bathroom followed by a thick cloud of pot smoke, and I wouldn't have to spend twenty minutes hunting for that widely advertised but strangely elusive wifi connection. (Note: Lucky Star busses don't actually HAVE wifi, they just like putting hotspot stickers on their busses.) In fact, driving up couldn't have been easier. I left as soon as I wanted to, I arrived before I was supposed to, no one needed to drive 30 min to pick me up at the station, and I probably saved a good fifteen dollars by NOT taking the bus. But to be perfectly honest, I missed it. I like busses. Most of you don't, and that's fine. But since we're all sitting around MY little campfire, I figured I'd explain why I do, and, in the process, cast myself as one of those particularly hardy sorts who find just about anything that is boring, monotonous or otherwise unpleasant to be an excellent character building opportunity. Those of you who know me well will of course confirm this.

The Chat

The most obvious appeal of long distance bus travel is the social life. Passengers on local busses are famously distant and defensive, but after about three hours of bumping down the highway together, people begin to loosen up. Certain types just click. On busses to New York in particular, I have noticed that the big jolly (read:loud) guys with hipster beards and disarmingly bright LL Bean backpacks (cinched up kindergarten tight so they don't have to take them off while sitting down) always seem to strike up a conversation with that one beautiful girl on board who is unlucky enough to be traveling by herself. This causes a strong group chivalry/envy reaction in every male within a ten seat radius. It's too weak to produce any real action, but strong enough to cause group loathing towards the Neon Beaners, which in turn gives us all something to talk about. They are lucky and unpleasant. Nothing bonds strangers together quite like a good dose of collective hostility towards something that is as easy to see as it is to hate. Good conversations happen as well. I have ridden long distance busses in a whole host of different locales, and in each place, no matter the host culture, there is a rapport between bus travelers that simply does not exist elsewhere. I have had the fortune of conversing with a semi-pro soccer player from Namibia (very pleasant), with Germans who presume George Bush was actually acting on behalf of the American people (rather unpleasant), and with two chicken owners - while their chickens were being fed bits of my sandwich. (Which, while it was sad to see a perfectly good sandwich go so quickly, was a surprisingly informative little chat, revolving - for the most part- around the fate of those very chickens. )

The Arrival

Arriving by bus, while perhaps the least dramatic arrival you'll find, is by far the most satisfying. It's a far cry from having used your own two legs to make the trip, but the weariness, that sense of being a little beat up for having crossed over a sizable distance, is heightened by the feeling that you have arrived in a place that wasn't necessarily expecting you. Train stations and airports are, by their very nature, the easiest places on earth to land. You can count on there being food, maps, and a whole host of taxis waiting outside to convey you to that exact final location, without ever really having to deal with the newness of a place until you wake up the next morning, refreshed. They set you down in a commercialized mechanism for removing that sense of arrival and replacing it with a rather limp imitation of what's outside, usually realized as a different set of stores selling you local variants on what was on sale back home. Bus stations on the other hand are notoriously seedy affairs, having no real reason to boot out the resident homeless crowd like an airport or train station might. (Although that being said, there are some that give it their best shot. My favorite is the Santa Cruz bus station that uses loud classical music as an auditory bum repellant in the front entrance.) And it is thanks to this decrepitude, thanks to this inability to keep the grungy reality of your destination at bay, that they maintain a far more honest sense of arrival. When you land in a bus station, there is no questioning the fact that you are somewhere new.

Dot, No Dot

And that's IF you happen to be on a big dot (versus small dot) sort of trip. Small dot dropoffs (which is to say, no station) result in about as shocking a touchdown as you can hope to find, short of having a bag thrown over your head by the Homeland Security department and being tossed in to a jet bound for Egypt. (I suspect that this, and other shocks felt on a trip like that, would be significantly stronger, but thankfully I haven't had the pleasure just yet.) Nope, no station needed, just a sign on the side of the road. Hell, all you really need to do is convince the bus driver that something unpleasant and difficult to clean up is about to vacate your body in the next few seconds and he'll helpfully stop the bus just about anywhere!

Just Better

Of course small dot travel can be done more easily in a car, but - and here, I've made my way to the only real point to be made - busses are packed with raw material for cracking good travel stories. Nothing else comes close. It's all there: a poorly ventilated brick of tightly packed humans, all closer for having gone through a low-grade ordeal together, that fresh excitement of a midnight arrival on a strange street corner, and ultimately, the prospect of feeling as though you've really gone somewhere.

Comments

Nate
My god, the hawaiian huts! I do remember those. I also the question of 'where we were going to be in a year' being passed around. I don't remember what was said, but I doubt any of us were close. And of course, the busses! With that grumpy old greek guy selling tickets in the back, fenced in to his odd little kiosk. I remember peeling blue paint for some reason, but they must have been orange...perhaps my color memory inverts things.

Carla
do you remember those buses on Corfu? The bright orange ones that we had to stand on even though they took the corners at 30 on gravel. I am glad we found the bus though, or we may have had to spend more time on the beach with glass in the sand :-(, the huts where cool though. And the Lightning Bugs!