The Road to New York

I’ve always got my money’s worth from Greyhound. It’s generally the cheapest way to get around the states and, for this reason, you’re inevitably going to come across some characters.

Last time I was in the US, in 2004, I boarded a bus in Las Vegas for a 16 hour journey to Denver, Colorado. I sat across the aisle from a guy who had lost everything he owned in the course of a week long bender on the strip. He left Vegas with his bus ticket and a few spare dollars in his pocket. I was expecting him to ask me for money after telling me his story. He didn’t.

This time around, I boarded the first of four buses in Wooster Ohio, bound for New York via Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and Baltimore Maryland. On my bus were about half a dozen Amish people. They got dropped at the bus station in several horse-drawn buggies (for real!). They all dressed in black. The guys wore slacks with braces, white shirts and thick woollen capes. A few of the men were smoking pipes before we boarded. The women were dressed in ankle-length dresses, similar capes, and bonnets. They spoke in what sounded to be like a German dialect.

I’m not sure how their Greyhound trip fit in with their beliefs about technology. I was hoping to strike up a conversation with one of them, but it didn’t happen. Apparently communities are strongly concentrated in north-eastern Ohio (whish is where Wooster is)…perhaps they were going to visit another community?

I left the Amish in Akron Ohio and boarded a bus for Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. We arrived in Pittsburgh early in the afternoon in time to get a nice view of the city. It looked pretty cool. Very industrial and kind of gritty looking, but not ugly. It appeared to be fairly densely populated, with many terrace style houses crammed onto steep embankments that ran up from the banks of the Allegheny and Monogahela Rivers which converge in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River river. We had a 20 minute driver change, enough time to get a coffee from a nearby office building.

As well as the characters, the no-frills ethos of the Greyhound usually provides an air of adventure…often along the lines of “it was a rough ride but I made it in the end”. In 2004 I boarded a bus bound for New York at a particularly rough terminal in Washington DC. It was about midnight and I remember that I was feeling pretty under the weather. I was the last one through the metal detector set up at the boarding gate. The bus was full, there were two seats left down the back of the bus when I got on. One was soaking wet and the other was occupied by a huge suitcase belonging to an equally huge Latino lady. When I saw the suitcase and the lady I was almost resigned to the fact that I’d be travelling in the wet seat. With a clumsy half-hearted argument and a look of desperation, I plead my case. She responded with a few gruff words in Spanish and a flick of the hand. I remember being very angry at the world.

This year’s Greyhound adventure sprung out of the Pittsburgh-Baltimore leg. Basically the bus got lost. The driver missed his exit on the Baltimore beltroad, taking us on an hour long circumnavigation of the city. I missed my connection and the last bus to New York out of Baltimore and was redirected to Philadelphia. By this stage it was about one in the morning.

During winter, bus stations are a popular refuge for the homeless as well as the odd larrikin on his way home from the bar. The Philadelphia bus terminal had employed a security guard to move such characters along. The guy would do the rounds every fifteen minutes asking to see people’s tickets. Apparently he wasn’t all that good with faces because he’d hit me up every time. It started to piss me off. On his third time around I told him that, yep, my plan was still to get on the bus to New York.

The liveliest customer at the station that night was an elderly black guy who must have been in his 80s. He looked like a retired R&B artist, sporting a lot of bling and some big sunglasses. Each time the security guard asked him for his ticket, he’d say he was still looking for it. In between time he’d shuffle around with his cane asking people for money and swearing at them when they refused. Eventually he picked a fight with a cleaner and started following around, wielding his cane. The cleaner was fairly calm initially but got more and more aggravated. Eventually he confronted the old man, “stop hiding behind your cane fool”. The old guy responded by throwing his cane on the ground and raising his fists, “Come on man. I don’t need no cane. I’m gunna whip your ass”. This was enough to have him removed by the police. As the cleaner walked away he shook his head and muttered, “This is the shit I gotta put up with every night”.

The bus for New York finally arrived. There was a heart stopping moment when the station manager told us that the inbound bus was quite full and there was a chance we all would not get on. We just fit. I boarded and was inspired to write a post about The Greyhound. Tapping away under dim light, ipod in to dampen the sound of snoring, the lady sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. I took an ear out. “Are you a suicide bomber?”, she asked, deadly serious. “Ahhh, no”. “OK, it’s just I thought you were writing a suicide note before you blew us all up”.

I rolled into New York at four thirty in the morning, 17 hours after I left Wooster, two and a half hours behind schedule but with another US city under my belt and a few more stories to tell.