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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Goodbye, California.


44 hours on the road
2 nights sitting up sleeping
4 states
15 stops
1,900 miles
Looking out from a Greyhound window seat at San Francisco Bay, this wave of patriotism washes over me like breakers on a California beach. The skyline makes my chest heave with national pride. Skyscrapers huddled together on the shore are monuments to what we do well — build. And the bay itself was a blue canvas. Sailboats tacking, commuter boats docking, barges idling and waiting their turn at a pier. San Francisco has been labeled a laid-back city, but on a late July afternoon, crossing the Bay Bridge from Oakland, I saw a bustling community. Americans working hard, not for a dream, but for reality.

I didn't choose bus travel over air flight expecting to be coddled, so rolling south on U.S. 101 I was surprised that the bus delivered a smooth ride. Smooth enough for a former long-haul trucker. Then a loud man who boarded in San Francisco started yelling from the back, "I love you all . . .we're all going to heaven," and launched an unintelligible rap. After a visit from the driver during a brief stop in San Jose, he quieted down and we reached Gilroy, the garlic capital. The driver turned east on 152 and climbed Pacheco Peak, ears popping to the summit. We passed San Luis Reservoir, a large lake with no marinas and no houses jutting out from the shore. Only a few campers and hikers and fishermen were visible. It was a big, empty lake near a mountain summit. Peace on earth.

Down the road a piece, I'm daydreaming and taking notes when suddenly the big road, Interstate 5, appears and we merge, southbound. Northbound lanes are jammed as if L.A. is evacuating. Zooming at 75 m.p.h., we cross brown fields, some scorched by fire, and one still smoldering. But others are under cultivation.  A sign says L.A. 224 miles. Another sign decries water curtailment for agriculture, predicts a California dust bowl. We stop for a food break at Coalinga Junction. I choke down a convenience store sandwich and chat with the driver about the engine and life on the road. He says the loud man settled down after taking his "meds."

Back on the interstate the bus approaches Tejon Pass, also called The Grapevine. Carved through the Tehachapi Mountains, it's an infamous grade, one that is legendary in trucker lore for burning up engines on the ascent and burning up brakes and causing deadly wrecks on the descent. I hear and feel the automatic transmission downshift twice. The big Detroit diesel labors and the vehicle slows to a crawl. We slither through a man-made canyon, deep cuts into the mountain's chest. Topping the summit, the bus points downward and hurtles along the mountainside. Although the driver took the curves and descent a little too fast for me, he does a good job and we have no trouble. We arrive in L.A. about 9:30 p.m.  

And there I waited for more than three hours in a cramped, yet clean, terminal. People wearing sweat suits, old jeans and t-shirts, slouch in the hard plastic chairs. Their luggage is sprawled across the tile floor, piled against walls and stacked in aisles. We all looked tired. Most of us kept to ourselves. Finally a door opens, we line up, and the bus for Phoenix fills up. But nobody tells us. We just stand in line like sheep. Frustrated, I approached a kid, about 18, who was next in line when they closed the door in his face. I asked what happened. "Full," he barked, his voice ripe with indignation. So I ask around the terminal, my voice now ripe with indignation, and find the shift supervisor on the dock outside. That was sorry service, I bark, leaving at least 25 people standing in line with no explanation or notification when we could expect to depart. I tell him he should at least apologize for the delay. He doesn't say anything back, but grabs a microphone like it was a CB radio and announces Greyhound is sorry for the inconvenience and another Phoenix bus will soon board.

 An hour later, I scrunch into a seat on the overflowing bus and I'm thinking I wouldn't treat a dog the way Greyhound treated us. I'd like to give that supervisor a one-way ticket on a slow bus to Tombstone, or Death Valley, standing in the back. No A.C.

Rolling eastbound on I-10 about two a.m. The Greyhound hunkers down for another mountain pass. A sliver of moon hangs in the sky ahead. I look back and catch a sea of lights. Adios, City of Angels. I doze, but never feel like I'm sleeping. More like being hypnotized. And when the bus stops somewhere in the desert I stagger into a truck stop/travel center and ask the man behind the counter where I am. Ehrenberg, Arizona, he says, a map dot just across the Colorado River which is the state line. Rolling again, more nodding off, and I'm fully awake about 60 miles outside Phoenix. The young woman next to me, about age 19, is headed to Laredo to visit friends. She slept with her head against the window almost the whole way.

Early lesson on going Greyhound. Not all buses are created equal. Although the Oakland bus had ample leg room, these seats were built for people five feet tall, or shorter. Legs bent all night, all morning, and I'm cramping up. So a few times I stretch them into the aisle. Nobody's moving about so it seems okay.

Phoenix. We switch buses because the A.C. played out crossing the desert last night, although it was not uncomfortable. Unlike L.A., the staff gives us preferential treatment and ensures that folks who got bumped last night in L.A. are boarded first. Still, there was no time to dally. Man next to me is big as a Sumo wrestler, says he's going to court in Tucson, spreads his legs, pushes me against the window and snores, mouth wide open

Tucson two hours later and I'm willing to beg, shine shoes, for coffee. I find a vending machine that serves hot Java. Price $2.50. It's been 25 years since I've seen that little glass door close, a paper cup drop and catch hot coffee streaming from above. (One time, coffee poured down before the cup dropped. What a mess.) And unlike that acrid, stomach-wrenching coffee of those bygone days, this big cup hit the spot. A coffee snob for years, I was grateful for what I could find and relieved that I had found a fix.

A dapper man at the Tucson terminal stands in the parking lot. Squinting into the morning sun, he closely watches us unload. We pull out a half hour later and he's still there. Circling the lot, I look out the plate glass window. He walks to his car, alone. A rendezvous unfulfilled. Mother, brother, lover? Who was he waiting for? Or was he in law enforcement, and acting on a tip he was stalking a fugitive. Let your imagination finish the story line.

We have a fresh driver. Third one since leaving the Bay. One Black, one Hispanic, now an Anglo, and he's a big old boy. Like the other two, he's top notch with customers and handling the equipment. Now a leak from above. Brown water dripping from the ceiling. Doesn't smell, so I just grab a napkin and wipe and wipe for miles. A man in the seat in front of me wedges a paper towel to the mess and clogs it up.

East of Tucson we climb more mountains and puffs of popcorn drift across the blue sky. The desert is mystical, magical; how the thorny scrub brush, yucca and some grasses can cling tight to this sand and gravel, put down roots and not blow away is fascinating. Now transmission lines stretched from what looks like a succession of goal posts scar the expanse. A hub cap, 40 yards off the road, halfway up a steep hill. The town of Benson, dusty and dotted with mobile homes and trailer parks. Cattle on the right with ribs protruding. Climbing again through Texas Canyon where the marvelous work of Father Time and Mother Nature unite to offer a visual treat of boulders that hang from above and defy gravity. The popcorn clouds crash into a distant mountain top, look like surf and spray pounding rocks at a California beach.

Next stop, Lordsburg, New Mexico. Drew's Barbecue, an authentic, Texas-style joint. Only three out of about 50 passengers eat there. The others—McDonalds. The man working the pit is from Victoria, Texas, near my dad's hometown of Yoakum. One man from the bus eating with me says he just gut out of the penitentiary. Bank robbery, he says, but can't complain, had three good years before getting caught. I'm not sure whether to believe him. Barbecue is not bad, like the coffee in Tucson, road fare demands a cast iron stomach or tons of Tums.

Rumbling along, the landscape is now a tabletop. New Mexico highway sign: Continental Divide 4,500 feet. No majestic, snow-capped mountains, just endless desert with distant jagged peaks.


 Near Las Cruces, the Rio Grande Valley is a wide and green ribbon littered with dairies. Countless cows, corrals and milking stations. Animals living on top of each other. Hay bales stacked to the ceiling in massive open barns. Now pecan and almond orchards. The river is the giver of life in this parched land, but I wouldn't want to live downstream or downwind from those dairy farms.

El Paso. A view of American smelters and Mexican shanties and confusion at the terminal. I caught up with the bus that left me in L.A. and had ten minutes to board. Otherwise, a long wait. Now I'm standing outside, waving my ticket, watching the driver inside the bus count heads. I make the cut, board and squeeze into one of the few open seats. A gaunt man with leather skin and grizzled face climbs on. His carry on luggage — a plastic trash bag.

The meek, the humble, the poor, liars, criminals? misfits. These are my traveling companions.

Near Sierra Blanca, about 80 miles east of El Paso, we pull into the check station and four Border Patrol agents climb aboard, pistols on hips. An air of gloom descends. Many riders slump in their seats. One family of four that looked Hispanic must know the drill because they immediately pull identification from wallets and purses. The agents ask for passports, ask many of us if we're American citizens. I stand up to look outside because I hear something rumbling under the vehicle and two of them yell at me, "Sit down!" But a man in the back stands up, complains, "Hey, they're searching my bags." The agents are ticked off at him for getting up. We're supposed to stay seated. They tell him to grab his bags from the overhead bin and usher him outside for questioning. He returns in ten minutes and we roll on, but for several miles, he launches epitaphs down the bus aisle, says they asked him if he had a job, if he had ever smoked pot, been arrested.

Second all-nighter, on the road to San Antonio, and I'm okay with sleeping sitting up. It's like meditating. At dawn we make Junction, about 120 miles from the Alamo City. Two young folks, one with a flat-billed cap, rush in and find an electric outlet near a booth in the back and plug in some sort of electrical gadgets. (Many riders played video games.) At last, San Antonio and drizzle on the windshield and damp roads, but no rain for our dry state. I'm scheduled for a three hour wait in San Antonio but jump ship when I hear last call for another Austin bus. I grab my bags from the cargo bay below, show my ticket and in no time I'm on I-35 in a plush bus with window curtains and wide aisles that makes me want to see if John Madden is aboard. Like I said, all buses are not created equal.

I nod off several times and suddenly we are pulling into the Austin terminal. A half-hour later my wife Diane wraps her arms around my neck. I feel on my back the eyes of a man who rode with me across the desert and stands near the door. Diane and I walk away holding hands. I glance over my shoulder. He stares out the window.

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