Out of Iowa: on the bus

When a winter wind sets to blowing across Iowa there isn't a lot to stop it or even slow it down. Just me, it seemed. Three days before Christmas, 1985. As I stood there with a hangover and my thumb out. Going home.

Going nowhere, though. Nobody had the slightest interest in stopping for me. Back then, I blamed 'em. Not in anger, sadly. The rejectioned deepened my lonliness, homesickness. Made the distance too painfully apparent. Half a continent. The thousands of cold miles between me and where I wanted to be.

So I said fuck it. Walked back into town and found the Greyhound depot.

To Vernon. In British Columbia, I told the girl.

She thought I wanted to go to South America. Y'know, Colombia. British Honduras sort of idea. Nope. Someplace really exotic. Canada. Which exists, we determined. After a bit of a search.

A hundred and fifty bucks. Three days on the bus. Now, $150 was what I had, pretty much to the dime. That's why I'd set out to hitchhike. Cause it's a damn long trip and I might decide I'd like to eat something, somewhere along the way. But, baby, it was cold outside. And you can't starve to death in three days. So into a nice warm bus and try to find a seat.

I say try cause it was three days before Christmas and I wasn't the only one going home. So, apparently, was most of the U.S. army, navy and air force. So I squished in with those guys.

All guys, back then, really dumb ones. Talking loud, laughing stupid and throwing shit around the bus like kids on a field trip. This was still the cold war (which I kind of miss) and these young fellows had never heard of terrorists. Nope, they said things like 'kill a commie for your mommy'. No, they really did. That's a quote.

The only person on the bus other than me, at that point, who wasn't a soldier was about as opposite as he could be. I'd call him a beatnik except those didn't exist anymore, even in 1985. He had longish hair, a turleneck and one of those ridiculous berets that artists wear in cartoons.

He was reading War and Peace, probably because he felt he should. Not that there's anything wrong with that sort of motivation. That's pretty much why I picked it up for the first time. Ain't why I couldn't put it down though. Oh, those Russsians. Rah, rah.

I remember that guy so vividly after a quarter of a century because he was such a contrast to the rest of the gang. For all that his uniform was just as precise. He kept his nose stuffed in his book and my impression was that he was so full of indignation at the multi-faceted wrongness of the rest of the boys on the bus that he could barely contain his skinny-ass little self but had the good sense to realize it'd be a really good idea. Prob'ly just my imagination though. Guess he's doin' something, somewhere theses days. Big old world.

So, tired, hungover to start with and sitting bolt upright as we bombed north into Minnesota. At each stop soldiers got off and a roughly equal number of identical ones got on. Yes, yes, I know they weren't identical. I know there are nuances. I know they were individuals. Seriously, though, you'd never fucking know it.

One of those stop and shuffle things where we got off briefly to get a little dark, cold great plains air and deisel exhaust (heady mixture) and then got back, sometimes onto a different bus. I found myself sitting next to an old man to whom I said nothing the rest of the way up to Minneapolis and don't forget St. Paul. At which point he said something to me, which was: "when was the last time you had something to eat?"

It had been a while, by this point, and the next time was another while out in front. So. "Let's go get you some dinner."

A big, full, hot meal in the crappy Greyhound restaurant, which are measurably less crappy in a big city like the twins.

I'm comforted knowing that gent didn't do it for the eloquence of my gratitude cause I was an exhausted, strung out, ravenous 20-year-old, and there was none. He's no doubt long gone by now, and, of course, there's no reward. But I haven't forgotten.

Minneapolis/St. Paul was the big layover of the whole trip. Measured in hours, maybe a large chunk of the unlit part of a winter day. There was stuff to do if you had money, like the soldiers. I didn't, so I watched them do stuff. In the bus depot and out on the sidewalks, lined with bars.

Finally back on. And on, and on. The rest, most of the ride, was a blur. Cause nothing changed. Until we hit Tacoma, the last town anyone's ever heard of. And so damn close to home. The town where almost all the soldiers got off and almost none got on. The town where I got two seats to my self and stretched out and really went to sleep.

No one's ever heard of Wenatchee. The site of my last bus transfer. That's where I woke up. In the quiet dark. Too late.

The bus driver was just gathering his shit and heading off to wherever they go at this point. Home, at one end of the line, I guess. Some Motel 6, or such, if not. Anyway, up I sprung, jabbering questions. With some naive Canadian expectation of being taken care of, I suppose. What I got, instead, was the door to the side of the road.

A much warmer road, I'll grant you, on the right side of the Rockies, than the one out of Osage. But, man, the unfairness. Now just a couple hundred miles from home. And having endured every fucking hardship that was in the story I signed on for. Broke. Starved. Still in the fucking States.

I found my way to the highway through the Christmas Eve darkness and stuck out my thumb.

All through the night... flyin'

Goin' through Winnemucca, bud. Through, through, through. Goin' to California. Open. Up. Your. Gol-den Gate... the way Tom Waits sings it in his Kerouac song. But that's tomorrow morning. Even Winnemucca is the middle of the night.

The sun's going down over Great Salt Lake and I'm about to undertake the single most glorious epic haul of my road trip career. Across, hands down, my least favorite state.

I haven't been everywhere, man, but I've driven over massive amounts of those United States of theirs. Half of them, so far, and for all but Hawaii I've driven myself there. Myself and whoever I was lucky enough to have along. In a few cases I've just bombed through a corner of a chunk but the ones I love I've criss-crossed and crosshatched and just generally buzzed all over.

California, I've pretty much cut to ribbons.

Texas, less conclusive strings of silk. Texas, home of the most courteous drivers on the planet. Like I'd know. Way more courteous than Canadians, though, and I've heard that's saying something.

Washington, of course. Six ways to Tuesday. Not sure what that means but it sounds right.

Montana may be the second ugliest and the second most beautiful state in that whole story they've got going on down there. From what I've seen. Which is half of 'em.

Fucking Idaho. Like a little concentrated best of home. My B.C. interior.

Oregon. Off I-5 and down the wretched Rogue River hell road to the ocean. And the dunes. A cool beach of a Sahara right on the Pacific.

Utah. Where you learn that those childhood Wile E. Coyote cartoons weren't inventing any landscapes after all. Down the Virgin River to sleaze pit Vegas. Cathedrals to everything the other churches vilify or at least downplay. Legal brothels like fast food joints with menus posted on the walls outside. No joke. Hit the low note.

But, yep, it was across this very same weird, amoral project called Nevada that time stopped all night on a highway with no one on it and everyone with me asleep. And not much for towns. Or anything else.

Just a beige-grey ocean that included the sky. And a highway that rode it's gentle waves. Windows down. Desert breeze and tumbleweeds. Still warm in the dark, except that we were flyin'.

Our skin still crusted with salt from our unseemly dip in Great Salt Lake. It's pretty much just not done, apparently. By normal people. Lots of them, in Salt Lake City.

"Oh, it's not good for swimming," they'll mutter, if you enquire. Add something about brine flies, maybe, if you push it with the obvious question. Why the hell not? Or just repeat that it ain't no good.

It's great for swimming, actually. Especially if you can't swim. Cause you can't sink in the damn thing. There's so much salt in there that you float like a cork even with your hands and feet stickin' up in the air.

Flyin'. Touch down in Reno for gas. Once again at a barren rest stop in the pre-dawn chill, somewhere in this endless, scrubby desert. Then it ends as the sun truly starts to rise, and we're in California.

It's a perfect blue day, and now we're climbin'. Cause there's always gonna be a mountain range if you want to make the ocean. Sierra Nevadas, then. Up and over. Past Lake Tahoe and down, way down.

The day heating up like the brakes. Now it's lakes and evergreens like home.

Only the brakes cool off as we flatten out around Sacramento. Transition to palm trees as we settle in for the last little pull.

Labor Day Traffic. It's a little more than a week till 9-11, in fact. Last sunny fun in that happier old world.

No idea that's all comin' down though. What's ahead for us is a little beach. We'll pass the Golden Gate Bridge like it's not even there and hit the ocean up towards the 101. Rinse away the Utah salt in the breathless chill of the Pacific.

Then, finally, rest on the sand after one pure haul. Soon. And it'll be welcome, cause now it's really hot. Except that we're flyin'.

Flyin' from the tepid, concentrated little Mormon ocean to the thinner, cooler solution of the fuckin' big Pacific. San Francisco. On the edge of absolutely everything.

The gates of ...

Once you're in, you're in. The lineup, that is. U.S. border crossing. Cars ahead, cars behind. Sometimes even on each side, although we usually aim for the boonyville crossings to get this shit over quick.

Americans fascinate me. And freak me out.

For all the superficial similarities between us up here and them there, I can never escape the impression that the civilization's lacquered on 'em pretty thin. The very institutions that structure their notion of civilization seem to exist only grudgingly. Their courts and their various levels of government in particular seem to perform every function with an unspoken but apologetic preface to the effect that they really have no business exercising any control over any moment of anyone's life.

Until they have your ass. Cause, weirdly, the moment you're out the wrong door of whatever bureaucracy has processed you with an unfortunate result, my take is that you're pounced upon by state and individual citizenry alike in a briefly healing consensus of savagery that presents as something like 'the best we can do for now'. From a watchful populace that worships nothing more fervently than the perfection of endless torture in an endless hell.

They worship many other things, as well. Course they do. They're a worshipful bunch.

Family, for instance. I've watched them pat my kids on the head in their diners and their Wal-Marts and ask them dumb questions that represent an incredibly powerful kind of love practised by dumb people who doubt nothing.

I've seen that these people would kill or die for my children with less hesitation than I would. The same lack of hesitation with which they'd roast the little buggers alive if god, good order and group dynamics required it.

A moment back I used the word 'weirdly' describing the riot that ensues when American people and American institutions transcend their uneasy relationship and get to rip someone to bits together. Well, of course, there's really nothing weird about it.

Not when we're talking about the powerful impulse to violence. And the tension resulting from the attempt to control it. Of, by and for a violent people. And about the release that results when it's suddenly made okay.

I've had my share of encounters with American cops. Highway Patrol, Border Patrol, State Troopers and, of course, the endless variety of municipal cops.

Cause it doesn't matter, down there, if the town was too small to notice that you just blew through it. It's got it's own police force. And it's own football team. And it's very own mythology that some there will take your ass down for if that's what's right. And do it slowly, so it hurts longer.

Oh, and I've never had a bad one. Cop encounter, that is. In fact I've always been treated with a kind of decorous respect that is unfamiliar to me up here where we all just kinda act normal.

And if I sound like I'm scoffing, I'm not. I recognize that this decorum is a small part of a value system they're heir to that means they'll protect me/mine and die doing it if they've gotta. And it sure ain't for the shitty paycheck.

I've had them knock on my window at 2 a.m. with my whole family crashed out in the van at a wide spot in the road, expecting to be sent on my way. Instead, an apology for disturbing my sleep.

Just making sure y'all were okay. Sir.

Made me feel pretty sure we were okay.

But I've never missed that coat o' varnish that was mentioned above. Cause it's down across the eyeballs of every one of them. And I've never missed that the respect and service are not really for me. They're for a codified certitude that transcends absolutely fucking everything, and for which they'd kill me/mine as righteously as they'd kill/die for us, with no measurable change in pulse. At least that's what they'd shoot for. They're human, after all.

So no Americans fascinate me and freak me out quite like American cops. And customs officials are no exception. I've got a disquieting hunch they're paid even less than other kinds of cops. And that it, equally, ain't about the money.

And when you're in, you're in. The lineup.

And Tammy got her lip pierced just before this particular trip. Same day we went down. Salt water, said the piercing chick. About the swelling. Organic sea salt, of course. This being B.C. Bulk.

Just a plastic bag with a few grams of an unidentified white powder somewhere back there in the van. I remembered. As we inched forward, surrounded.

Away from all things gentle and toward the gates of their wooly new Rome.