Seamy UnderBelly

There’s a social and economic divide represented in the choice of travel mode. While not everybody on an airplane is rich, I believe I can safely say that nobody on a greyhound bus is rich. And Amtrak is strictly for the NPR crowd. If you aren’t amused by Garrison Kielor’s self-congratulatory social values you won’t feel at home on the Coast Limited. I gave it a trial earlier this summer and there was a definite air of gee-aren’t-we-culturally-superior in the cars, as train travel was known in the last century but one, not to mention the German Shepherd that ran up and down the line of waiting travelers in Portland’s Union Station as we waited to board, slobbering around my ankles at the end of a very short leash tethered to an unsmiling character wearing government issue Ray-Bans and cute little black BDU bun-hugger trousers below a Kevlar vest. Packing a Glock in a ballistic holster high and tight on a muscular thigh.

I chose Greyhound bus, seduced by their perfectly sincere and patently absurd claim that all the buses which they invariably refer to as coaches, have wi-fi and AC outlets for your laptop. And they took out a row of seats to give each passenger an extra 1 and 5/8 inches of legroom. Nice.

The Greyhound stations are still the anchor tenants of the decaying inner city core. The Old Towns of America. Wino America. Crack-ho America. Pimp supply America. Even in hip progressive Portland. Sure it’s a relatively new building, and an integral part of the transportation nexus of bus, streetcar, Amtrak and light rail, but the same social misfits, substance abusers, lost souls and demented predators still gather in its shady places and transact their dime bag and sneaky-pete dealings. It’s the seamy underbelly, America’s Third World.

Like the King’s Table of travel, for a prix-fixe Greyhound offers unlimited mileage within a time-frame depending on how much cash you part with. I could go where I want to go and see my pals old and new and make it back to Portland in the 15 days but just barely. And if Murphy is still writing the laws of scheduling, it wouldn’t take much of a traffic delay or a breakdown to send the house of cards atumble. And my credit card wasn’t quite maxed out, so for an extra hundie I doubled the time frame and got the 30 day Discovery Pass, used to be called AmeriPass. It isn’t much of a document, graphics by DOS printed by what looks like mimeograph, but the nice man, who by the way is nobody’s fool and utterly cold about the orthodoxy of baggage weight limits, put my little mimeographed slips of A-4 paper in an elaborate blue plastic folder much nicer than the ones your airline tickets go in, so there Richard Branson, take that. Like I said, it’s the King’s Table of travel, unlimited portions of awful.

Anywhere in Central or South America, or Asia, or Central Europe, the people travel from town to town with their chickens and goats and plastic carrier bags of produce, life savings, or grandmothers on the autobus. If you tour with a backpack you do too. I don’t know this personally but my kid goes all over the place with his camera and his backpack and his smile and his curiosity and I figure it can’t be that hard. Here at least I speak the language. And here also there is rarely if ever livestock with which to contend. And I understand the cultural niceties of the lumpen. After all, I’m a lifelong if not currently practicing alcoholic and drug addict. These are my people!