Swarm

All of a sudden about six seconds after I hit the publish post button on my last post they swarmed on me and it fucked me up. A baggage guy and two drivers with no-nonsense looks on their faces surged through the very crowded waiting room calling for passengers to Denver. Critical distinction we all missed at the time, “to Denver” Me, I’m through Denver. Too late now.

I said ME, she said that’s right, the baggage guy grabbed my rucksack and we were off, at 7:15, and I was like cool I wo’nt have to do this mass crowd scene for another half an hour. They herded me onto a nearly empty nice smelling (at least neutral smelling bus, motor running. That was it, they shut the gate, we were rolling out of town. The back way.

Now we’re leaving steamboat springs Colorado and my schedule is toast.

This bus, ironically the same actual coach I was on last night all night, runs to Denver via

US 40, a secondary road roughly midway between I-80, to our North, and I-70, well south of us. We went up through the nearly exact upper left hand corner of Utah and now here we are. Hard part to swallow, my bus for Omaha leaves Denver at 6:30, and I GET to Denver at 7 or 7:30. Depends.

The actual malfunction occurred when somebody put “Denver “ on my paperwork instead of Hartford where I am actually connecting to. What happened is the 1418 at Salt Lake got full. 60 passengers and more to come. So we pulled off a few to ride the milk run. Oh Well. The guy keeps saying I might make it, and that I can go to Chicago via St Louis and rejoin my putative schedule but I don’t believe it. So now I get to practice the principles of recovery this particular one being acceptance.

No Problem.

Now I’m in Denver, in a very quiet modern, nearly clean depot. The kid behind the counter says they’re putting on another coach to New York and I should just park a bag in the as-yet-nonexistant line behind gate 16. So I did that.

Then we found the plugin corner, dozens of wall sockets and a little counter so like I’m plugged in but not hooked up there’s no wifi here that either of us can find there’s another serious looking young man also typing madly and getting nowhere. At least I’m charging up, that’s very good.

But and there’s always a but , I got no idea what’s actually going on, if anything and I’m apparently operating on pure faith.

Oh man, though, what would Jack and Neil think and say about this place tonight. I remember the days of slouching down the road in the backmost seat with a Sneaky Pete of Gallo Tokay and nobody bats an eye. And the bus depot being the most down the beatest space in the city, where you could get out of the rain, sit a minute and figure out your next move. Especially those times hanging up on the roadside hitching and getting cold and tired and making it to the Greyhound and calling somebody for the few bucks a ticket cost in those days, San Francisco to Portland, man, 24 dollars and you were warm and dry for a few hours.

Yet it doesn’t feel spiritually void here, it feels OK, even though there are a lot more rules and the dollar figure is higher. It’s still a beat world in here, it feels OK.