I hated and loved the Greyhound. I wrote poems on it. I wrote poems about and for it. My next book came into view on it, as did so many things: out those big, greasy windows I’d glimpse contours plain and monstrous and transitory. In all manners of weather. In all moods and hours and modes of exhaustion.
It was on the Greyhound, travelling back home from Toronto to Edmonton with my best friend Amy, that I caught a first glimpse of what my life was going to need from me. It put my home in relief and set me adrift and I thank it and will never forgive it. It offered me an elsewhere. It doomed me to otherwise. Greyhound has been gone from the West for years now.
It was the font of all mundanity. It held such extremities. I crossed the country, I commuted to work. And every time, those contours, flickering on the other side of the glass. I had to work to ignore them.
It spat its exhaust across this land for ninety-two years, fostering/dooming our society, our humanity.
Such need tied to that vanished system. A means of movement so crucial to life and livelihood and safety. Patchworks swoop in to replace it, in places, but they are only that.
I was the hungriest, the thirstiest, the sweatiest, the coldest, the queasiest, the giddiest, the most attuned, the most engrossed, the most tuned out, the most uncomfortable, the most anxious, the most unfettered whilst upon those fucking buses. I talked to so many strangers, more than I would anywhere else. How to recline the seats, what time we’ll be home, what time is it now. Or more intimate things, the things and people being left, the things and people we’re travelling toward. The beauty of a sunset, a rainbow. One’s views on those glimpsed contours.
People at their limit, not taking one more second in this purgatory. People running drugs cross-country in boxes stowed under the bus. People just out of prison. People about to end long periods of estrangement. People initiating long periods of estrangement.
I had a lucky seat: third row, left side, window. My introvert’s strategy was to heave my bag down on the seat beside me—on the bus, your bag was always too big—and start what I hoped looked like a drawn-out rummaging process. That way I would often dodge having a seatmate. If I didn’t do that, I’d so often be the first one with a seatmate, six feet tall, smooshed into my blasted lucky window seat.
I’ve been harassed and leered at. I’ve slept on my valuables. I’ve stared out the window with a sleeping stranger’s head on my shoulder. I’ve minded people’s children. I’ve shared snacks. Shit was always on the verge of going terribly wrong. A driver threatening to boot someone off in a blizzard. A passenger losing it in a public way, oblivious, obstinate, raising everyone’s ire, resoundingly outnumbered. A driver taking weird chances on the highway. A driver being cruel for no reason apparent to us. A driver unspeakably generous and patient and kind, cracking jokes into the PA, leading a sing-along, pointing out the attractions, some small scrap of the contours, apologizing for all this highway traffic, for the ice on the roads, negotiating a blizzard, chatting with the stiff lady in the front seat about her grandchildren, or with the extrovert in such pain because no one on this bus is talking to each other.
All the cigarettes smoked just outside the bus bays. All the chips and chocolate bars, French fries, questionable sandwiches, warm pops, weak coffees. Grilled cheese in a bus stop café in a town I can’t name. All the hideous bathrooms. All the women asking loudly for tampons, for toilet paper. All the women with their bags unfurled across wet counters, calmly putting on their face. All the women crying, all the women laughing together. All the times was I one of them. All the infinite piss and bleach and dank fluorescent lighting.
I lament the loss. I still can’t believe it doesn’t exist. It won’t be in, won’t be causing, any more books. I lament for those who aren’t able to leave. The gradients of need still hinged to that bus. And I lament for those looking for the contours glimmering and haven’t the means to do it. For I simply wouldn’t be the person I am, doing the things I do in the place I’m in, if it wasn’t for the goddamn Greyhound bus.