IF IT HADN’T been for my Uncle Ben, I would never have made it from Reno to New Hampshire by way of New York City.
But I did.
On a Greyhound bus.
In the summer of 1985.
I was twenty-three years old, with an untested cockiness to match, and exceedingly hopped up on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Visions of undiscovered worlds made my soles itchy. Besides, my friends were having similar adventures – why not me? So I accoutered myself with essentials from the local (Pleasant Hill, CA) sporting-goods store – backpack, sleeping bag, and various important-to-me contents – and set out.
The plan was to hitchhike cross-country to visit my Dad in Plymouth, NH, where he ran a small and popular diner. After hitchhiking to Humboldt County and spending a lost month with some former roommates, however, I realized that the United States was bigger than it looked on a map – so big, in fact, that it somewhat quelled my cockiness. I managed to thumb my way from Bridgeville to South Lake Tahoe and thence to Reno. My cash reserves were low enough to give me second thoughts about this mission, but after concluding that I couldn’t go back home, having made such a public fuss about my proposed great eastern pilgrimage, I called my rich uncle in Salt Lake City and threw myself on his mercy.
“Come to my house and we’ll talk about it,” he said, and wired me a bus ticket.
Thus I left Reno in a cloud of diesel smoke, trundling across Nevada on Interstate 80 as day eased into night. We arrived at the Salt Lake City Greyhound station around 3 a.m. A teenaged and mohawked punk sat down beside me and asked if I wanted to buy a mouse.
“A mouse?” I asked, befuddled by the hour and the trip. “What kind of mouse?”
“You know, a mouse,” he said, producing a live white rodent from the chest pocket of his jeans jacket.
I politely declined, just as my sleepy aunt pulled up in her family’s car and whisked me homeward to a welcome meal and shower.
I spent a couple of days wandering about Salt Lake City – which at that time had no public phones, no public bars, and many Mormon missionaries. My uncle was kind enough to lend me $600 for bus fare to New York (and expenses), and I was off again.
Now, I wryly confess that after almost exactly forty-one intervening years of a sometimes-checkered life, only flickering and disordered impressions remain of that epic three-day trek. But here’s some of what I recall:
– The slowly changing landscape captivated my eyes and imagination. Deserts, dry lakes, cornfields, cities, small towns, mountains; I was particularly taken by crossing the Continental Divide, and later the Mississippi River, as announced by two of our many drivers. I had often heard of and read about these important pieces of American geography, but seeing them in person was something quite unexpectedly else. This country of ours is vast – vast enough to swallow whole a suburban 23-year-old who had inaccurately reckoned its size through fevered but uninformed fantasies. And the further we went, the better I felt about trading my thumb for a bus seat.
– In Cheyenne, Wyoming, one of my seatmates pawned some of his belongings (at least, he said they were his). We used the proceeds to buy a couple of bottles of booze, which we then sold to the other rear-of-the-bus passengers for $1 a shot. We became so merry as our bus inched through the black velvet night that the driver threatened to put us all off.
– Evidently, Burger King had some sort of agreement with the Greyhound company, because all the major (and some of the minor) I-80 bus stations between Reno and New York stood cheek-by-jowl with the famous fast-food outlets. Hungry, but not knowing much about thrift, I repeatedly stocked up on enough hamburgers and fries and cans of Coke Zero to fortify me through the long foodless stretches of subsequent highway. Believe it or not, they actually tasted good cold.
– “Smoke a cigarette,” the biker in the next seat told me, offering his pack. “It’ll stave off your hunger until we reach Milwaukee.”
– In Chicago, I washed up in the bowels of the Sears Tower (the bus station men’s room was located in its basement). For some reason I set my wallet on top of the towel dispenser, where I promptly forgot about it and walked out. A minute later, panicked, I ran back inside. For some reason, it still lay there – untouched.
– Three days of close-quarter life-swapping kept us all distracted from the monotony of the seemingly endless road. We shared our individual missions, family histories, and dreams of the future, promising to keep in touch when our voyage ended. (We didn’t.)
– Grapefruit juice, always my go-to citrus refresher, tasted wonderful washing down cold burgers at 1 a.m. in Cleveland.
– Most poignant passenger: “Don’t end up like me,” warned the sad-eyed older man across the aisle. “I haven’t been home in years; I just wander from place to place looking for somewhere to settle down.” He later asked if I thought my dad could give him a job in his New Hampshire diner. I don’t remember what I said, but I hope it was kind.
– As we finally pulled into the New York Port Authority terminal, our driver recited an inspirational poem: Rudyard Kipling’s If, or something like. Whatever it was, it made my eyes water.
In New York, I visited my dad’s mom, who then lived in the same Brooklyn apartment building my father grew up in, and saw some familiar sights that my dad introduced me to when I was a younger lad – including Coney Island and Times Square (albeit the latter at 3 a.m.). After passing through Central Park near dinnertime, I encountered The Dakota skyscraper, where John Lennon lived until he was killed only a few years previously. I walked up to the incurious-eyed doorman.
“Where did it happen?” I asked in a solemn tone.
He silently pointed at the sidewalk, with the air of a man who was sick of being asked that particular question.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, shuffling off.
The next leg of the trip, New York to Boston to Plymouth, New Hampshire, passed relatively quickly – totaling just over three hundred miles, compared to the continent-spanning stretch I had just endured – and was memorable only by a late-night Boston arrival and the Plymouth bus’s absence until the next morning. Unsure what to do at that hour, I wandered into what the plaque outside claimed was the original bar which inspired the television show Cheers. It was a half-hour until closing time, and at this far remove, all I remember is a drunk yuppie pulling on my beard and a kindly New Hampshire-bound Coast Guardsman who told me we were in the same boat (pun intended). He indicated my sleeping bag and his own well-stuffed duffle.
“Best thing for you to do in this city is stick with me,” he said. “The bus terminal will be open all night, and we can sleep on a couple of benches.”
So we did. The Plymouth bus arrived around 6 a.m., and following a pleasant meander through the New England woods, by noon I was embracing my father again after a period of some years. I intended to visit for a week, stayed for a year, learned how to run an offset printing press, then hitchhiked to Burlington, Vermont, and headed home to the Bay Area.
Older and wiser, I went by plane.
DEAR PATIENT READER (and anyone else who happens by),