This past Thanksgiving Break, I rode the Greyhound bus from Columbus, Ohio to Charlotte, North Carolina. It took seventeen hours—I left Kenyon at about 12:30 PM and I didn’t get home until about 5:30 the next morning. I’d never ridden a bus before, but the fare was considerably cheaper than a plane ticket and as a writer, I’m always looking for unique adventures to write about, so a money-saving overnight bus ride was a win-win.
It wasn’t great. I spent my three-hour layover in the brand new Columbus library, and I was unable to fall asleep for more than two or three hours throughout the entire trip. Instead, I sat curled up in the seat behind the driver—I had two seats to myself—and watched Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia melt by. On the stretches of dark, empty highway, I looked up at the stars. We also drove through an endless stream of small towns, and some of the little houses and main streets were decorated for Christmas, so the entire evening felt like a hazy half-dream, punctuated by the weird sounds Earl, the bus driver, would make from time to time.
When I got off the bus, I was starving and had the worst cotton mouth in the history of mankind. My parents asked if I would do it again, and I said that I knew I could do it if it was absolutely necessary. So when Spring Break rolled around and the plane tickets were two-and-a-half times as expensive as the Greyhound tickets, I sighed and agreed to ride the bus home again.
“You’ve done it before,” I told myself as I raided Peirce for more snacks (I’d learned my lesson this time), “You can do it again.” My friends looked at me like I was crazy. They told me to be careful and guard my bags. I nodded and told them I would probably sit in the front seat. My first bus was never more than half-full, so I didn’t have to share a row with anyone; I was hoping this second time would be the same.
It wasn’t. My wait time was too short to escape to the library again, so I sat at a table and worked on an extra credit assignment for two hours, surrounded by an odd combination of people that included a large Amish family. The bus station smelled like microwaved french fries and stale cigarette smoke, and all six televisions were playing the same dark and violent FX movie with the sound on (each one had a slightly different lag, so it felt like the words were echoing one another). In short, hell.
When we started lining up to get on the bus, I got a little more nervous—the vast majority of the riders were men, and it looked like it was going to be a full bus. It didn’t look like I was going to have my own little row this time. However, there were a few other women, so I found myself in a fourth-row window seat, sitting next to a woman in her mid-forties. Her name was Becca, she was tall and thin, with hair that was beginning to gray and no eyelashes—I later found out that it was a nervous tick of hers, and that her grandmother had done the same with her eyebrows.
Becca and I talked as the sun set over Ohio’s rolling hills. She was a recovering addict, she told me, headed to West Virginia to stay with a friend while she got her life back on track again. She showed me videos of her children, one of whom was a sixteen-year-old who played the guitar and sang pretty well. We talked about our parents, about pasts and futures and religion and addiction and abuse. Well, she talked––I did more listening. But there was a nice flow to the conversation: we discussed Jane Eyre for a little while, and she wanted to hear more about my love for running. She asked me what I was studying, and when I told her that I’m an English major, she told me that she was working on a book herself. She had some poetry to the way she spoke, particularly when she would talk about her new start in West Virginia.
“The universe has been giving me signs lately,” she told me once, “Just little things, like keep walking forward.”
After our layover in Charleston, West Virginia, she seemed twitchier, more nervous and restless. I was trying to sleep by that point, but I could hear her shuffling around next to me, searching for things, and she once asked me to borrow a pen. When the bus stopped in Beckley, Becca handed me a note she had written me, clumsily grabbed her handfuls of things, and waddled off the bus. The people around me laughed at her, told me that she was a drug addict and that her entire story had been lies. I could tell from that beginning that she was a bit off, that maybe drugs hadn’t been as far away in her life as she had told me, that she may not have told me everything or the complete truth.
It broke my heart a little, to see them dismiss her story so quickly. But her children were real, her love for her sons and daughters was genuine, and the hope in her voice as she told me about her plans for the future could not have been a lie.
I should take a moment to say that I am incredibly lucky. I grew up in a suburb where the hardest drug anyone did was marijuana, and even that was rare. I was lucky enough to receive the admission and aid necessary to attend Kenyon, and my parents have always supported my decisions. The people who laughed at Becca were not so lucky. Their “bubbles” had stricter limitations and much worse air quality than the suburbs or Kenyon. Drugs continue to be a huge problem in the states we traveled through, and the people who laughed had likely been around addicts their entire lives.
However, in the micro universe that I entered for eleven hours, we shared the same cigarette-smoke-tinged air. We shared our destinations, our hopes for the future, and while some of what Becca told me may have been a story, she was clearly trying to start over again. Her plans may have been shaky, but she was riding away from her past life and trying to figure out how to better provide for her children and herself. That hope, that trembling, newborn confidence in her voice? That was real. And she wanted to be heard, to be respected in this new life. Why would I deny her that in our six hours together?
At around one in the morning, Becca clambered off the bus and into her new life. She left me a note, thanking me for our lovely conversation and “how refreshing it is to be joined by your company.” Amidst the stifled laughs and the sneering looks of the people surrounding us, she wrote of her own hopes for my future, and I felt the same hopes for her.
We both learned something on that bus ride, I think. At least, I did. With two trips under my seatbelt (there are no seatbelts on Greyhounds, but I just really wanted to make that pun), I can tell you three things:
1. Bring more food and water than you’ll think you need.
2. Brush your teeth midway through the ride, even if you don’t end up sleeping.
3. If you feel comfortable and safe doing so, take a moment to talk to the person next to you. You may learn more about another human being, yourself, or the world than you could ever imagine.
Image Credits: Taylor Hazan