The news that the iconic Greyhound Bus is to debut in the UK in September raised golden memories of an amazing summer, several decades ago, when vehicles bearing that famous name carried me on a three month adventure through the highways and byways of North America.
The escapade is still burnt on my memory but it seems as if I travelled in another age. At one time trains, then buses, would have been the usual way to traverse the thousands of miles that crisscross the USA. Today, most travellers needing to make an essential journey would, I’m sure, choose the plane.
But in the 1970s, the bus seemed still to rule the roost and the road. And for two recent graduates, juggling their nickels and dimes, the Greyhound was an economic option – just under $300 (then not much more than £120) purchased an open ticket for twelve weeks of travel. Plus, of course, the buses took you to corners and outposts that you would never have gone near by utilising the nation’s airports.
The other great recommendation, too – and this will seem paradoxical – is that the buses took you so long to get anywhere. For the average American, keen to reach family or a loved one or friends, the Greyhound may not have quite lived up to its name. Never that speedy, the seemingly eternal treks across the great wide continent may have appeared disconcertingly inconvenient.
But for my friend and me, these stretched-out odysseys gave us two great benefits – hour upon hour of views of the town and the city, the plains and the mountains, the rivers and the deserts. But, much more usefully, they gave us a free place to stay for the night.
From May to August, we took our extended trek and, for other than maybe half a dozen occasions, we bedded down for our kip in our seats as the Greyhound headed into the neon night, the forever darkness, allowing its two English customers a chance to catch up on their shut-eye.
It’s also worth saying that, at that time, transatlantic travel was only newly affordable. Freddie Laker’s Skytrain had led to a price war with the traditional carriers like BA and, for the first time, someone like me could scrape together the cash to fly to New York.
And scrape pretty well covers it. For almost a year after I left university behind, I toiled as a labourer on a local building site for £1 an hour wages and, by saving hard, managed to secure just enough to cover air fare, the bus pass and very modest living expenses.
The fact that Anglos were not seen that often over there – at least, once you got beyond Manhattan – made the journey all the more intriguing. Serving staff in a Mid-West McDonald’s – the burger chain hadn’t arrived in the UK then and was a cheap staple in my pre-vegetarian days – would be amazed to hear your accent. “Please say that again,” would be the delighted response to your request for fries!
The bus became a kind of home-from-home as we followed the fantastically detailed and reliable timetables, enormously complicated listings of destinations and connections, running seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Stop-offs in remote Southern villages or Rocky Mountain settlements conjured up the real America we were seeking though, of course, the depots and stations of Chicago and LA, Nashville and El Paso provided their own distinct visions of this multi-cultural continent.
There was craziness, too – no attempt to replicate, however loosely, the 1940s escapades of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, fictionally recounted in the 1957 novel On the Road, would have been without incident, and so it proved.
Picked up by a gay Colombian called German on my first night in the Big Apple – the innocence of youth! – led to my waking up the next morning on the tiled floor of Port Authority, the huge bus terminal in the heart of New York, with scant memory of too many beers and wild detours through the Lower East Side.
Chasing women we’d met on a bus took us hundreds of miles out of our way to the lost ranges of Montana; transport police waved guns menacingly at us when we jumped train barriers without the money to buy tickets in San Francisco; and a journalist warned us to leave Lowell, Kerouac’s place of birth and burial, as soon as we were able with our long hair all too likely to attract violent redneck attention.
There were dozens of such interludes – meeting poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Frisco, catching Elvis Costello on tour backed by Mink DeVille on the West Coast, seeing Scorsese’s The Last Waltz in a deserted movie house in Baton Rouge, visiting Canada and Mexico and so much more. And, most nights, settling into the relative comfort of a Greyhound seat to sleep and await the next turn in the road, the next twist in our twenty-year old lives.
Tags: Greyhound Bus, On the Road
