ON THE BUSES
With Greyhound abandoning Canada, Andre Ramshaw takes a fond look back at the quirky charms of coach travel.
Air travel's wings are permanently clipped on the glamour front — with health measures piling misery on to already onerous security steps — while the romance of the rails is largely a relic living on only for those rich in wallet and time.
But they had their day in the sun, injecting an element of excitement to travelling eagerly abetted by advertisers.
Not so the poor old bus.
With Greyhound Canada announcing in May it is permanently shutting down all its Canadian routes, the market for motorcoach journeys has never been darker — and less fashionable.
It wasn't always so.
Before deregulation of the skies in the U.S., the cheapest if not most comfortable means of covering long distances was by bus.
My first epic post-high school journey across the Atlantic was a fairly straightforward trip by car to Seattle and then a nonstop Pan-Am flight to London Heathrow.
My return, however, hobbled by a depleted bank account after seven months on the road, involved a budget flight to Newark, N.J., a surface transfer to New York City and then a cross-country Trailways bus to Bellingham, Wash., north of Seattle.
First, though, I had to navigate the cavelike maze of the
Port Authority Bus Terminal, an intimidating hulk in the middle of early-'80s drugged-out Manhattan. When I felt hands on my backpack as I strolled near Times Square, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Turns out a Good Samaritan was helping me adjust my load.
But with NYC's reputation then, my first thought was a tabloid headline: Unhappy Trails for Dim Traveller.
My tensions eased when I eventually settled into my bus seat for the four-day, three-night journey, the industrial sprawl of New York and New Jersey giving way to bucolic scenes more reminiscent of the English hills I'd just left.
If bus travel has an Achilles heel, however, it comes in the form of fellow passengers. It's hard not to sound snobbish over this, but travelling by coach can often be an ordeal by proximity. To be sure, airplanes and rail cars have their share of malodorous, maladjusted and just plain malignant customers.
But the tight confines of the bus, and its last-resort tightwad image, attract a particular medley of motley characters who could fill the actors-uncredited list of the bleakest film noir. Everyone looks on the run: from their creditors, from their families, from their demons, from themselves.
As our Trailways service trundled through what Americans now dismissively call “flyover” country, I was both bemused and appalled by the slice of Americana unfolding before me. This was well before the opioid epidemic roiling North America, but several of my fellow riders were grappling with obvious addictions, not least evidenced by the empty bottles and vomit that occasionally littered the floor.
When you're 19, it's just part of the adventure. Yet it was hard not to shake the feeling one was riding a rolling equivalent of the last-chance saloon.
For all that, I have vivid memories of seeing the United States in a manner almost impossible but by bus, where the driving and refuelling are someone else's concern.
I saw the ravages of post-industrial Rust Belt economies in places like Gary, Ind., and Toledo, Ohio. I marvelled at the shining confidence of the western metropolis of Denver. And I revelled in chit-chat about accents with a fellow budget-minded Brit at fly-blown cafés in Nebraska.
A bus journey undertaken a few years later was equally epic, but this one was marked not by its oddballs and urban wastelands but by its utter loneliness. Travelling by Greyhound from Perth, the state capital of Western Australia and one of the most isolated cities in the world, to the South Australian state capital of Adelaide — a distance of 2,700 kilometres across some of the most unforgiving terrain anywhere — was a lesson in isolation.
This was before the internet, and I shall never forget the eagerness with which a young man in Kalgoorlie solicited my day-old copy of a dog-eared Perth daily paper I'd been about to discard. I was a knight delivering news from the Crusades.
Continuing east across the vast Nullarbor Plain, I have a searedin memory of our jovial driver pulling off the empty highway at midnight, inviting his groggy charges to gaze at the stars. Sleep-deprived and aching, most us trudged out reluctantly. A few stars? Big deal.
As we stood near the edge of a sheer cliff that stretched to infinity in the inky blackness, the Great Australian Bight before us and the Outback terrain unspooling behind us, we stared slack-jawed at a velvet carpet of diamonds overhead. Unscheduled stops like that can make you forget all the indignities of bus travel.
I've squeezed myself onto other buses in the years since: From Auckland to Wellington in New Zealand (while the driver crooned Welcome to My World); from Pretoria to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, via the Drakensberg mountains and Nelson Mandela's home village of Qunu; and from Calgary to Vancouver through prairie grasslands and mountain passes to the soggy floor of the Fraser Valley.
Even recently, I've ridden the overnight Megabus service (ca.megabus.com) from Manhattan to Toronto to save on hotel costs. A double-decker, it was comfortable and uncrowded, allowing for a few solid hours of sleep as we cruised through serene Upstate New York.
The long-distance coach is still a way of life elsewhere, including in Britain, where the National Express connects with Eurolines for service to European destinations. It remains the only option for those of limited means, especially where rail and air service are lacking.
Sadly, however, the bus can never quite shake its no-respect Rodney Dangerfield baggage.
Even Hollywood has a dig. In the 1934 rom-com It Happened One Night, one of the few films where a long-haul bus trip is central to the plot, the dashing Clark Gable looks thoroughly miserable as he pretzels himself into a jammed night service with hat boxes and suitcases threatening to turn Miami-New York into a one-way ticket to hell.
You wouldn't get that on the Orient Express. But then you wouldn't get Toledo's temptations, Kansas coffee klatches or an impromptu date with the heavens, either.