Feels on the Bus

Many years ago, while guest hosting a CBC Radio show, the comedian Lara Rae made a joke about long-distance travel that stuck in my mind. Maybe she called it a poem or a very short story; my recollection has been dulled by the decades. In any case, it went something like this: “I took a Greyhound from Calgary to Toronto once. Don’t.” Although the iconic, nearly century-old brand ceased operations within Canada in 2021, its routes picked up by a patchwork of regional carriers, Greyhound is still active in the United States and remains synonymous with intercity journeys by bus. And not in a good way.

Anybody who can afford it will usually fly, drive, or take the train when they travel significant distances in this part of the world. Who wants to wait in a dingy station and sit beside a stranger, only to endure interminable hours of bumpy highway and a tiny bathroom with odours of uncertain origin? Rarely half the fun, getting there by bus entails a cheek-by-jowl embrace of the whole messy spectrum of humanity. Yet the Irish Canadian writer Joanna Pocock willingly embarked on a pair of cross-continent Greyhound trips, from Detroit to Los Angeles, seventeen years apart. Her account of those treks is an impressive work of immersion journalism, probing how both she and our southern neighbour have changed.

In 2006, grieving a miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock felt an irrepressible need to move, to revel in being unencumbered. She also had a vision for a novel whose protagonist, an androgynous teen from small-town Ontario, takes the Greyhound to Las Vegas to meet up with her estranged mother. Hence a 3,700-kilometre research trip that “filled the gaps left in the absence of joy and the sense of a future worth heading towards.”

Retracing that journey in 2023, Pocock observed a new edge to the hardships experienced by people whose circumstances dictate that they get from A to B by bus as well as the socio-economic and environmental challenges that have proliferated in the communities and rural landscapes she once again visited or passed through. This is where Greyhound shines: an illuminating, troubling portrait of a slice of the population whose precarity refutes the American Dream more and more each year. Pocock’s fellow passengers included a one-handed man who, after his wife and baby died of COVID‑19, was electrocuted at work and had just emerged from a fourteen-month coma; a guy whose luggage consisted of a laundry basket full of clothes and a garbage bag; and a harried, mobility-impaired mother who implored her three small children to keep quiet while serving them a stream of junk food from the overhead rack. There was camaraderie and gallows humour on board, although less than Pocock witnessed in 2006, with travellers now drawn to their digital devices and a heavier sense of bleakness pressing down. “On this trip,” she writes, “I saw many more sunken faces, saucer eyes, bruised arms, weeping sores, sobbing adults and people who seemed shocked into silent depression than I had ever seen in my life.”

To these observations Pocock adds another unique layer: the perspectives of women who have ventured across the U.S. While Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley are canonical, can you name a classic American road trip book not by a man? Pocock weaves passages from Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day (1948), Ethel Mannin’s An American Journey (1967), and Irma Kurtz’s The Great American Bus Ride (1993) into hers. These authors were not at the wheel, following their hearts on the open road; their accounts are rooted in Greyhound trips. Like Pocock’s own memoir, they subvert the individualism and machismo of the car.

Ultimately, Pocock travelled on the margins: through those spaces within walking distance of downtown bus terminals, through cheap motels and late-night diners, through a world with easy access to opioids but not to health care. Her observations led to some pithy questions. In choosing to take Greyhound, she had a degree of privilege that set her apart, but she wonders, “How important is comfort when it relies on extraction and exploitation for its existence?”

Incisive thoughts like this one, as well as Pocock’s deep empathy and curiosity, made me want to sink into Greyhound and enjoy the ride. Perhaps in keeping with the spirit of bus trips, however, the reading is not always smooth. In a list of tips that he posts online, the American magazine veteran Mike Sager asserts that “artful digression is the key to good writing.” Pocock takes us on myriad tangents from her window seat, but several deviate far from her through line and the momentum of the journey is lost. Pages-long asides about suburban living, atomic weapons testing, and the evolution of Las Vegas, for example, feel like detours that could have benefited from more direction. Even some of her short reflections, including one on today’s culture of tipping, feel tacked on. And though the comparison between 2006 and 2023 provides a compelling structure, and the fictional sidekick from the novel-to-be is a unique companion, I found myself unsure at times about which trip I was on.

But maybe that’s the point. If you want to get somewhere quickly, buy a plane ticket. If you’re open to other people’s stories and up for a meandering, eye-opening adventure, consider the bus.