(June 12, 2012) ON THE BUS to BROOKLYN, NY — This is the conclusion of the Great Northbound Bus Trip, a story begun in yesterday’s diary. I left New Orleans on Tuesday morning, stopped overnight in Auburn, Alabama, then left there on Wednesday at 11:45 a.m., arriving at New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal 26 hours later.
All of my transfers had very tight windows, but I managed to make every bus. And my bus pass karma, which took a hit when I was unable to get on my preferred bus in New Orleans, was redeemded when I made it onto an earlier bus in Richmond solely by virtue of having a pass rather than a specific ticket for the next bus.
I sat next to a very elderly man who was traveling from Gainesville, FL, to Lynn, MA. He was moving to Lynn permanently, and he was carrying his possessions in two white garbage bags. I regret not getting more of his story. I was so tired and so absorbed in reading Game Of Thrones that I just wasn’t that talkative or inquisitive. But I’m sure there was a quite a tale to be heard.
Sitting behind me was a woman from Maine who was headed home after visiting her son in Georgia. She had an amazing Maine accent. Unfortunately, she also had a set of very cheap headphones and a desire to see how many decibels they could produce. She and I also had very different taste in music. Here are my tweets from hour 22 of the trip:
- Sweet Lord Jesus, make the woman behind me on this bus stop blaring Nickelback through her headphones. Amen.
- Jesus, you fixed the Nickelback issue. But I guess I wasn’t clear. Now she & the tone-deaf guy with her are singing along to Enter Sandman.
- A child just threw up. And the tone-deaf people are whistling along to Metallica. Hour 22 on this bus is not going well.
- Woman behind me just said, “I’ve got Creed on here, too.” Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us. You’ll need both hands to load your gun.
- And now she’s playing the Eagles. “Hotel California.” This is obviously a set-up. Which of you bastards hired her?
- I kid you not, she just asked Tone-Deaf Guy: “Lynyrd Skynyrd? Do you like him?” I’m praying for the sweet release of death.
- Could somebody Google “justifiable homicide” for me? I’m fairly sure there’s a Creed clause.
After a while she settled down and the rest of the trip was uneventful. I arrived in New York an hour earlier than planned. I’m staying in a cheap hotel in Brooklyn for two nights, then staying with my sister till I leave on Wednesday.
There are a few things I forgot to mention in yesterday’s diary that I want to be sure to write down for the sake of my own memory.
One cool thing that happened because of Twitter was that I spent some of my time on the bus exchanging favorite lines from the movie Tombstone with Dirk Maggs, the director of the radio adaptations of the final three books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. Dirk is a brilliant radio producer and, thanks to Twitter, someone I now know a tiny little bit. And he, like me, would bring Tombstone to a desert island if need be.
The guy I sat next to until Richmond was a very interesting guy, too; a young, African-American truck driver who was traveling from Atlanta to Connecticut to contest a traffic ticket he’d received there. He didn’t believe it was warranted by the circumstances and he wanted to keep his driving record clean, so he was making the long trip. This guy, whose name I never learned, was a very observant person. He owns his own truck and has driven all over the country. He showed me gorgeous photos from Washington of frozen lakes, and a photo of the St. Louis arch taken while he was touching it. He and the guy behind us showed one another photos of their dogs, too. And when I snapped a shot of a rainbow (which he pointed out to me) he asked me to text it to him, which I did. And unlike almost every other passenger on every other bus I took, he disliked smoking and was vocal about it. When I told him what I was doing and that I had no home at the moment, he said he was the same way. “No kids, no wife, no apartment,” he said. “I sleep in my truck and spend most of my time on the road.” He said he’s planning to come off the road at the beginning of next year and start driving locally in Atlanta.
My seatmate also leant his phone to a guy sitting in the back of the bus. This man had just been released from prison that day, and he was using the phone to call the family of his cellmate to encourage them to visit the man more. He talked to a member of the man’s family and pleaded his case, then talked to the guy’s girlfriend and encouraged her to move closer to the prison. “But not to Atlanta,” he said, “or any place close to it. Move to one of the counties far away, where there’s nothing but grass and trees. Grass and trees.” He was headed for Baltimore to get away from the life he’d lived in Atlanta that had landed him in jail. He said he was born in Michigan, raised in New York and then moved to Atlanta, where things had gone wrong. Now he said he was headed to “a new life” in Baltimore. I wish him well.
I also want to share this bit of wisdom, sent to me by a friend who recites it to herself often: “All that you do, do it with love. All that you say, say it with love. All that you are, be it with love.”
And now to the numbers. Part one of the Jazz Or Bust Tour is just about over. It’ll be officially finished when I reach State College, PA, next week. Although I’m scheduling a poetry reading there, so I guess it’s not completely finished. Here are some numbers from part one:
- Total miles traveled: 5,225. This is probabaly quite a low estimate. I used Google Maps to figure out the mileage between each city I went to. However, my route was longer than the Google Maps route because the buses stopped many times and often traveled miles out of the way.
- Days on the road (through July 18, when I arrive in PA): 48
- Homes stayed in: 14
- Shows attended: 28. This isn’t counting any of the second lines in New Orleans, which weren’t official shows.
- Interviews conducted: 21
- Interviews given: 8
- Poetry readings performed: 5 (You can listen to them here.)
Part two of the tour will likely be even longer. It will restart in late August, probably at the Detroit Jazz Festival. Then I think my route will be to the Midwest, the Rockies, the Northwest, California, the Southwest, Texas, New Orleans. Or something like that. I’m planning that part now.
Thank you to everyone who helped make part one a success. The interviews I recorded will air through the rest of July and August, just in time for the tour to start again.
(If you’d like to support my tour, you can make a one-time donation and get great thank-you gifts HERE. If you’d like to become a member of The Jazz Session and make recurring monthly or yearly payments, you can do that HERE.)
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