On the Bus

I am looking forward. . . .

<a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/tuesday_potluck/”>On the bus home from Philadelphia a few weeks ago</a>, I had an Important Insight.  It was an insight borne of decades of driving and my last couple of academic gigs, which (because of their locations far from airports) have entailed traveling in shuttles and buses and vans and town cars and rickshaws.  And I’ve decided to share it with you, just because (and just below the fold).

After decades of driving, I find that I have become the Default Family Driver.  The reason it has taken me so long to grasp this is that when I met my wife in the early 1980s, she was far more conversant with auto-mobiles than I was; I hailed from New York City and had never owned a car, whereas she drove a small truck and could actually do her own repairs.  Over the past quarter century, however, cars have become too complicated for mere mortals to tamper with, and Janet has gradually become less and less comfortable driving in rain, snow, or darkness.  Since we live in a corner of the world that is covered in rain, snow, or darkness approximately seventy percent of the time, I do most of the driving.  OK, and then there was her neck surgery, which had obvious implications for things like backing out of parking spaces and handling difficult intersections.

The result of all this default driving is that I now feel completely pampered whenever I am being driven someplace.  It doesn’t matter where I’m going or what vehicle carries me.  I find a comfortable position, curl up as best I can, and read or fall asleep or read and fall asleep and read and fall asleep and read again.  It feels like luxury.*

But it didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago that I used to have a very different — and far more neurotic and tightly-wound — attitude toward passengerdom.  The first glimmerings of this Important Insight (whose importance will become clearer as the tale unfolds) appeared while I was on my way to Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario late in January.  I know, I know — I live in a land of rain and snow and darkness.  How could I be so delusional as to plan a trip to the remote frozen north in late January?  But <i>mirabile dictu</i>, after a series of delays and cancellations and miscellaneous uncertainties, I managed to arrive in Canada, which turns out to be a completely separate country from the United States, with its own currency and everything.  And as I was being ferried from Toronto to Peterborough in a snow-and-salt-encrusted shuttle, I suddenly had flashbacks to my youth, when I was being ferried around southern Ontario in the snow-and-salt-encrusted team bus that drove us from one hockey tournament to another.  I’ve always been happy (er, possibly too happy) to note that mine was the first team from New York to play in Canadian tournaments, and even happier to note that in early 1972, just before the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Series”>Summit Series</a>, we actually beat a bunch of Canadian teams, including Kitchener, the team that had beaten Wayne Gretzky’s team, Don Valley, in the finals of the AA division of the Brockville “Thousand Islands” tournament (my team had lost in the A division finals).  So to this day I can say (and will, whenever the occasion presents itself) that I played on the American team that beat the team that beat Gretzky’s team in 1972.  But my flashbacks this year had nothing to do with playing hockey, and everything to do with the sensation of being driven from town to town in southern Ontario through four-foot snowbanks in salt-encrusted vehicles.  And then lo!  When, after an hour and a half on the road, I checked in at the Peterborough Holiday Inn, I saw that I would be sharing the hotel with . . . <i>teenaged hockey players</i>, participants in a “bantam” tournament (ages 13-14) of teams from southern Ontario.  The woman at the front desk apologized, thinking that I would be worried about rambunctious adolescents keeping me awake all night.  “Not at all,” I replied, “I was just thinking about when I used to play in these tournaments.  It’ll be fine.”  I looked around — yes, it was all there again, the breakfast specials with the maple-flavored sausage, the frozen swimming pool, the lanky, scraggly kids unloading their stuff from the bus. . . .

(By the bye: the drivers who drove me from Toronto to Peterborough and back, like the driver who drove me from Albany, NY to Williams College last week, got a $20 tip each way.  That’s partly because I believe in thanking people for ferrying me around for sixty to ninety minutes, and partly because I know I have to pick up the slack for all my fellow Americans who have decided to <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/ask-dr-helen-is-it-time-to-go-john-galt/”>go John Galt</a> when they encounter workers in the service economy.)

Anyway, when I was but a bantam I always rode in the front of the bus and watched the road.  I wanted to see precisely where we were going, how we were getting there, and how quickly or slowly we were getting there.  I wanted to check out the surroundings and the traffic and even the design of the highway signs.  If you could have rolled down a window, I probably would have stuck my head outside it like a dog.  Weirdly, I took this approach even to city buses in New York, one of which — the world-famous Q28 of Queens — I rode every weekday as part of my hour-long slog to high school.

So I realized, thirty or thirty-five years later, as I was being shuttled around the northeast US and southern Ontario not caring where I was going or how I was getting there, that this excessively attentive bus-riding was one of my younger self’s control-freaky traits: that I wanted to experience the bus ride as if I were actually in the driver’s seat.  I don’t remember whether it had any ulterior purpose — whether I thought of it as a form of mental discipline, or whether it was some kind of superstition.  All I remember is that I always rode in the front and watched the road intently, and now — thankfully, I thought to myself as I dozed off in the middle of my latest leisure read, <i>Dreams From my Father</i> by some guy whose name I can’t pronounce — I really do leave the driving to them, and chill the hell out for a few hours.

There’s a scene in <i>Pushing Tin</i> that gets at this.  Starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie, and Cate Blanchett, <i>Pushing Tin</i> is almost universally acclaimed as the <i>Citizen Kane</i> of air traffic controller films, and the scene in which Thornton sings a karaoke version of “Muskrat Love” has moved more than one critic to tears.  And fittingly, it is about control-freakery: at one point, Cusack’s character leaps up in a breakfast diner to “help” a befuddled waitress by straightening out all her chaotic orders for her, just as he lines up aircraft for takeoff and landing.  Well, you don’t want to be That Guy, and if you’ve got a few of That Guy’s tendencies in you, you probably should keep a hold on them — though not too obsessively, because that’s a bit control-freaky in itself.  And you should <i>definitely</i> try to keep That Guy in check if you have a teenager with a disability who wants to do things all by himself.  (Well, some things.  Jamie remains fond of demanding that I fetch him a plate of cubed pepper jack cheese for his television-viewing pleasure, and after a few weeks of telling him I am not his house elf, I have taken to sobbing like Dobby, “Michael is still treated like vermin.”)

Then again, chilling and going to sleep is not a plausible way of life.  Sometimes people really do need help (or plates of cheese!), and sometimes it’s good to pay attention even when you’re a mere passenger.  In 1974, humming along the frozen New York State Thruway on its way back from a dismal tournament in Potsdam, NY, our team bus suddenly lost its grip on the road somewhere west of Syracuse.  We were in the middle of an especially nasty upstate lake-effect winter storm — sheets of snow and high winds — and our driver simply found himself being blown off the road.  The alert kid up front (that would be me) had a moment of pure terror as he realized that the bus was heading for the guardrail of a bridge over a small frozen river, but it was only a moment, because the driver cannily steered in the direction of the skid, brought the bus veering back across three lanes of traffic, and managed to crash gently into the large snowbank (covering a sculpted grass hill) separating eastbound from westbound traffic.

After my moment of terror passed, I was preternaturally calm about the whole thing, having seen it develop from the start; so when the bus tilted, groaned, and then fell over to the left, I simply hung on to the overhead rack and then let go when the bus finally settled.  Not everyone got off so easily: a few of the parents were injured, and one unlucky fellow broke his arm.  I surveyed the damage and wondered whether I should kick out the front window, as passengers were advised to do in such an emergency as this (yes, I read the emergency warning on the front window, too).  Certainly it would make it easier for everyone to exit the bus, but then again, I had no idea who owned the bus and whether they would appreciate my attention to emergency safety procedures if it meant they had to replace a large front window on top of all the other repairs they’d be doing.  Also, at that age I had a well-earned fear of getting yelled at.  So I didn’t kick anything, and when the EMT people arrived they hauled us out of the right side windows, which were now at the top of the bus.  This was quite painful for the guy with the broken arm, and watching him, I wished I’d kicked out the window for his sake.

So I was thinking all these thoughts as my Greyhound bus brought me back from Temple University a couple of weeks ago, because even as I was feeling good about relaxing and snoozing and reading and not being a neurotic and control-freaky kind of passenger, I was dimly aware that we’d be heading through some rough weather and a couple of mountain ranges along the way (see comment 25 in <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1235/”>this thread</a>).  For some reason, a fellow Pennsylvanian decided to challenge my description of these mountain ranges as “mountain” “ranges” (comment 30), but he was well and duly mocked (comment 31) for his pettifogging pettifoggery.  More important, he was informed (by me, comment 35) that the final half hour of the ride did indeed feature some scary stuff.  But what I didn’t tell in that thread I’ll tell here: as the bus inched its way up the “mountain” pass near Rothrock State Forest, where US route 322 runs through the Tussey Mountain Range and there’s a nice sheer drop of a few hundred feet to your immediate right, a van crept by us on the left (why is it always a van?) and then tried to return to the right lane well before it had passed us.  The driver cursed, veered a bit to the right, and hit the horn.  We had no wiggle room, we were going no more than 15 mph, and we had maybe 20 or 30 yards of visibility — not enough to see the taillights of the next vehicle.  The van backed off, its driver apparently paying attention to his surroundings now, and our driver relaxed and softly cursed again.

And the reason I know of this little almost-incident is that I was sitting only three rows back, and there was no one between me and the driver; as in the Syracuse crash, I saw the thing develop, because when we hit that fog on the mountainside I couldn’t believe we were going to make it through (sure enough, most of the trucks on the road had pulled over at the rest area at the summit), and I decided to pay attention for a change.  After the van backed off, I whistled softly, and the driver said, over his shoulder, “do you believe that?”  “Unreal,” I replied.  “This is the last stretch like this, isn’t it?”  “Yeah, we’re almost there,” he said, “but this is pretty bad.”  It was indeed pretty bad, and if you travel from Philadelphia or Harrisburg to State College by car, you know that this mountain pass is then followed by fifteen miles of a two-lane road that consists of rolling hills.  For reasons that remain obscure even to the world’s leading meteorologists, it is always raining, snowing, <i>and</i> dark on that stretch of road, which makes the game of “avoid the oncoming tractor trailer” especially entertaining.  I didn’t talk much to the driver the rest of the way, but I could tell that he was quite relieved that somebody else within earshot was paying attention, that he wasn’t entirely alone in the night and the sleet and the fog.

We arrived in State College safe and sound and only a few minutes late; and before heading off to grab a cab in the sleet, I said to the driver as he hauled out the bags, “nice work through the mountains.”  He thanked me, I thanked him, and I got into yet another vehicle.  It’s a tricky thing, driving — and it’s a tricky thing, trying to figure out how to pay just the right amount of attention to the world.

_______

* I realize this is impossible on buses on which passengers are subjected to an endless stream of Adam Sandler and/or Sandra Bullock films.