Greyhound; the staple of cross country trips and the choice of runaways and desperate last-shot trips home. It’s like the airport, but if the world forgot that it existed, and only the employees and those who have need of cheap, long distance mass transit know of it. Picture the pristine, secure, massive international airport. You’ve been in one, no doubt, and if you haven’t had the pleasure of taking a commercial airline flight somewhere in your life, you’ve at least seen it in a movie somewhere. So, yeah, picture that. Now make it smaller. Like, really small. Think about something the size of a subway station. It’s better lit than a subway station, but the only reason it smells better is because it’s above ground. Now populate it with a mix of your average cross-country passenger along with a few of the desperate types that probably haven’t had access to a shower in a few days. They’ve managed to scrape together enough money to get themselves to somewhere that promises better opportunity, or maybe they’re crawling back home to the family they tried, and failed, to escape.
My particular trip was from Raleigh, North Carolina to Marietta, Georgia after a particularly straining week of stress that will get its own story in due time. My friend dropped me off an hour before departure so that I could get my ticket and be all set and ready when the time came. After bidding them goodbye, I turned to face the waiting room. My first thought was “it’s just like an airport. A sketchy McSketchsketch Airport.” I proceeded to treat it as such; baggage stays with one’s person at all times, including trips to the bathroom.
This brings me to the first adventure of the night. A muscular African-American man several inches shorter than me had just walked in as I was about to walk out. He wore a white tank top shirt and a pair of long denim shorts. He noticed me and stepped forward. He brought his forearm across his chest, his elbow pointed in my direction. He informed me that he “came in peace” and just wanted to ask for my help. He made a gesture that implied that I was to offer my own elbow, and something along the lines of the popular fist-bump or high-five occurred. He explained to me, and I had a little trouble following his story entirely, so much of this is speculation based on what I did catch, how he had found himself in a bad way(I don’t know if I’m imagining something to do with him just getting out of jail or prison, though he seemed nice enough) and was now on his way back to his wife and daughter, and that the woman at the ticket counter was being a pain, and that he was seven dollars short of the ticket price to get home. Despite my paranoid nature telling me that this man was just trying to get drug money, I reached into my wallet and counted out my ones. I only had six, but it was better than nothing. Thanking me for my kindness, he gave me a man-hug(you know, the one where you shake the other person’s hand, then pull them in to pat them on the back with the other? Yeah, that. Really awkward when there’s a foot difference.) and left.
On the bus, I found the first empty seat, which happened to be next to a middle-eastern man, probably in his thirties, with a shaved head and a goatee beard. He was headed to Miami, and didn't say much after the bus left the terminal. He slept most of the way to Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Across the isle, however, was a pair of middle-aged African-American men who, by the sounds of it, were seasoned veterans of Greyhound travel. Much like the frequent fliers of the airline world, these two men had made such trips as(no joke, he actually mentioned this exact trip) Seattle, Washington to Kingston, Rhode Island.
They discussed the driver's driving and people skills(she was a good driver, but her personality was too flat to be working with the public, they decided.), and then one began to tell the other tales of his life driving semi-trucks. The most interesting story was when he said that those drivers are taught that if someone cuts them off and an accident is inevitable that it is better to hit the person who cut you off than to try to avoid it and cause a larger wreck. DO NOT CUT OFF SEMI TRUCKS. They WILL run you over, and the CAN run over you. I don't care if you're driving daddy's six-inch-lift-seven-hundred-horsepower-glass-pack-diesel Chevy Tahoe. You're gonna get totaled, and if you're extremely lucky. it'll just be the car that gets such.
When we made it in to Fayetteville, I had a three-hour-and-forty-five-minute layover. Around one thirty, this older gentleman comes up to me and tells me that he's a Christian who's trying to get home and needs fifteen dollars to change his ticket out, because he missed the nonstop to Florida that left around one, and there was a death in his family. I wanted to decline at first, but something struck me; Everything that has happened this week has worked out well, even if it wasn't ideal. I've had people all over the place who were able to help me out. So I payed it forward. And I gave him the extra five so he could eat something to eat during his trip to Miami beach that would have come in after midnight the next day.
At 4:05 I boarded the bus that would eventually take me into Atlanta. My evangelical baptist friend would be taking the 4:15 to Orlando. We parted ways, and I ended up sleeping most of the way. The passengers around me weren't of any particular interest. There was the kid who was probably anywhere from sixteen to nineteen with the laptop and smartphone, but he kept to his technology the whole way. We made it into Atlanta just in time to board the bus to Marietta. The driver was in better spirits than the other two combined, despite having a mouthy passenger that didn't really seem to understand how the whole bus system worked. The thirty minute ride was uneventful.
