I recently regaled WEEKLY STANDARD readers with tales from my Florida biking adventure—eight days, 650 miles, and two college friends pedaling the east coast of the state to reach Key West—but I haven’t yet told you how we got back home. The return trip was an adventure in its own right, best summed up in a single word: Greyhound.
If you’ve ever experienced the classic North American inter-city bus service, the word itself is a talisman strong enough to conjure up repressed memories of that lean silver racing canine, taking an athletic stride across that navy blue background, and that hellish night you spent on a “Greyhound bound for nowhere,” jostled around with the brine of humanity, with Miranda Lambert nowhere to be found.
The story of Greyhound Lines, like all American corporate Krakens, begins with an inspiring immigrant individual, this one named Carl Eric Wickman, who was born in Sweden and moved to this country in 1905. After losing his first job as a drill operator, he became a Hupmobile car salesman, but failed at that too. Instead of giving up, and knowing it would make for a great story when he became a business overlord, Wickman used an unsold vehicle to create a bus line between Hibbing and Alice, Minnesota, for iron miners hoping to enjoy the saloons in the next town. Yes, Greyhound may be descended from the first official drunk taxi service.
With Wickman at the helm, Greyhound rapidly expanded by acquiring smaller bus lines. The company was offering transcontinental trips from California to New York by 1928. Those first iron miners payed 15 cents to ride the bus, and Greyhound remains just as prudent an option today. Or, as its PR wizards put it, Greyhound serves a “wide customer base who appreciate our value for money fares.” Reading between the lines—when you suddenly realize you need to find a way from a random place to another random place—in our case, a way that can accommodate your nonexistent college student bank account, your large touring bikes and heavy gear, as well as your haphazard hopefully-we’ll-pedal-there-
Actually, it’s what a ton of people do. Before taking my first Greyhound trip years ago between New York and Washington, D.C., I thought of buses as just another slow, antiquated means of travel that had gone by the wayside, but without all the romance associated with stagecoaches and steamships. Turns out, buses aren’t just for Rosa Parks and rock stars. Today, Greyhound serves 18 million customers traveling between 3,800 destinations ever year. And that doesn’t count the upstart bus lines that have sprung up in recent years like kudzu—MegaBus being most prominent among them.
When James and I pedaled our last miles into Key West, there wasn’t any of the fanfare our exhausted muscles felt they deserved. No checkered flag, no ribbon to break through, and not a drop of champagne to be found. Instead, my pedal broke and needed to be repaired before we could catch our bus at 5:00pm, taking us to Jacksonville where we had left our car. Limping a mile and-a-half to the terminal, we boarded just in time.
Our situation was weird and desperate, which I now realize placed us squarely in Greyhound’s target demographic. While it’s impressive that Greyhound still serves 18 million customers per year, that’s nothing compared to bus travel in its heyday. In 1935, for example, 652 million passengers rode on non-local American buses, an incredible number many times greater than the entire U.S. population. For several decades, buses were the way most people traveled long distances in this country. Today, however, if you’re riding the bus it’s often the case that something, well…weird and desperate has happened.
While we were busy boarding the driver barked and growled enough to let us know he was king of this 50′ kingdom. But the bus was relatively empty, and, lulled into a false sense of security, James and I made our first mistake by sprawling into separate rows, leaving an open seat to our left, guaranteeing a cast of characters would have to sit down next to us over the next 14 hours.
There was the long-haired German hipster from Pittsburgh, who told us that he was traveling to “find himself.” There was the four-member family in pajamas, who were returning from a vacation in the Keys, but also had several weeks of groceries on hand, and didn’t talk to each other. Mom and Dad sat in different seats, too distracted by their devices to notice their daughter leaping and singing through the terminal at 3:00 in the morning like it was a field of Daffodils, or their seven-year-old son who couldn’t keep his pants up. The power outlets never worked, the WiFi was a fantasy, and the girl across the aisle kept moaning that she hadn’t taken her medicine. The only person more bewildered than me was surely the foreign exchange student—taking, I guess, the washing machine approach to cultural immersion.
Why didn’t I worry about the man who bragged he had just completed a 22 year sentence in federal prison? Because a patriotic someone sitting behind me got their mustache bristles close enough to my ear to reassure me they were “packing heat,” presumably in their black leather fanny pack.
In a fit of politeness, a chronic problem of his, James talked with the young woman sitting next to him long enough to learn she had been in Miami for several weeks with “Babe,” who was “holding down a job at Pizza Hut for three months.” She was riding the bus round trip all the way to Syracuse and back (a 68 hour trip) to retrieve the young children she had left behind with their father.
That’s one thing I didn’t expect, my fellow riders willingness to air their dirty laundry, but it became a consistent theme. The man sitting behind me was in his mid-50s but had quit his job, and bought a Mustang, deciding, as he explained, it was finally time to start living his life. Everyone we met told us their troubles, and no one was happy to find themselves riding the bus.
Still, being lonely and down on your luck has always been a part of the Greyhound Americana experience. Dickey Betts, writer of Ramblin’ Man, sang he was “born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus, rollin’ down highway Forty-One,” and I have no trouble believing him now. Grosser things have happened in those back seats, but like Betts says, we’re all just “tryin’ to make a living and doing the best we can.”
If traveling is being places you’ve never been, and meeting people you might never meet, we did more traveling in our hours with Greyhound than we accomplished in eight days of biking the entire Florida coast.
