Going Home

Travel Stories: The Greyhound bus takes 51 hours to get from Los Angeles to Winnipeg, just enough time for Stephen Hunt to rediscover a little human decency

This isn’t how you go home—hobbling back to town dead broke, sleep-deprived and smelly. You go home smelling good, telling cryptic stories of parties in the Hills with porn stars; the time you drove up Bel Air Road in a VW Bus to Quincy Jones’ estate, how he wanted to turn your play into a television series; the day you made page one of Daily Variety.

And yet, I’m not that down about it. I need some cheering up, and I expect I’ll get some. My friends have lived a variety of lives, some more lucky than others. Although we all grew up in the same several square miles of the same city, we all have lived divergent lives featuring a variety of education, incomes and aspirations. One is a real estate broker in Alberta who has three children and is filing for divorce from his wife. One is married, built a house on the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg, collects wine and is in perfect shape—he looks exactly the same as he did when he was 17 and played goalie. Another is a fundraiser with an MBA who wishes he was a standup comic or actor but never left Winnipeg. Another is a corporate lawyer in New York with a housing allowance who lives at the corner of Church and Warren Street, four blocks from where the World Trade Center used to be. A couple other guys got union jobs right out of high school and stayed at them. They’ve been steadily employed for twenty years, are married. One has kids, the other doesn’t. They own homes. I left for ten months in Europe and Africa immediately upon graduation in 1980 and for good in 1986. Since then, I’ve lived in Toronto, Grand Prairie Alberta, the West Bank, Montreal, Vancouver, New York and Santa Monica. You know what? If you added us up, we’d be one successful life.

They say your whole sense of yourself is based on what happened to you in high school. And the more I live, the more I realize that apart from family, my closest relationships were the ones I had with those guys I went to high school with. Mostly, we aren’t that close anymore, but high school was the time when we were the rawest, we had no shape, and all formed our ideas of ourselves together.

Meanwhile, in L.A. no matter how you’re doing, you go to parties, or to dinner, or to screenings, or to church, or to twelve step meetings, or to the cafe, you meet people for the first time. Quite often, you never see them again. As you grow older, making friends becomes more and more difficult. You wouldn’t think this would be the case, but it is. I can safely say I have no guy friends in L.A. The biggest shame of this summer reunion wouldn’t be arriving on a Greyhound. It would be not arriving at all.

A couple of them, as a form of jocular torment, emailed my itinerary to me, which I printed and tucked into a back pocket without actually reading. It’s a little scary when I read it, but a little less daunting when I actually make the stops: Los Angeles, Barstow, Las Vegas, St. George, Beaver El Bambi Rest Stop, Green River, Grand Junction, Denver, Ogalla, North Platte, Lexington, Grand Island, Omaha, Onawa, Sioux City, Vermillon, Beresford, Sioux Falls, Dell Rapids, Prairie Junction, Flandreau, Brookings, Arlington, Watertown, Summit Corner, Sisseton Junction, Fargo, Grand Forks, Pembina, Emerson, Letellier, St. Jean Baptiste, Morris, Glenlea, and eventually, 7:15 Thursday night, Winnipeg.

The PA announces pre-boarding for the bus to Sioux Falls. Re-boarders first. That’s me. I grimly clutch my orange rectangular re-boarding pass, the thing that allows me to reclaim my original seat before new riders board. I hand it back to the driver and climb four steps into the darkened bus, making my way back to my original seat.

The desperate wish of every Greyhound traveler, in the middle of an all-night bus trip (in this case two nights) is universal: two seats to yourself. Please, please, please God, give me two seats. I’ll go back to church if you just give me two seats to stretch my weary body out. You sit on the aisle and pile things on the window seat—things you could not possibly move. You fake sleep. You roll your eyes back in your head, let your tongue loll around in your mouth, tremble uncontrollably or scratch your hair violently, simulate a seizure—anything that might discourage someone from stopping and asking, “Is that seat taken?”

A young blond guy, maybe 21 or 22, does just that. “Mind if I sit there?”

He’s pointing at the open seat next to me. He’s on his way from Delaware back to his home in small town Minnesota. “I had a job dismantling grain elevators,” he says. “I thought it would be easy money. Then I get to Delaware, and these things are huge. Sixty-feet high. And pulling them apart is backbreaking, man. I wasn’t ready for that. Ripping strips off a grain elevator. It’s intense. And the insides of grain elevators are disgusting, man. Filthy. You don’t wanna know. I hurt my wrist on like the second day. Told the guy I was leaving. He gave me a bus ticket back to Minnesota and fifteen bucks.”

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Stephen Hunt is a longtime traveler currently seeking the road out of L.A. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Press, Toronto Globe and Mail, Shift, Saturday Night Magazine and other publications.


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