A Big Bus Named Desire
By Donna McCrohan Rosenthal, East Sierra Branch
As a travel writer, I hear things. “Please do this and write about it.” “Do that or you’ll hate yourself.” New products. Game-changing innovations. So I do that and this. For this reason, I rode a bus from Burbank to San Francisco. The company advertises amazing prices and electricity at every seat.
I boarded at 1 p.m. with my thirteen-dollar – yes, thirteen-dollar – ticket and sat upstairs next to a chatty druggie. I soon abandoned him and grabbed the remaining seat, downstairs, where about a half dozen passengers had their laptops plugged into the overhead sockets. I thought I’d stepped into an ICU. I decided to forget about my computer and instead, just read, though I couldn’t do that too well without gouging the man in the adjacent seat every time I turned a page.
The bus only stopped once before San Jose, for a fashionably early dinner break in Buttonwillow at 3:10 p.m. We had our choice of several fast-food menus. My seatmate got Slim Jims, telling me that anything larger would have invaded my space. He dug his elbow into my midsection incessantly anyhow but as a travel writer, I’ve developed coping skills. In this case, I ignored the stabbing pain by pretending my appendix had burst.
By hour four we settled into a giddy sense of shared martyrdom. By hour five, I couldn’t feel my legs. Apparently my seatmate couldn’t feel his either, because when I mistook his knee for my carry-on and started fiddling with it, he didn’t notice. Good thing I didn’t try to unzip it.
Around hour seven, we reached San Jose. The crowding thinned and the garrulous gent descended from above, announcing himself with a soliloquy about making greens with fat back or a hog jowl for flavor. “That’s what my mammy taught me in Alabama,” he explained.
An African-American woman asked, “Was she black?”
“No,” he replied, “but I can play the banjo. I don’t do drugs. Some guy once put a spider on my face. Global warming is increasing at an alarming rate.”
“Here,” she chirped soothingly. “I want you to have this.” She handed him a plastic emergency survival blanket wrapped in some other plastic. He thanked her, then put on a hat that consisted of clear plastic tubes filled with tiny flashing blue LED bulbs. Not a dream! It happened precisely like that.
We arrived in San Francisco. As I exited, the automatic door slammed shut on me, hard. I let out a hideous expletive. People shrank away, looking terrified. They clustered around the wild-eyed druggie for protection and complimented his light-up head.
Yet as bus rides go, I can’t call it a bad experience. The bargain at thirteen dollars probably outweighed consensual martyrdom. I didn’t consider the day wasted either, because that’s what travel writers do. We hear things. We investigate them. We write about new products and game-changing innovations so that you can opt to pursue them or not. You decide whether to follow us after we do the reconnaissance and storm the beachheads – which seems as good a metaphor as any for going by bus from Burbank to San Francisco.