|
Volume 32, Number 4 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
October 2004 |
Good-
by Terrence Kardong, O.S.B.
Photo : found on the Internet
One day last summer we found sad news in the daily paper: Greyhound Bus Lines announced that it was terminating its services in North Dakota. In a sense, this was no surprise since public transportation has become increasingly scarce in these parts year after year. Probably it was just another aspect of the emptying out of the Great Plains; when people disappear, you can expect human institutions to follow. Nevertheless, this particular event, the disappearance of Greyhound, seemed to find a special resonance among us. Everybody was talking about it and it aroused many memories for me.
To begin, I have to admit that I am part of the problem for I have not ridden Greyhound for many years. Oh, I wave to the driver and the passengers
when I am walking along the highway and they pass by. But I have not climbed aboard the busses for a long time. So I have no business complaining that Greyhound is abandoning us. They claim they are losing money in North Dakota, and I don't doubt it. Other bus lines have announced that they will fill in the gap, but one wonders. If we don't ride them, then the pattern will repeat itself.
But my purpose here is not to dwell on an abstraction but to reminisce on my personal history with Greyhound. My first experience with the ‘Hound occurred in 1950. In September of that year, my parents put me on the bus in Minneapolis and told me to get off in Richardton, North Dakota, 557 miles to the west. At that time I was 13 years old. In retrospect, it seems like a foolhardy thing to do, entrusting a kid to the rough world of Greyhound. But at that time it did not seem unusual. Maybe we were tougher then, or life was more innocent.
That was a long, long time ago, and yet I still have some vivid memories of it. Of
course, the drive was endless and the scenery was sparse, but there were some memorable
incidents. I recall sitting next to a very black gentleman who regaled me with the
fact that he was an Ethiopian Jew! I don't know if I looked doubtful, but he finally
rummaged through his suitcase in the overhead bin and pulled out a dog-
As we drove on and on into the Great Plains, I thought I noticed that we were gradually picking up some other boys about my age. Could they be”Abbey Boys,” heading for school like I was? They were indeed, and I shyly began to exchange a few words with them. I think I remember that a few of them seemed to like cigarettes, but of course I had never smoked one in my sheltered life in Minneapolis. At that time, nobody thought it was intolerable that the bus was reeking with smoke. In those days, everybody was a smoker, like it or not.
It was already dark when we arrived at Richardton, so I had no idea exactly where
we were. In fact, we disembarked on Main Street and there was a reception committee
waiting for us. Actually, there were two reception committees, one for me and the
other for the rest of the boys. My three uncles, monks of the Abbey, had managed
to get a car for the occasion and they took me over to Walth's Locker Plant, south
of the tracks, for an ice-
That interminable ride from Minneapolis to Richardton and back was to be repeated many times in the next six years. As time went on, I began to become more aware of some basic facts. For example, I could not avoid noticing that there were a lot of soldiers on the westbound busses. They were heading for Seattle, and they were often drunk. That did not make them very attractive fellow passengers, but it was understandable for they were scared to death. The Korean War was raging and they knew it was no Sunday school picnic they were heading for.
Sometimes these drunks could be quite obnoxious, like the fellow who kept on slumping over on top of me in the next seat. He weighed about twice as much as I did, so I was crushed for mile after mile. Finally I told the driver and he tried to force the guy to stop burdening me, but it did no good. On Greyhound, you pays your money, you takes your chances. Everybody understood that it was not the elegant way to travel. It was basic transportation and it was patronized by the poorest element of society. The drivers tried to maintain law and order, but their power was limited.
Some of those long rides were worse than others. In my senior year, I had to board
Greyhound for Christmas vacation immediately after playing a basketball game. This
occurred at about 11 p.m., and I am not sure I even managed to get a shower after
that game. I was utterly exhausted and also humiliated, for we had managed to lose
to the mighty Beach Buccaneers 82-
But Greyhound did have something nobody else had, and it probably still does. It has character. More specifically, it has characters. It has people who say and do odd things, things that you just never see in an airplane. For example, one time I boarded a bus in Washington and headed for Newark. As soon as we got out on the highway, the fellow behind me began counting: one red car, two red cars, three red cars and so on. Up to a hundred. Then two hundred. The lady sitting beside him, presumably his mother, did not try to stop him. You don't stop such people. You just take them by way of Greyhound.
Another time we were riding west out of Mandan and this little bitty woman decided
that she needed to get something out of her suitcase, which was in the overhead rack.
So she simply climbed up and stood on the arm-
Sometimes the scenario was more complicated. I remember getting on a bus in Pittsburgh
and heading west for Chicago. A couple of seats behind me was a loud-
In response to each of these howlers, the young man would politely correct her; and his answers were invariably precise and intelligent. Pretty soon the girl exclaimed that he was the smartest guy she ever met. Well, no, he said, he was just a student at Harvard Divinity School, where they are expected to know such things. This conversation went on a long time, all the way to Columbus, Ohio, where the young man ended his journey. As for the girl, she went out and bought a pint of whiskey, which she apparently downed in a hurry, because she returned to the bus roaring drunk. Apparently she had endured all the clear thinking she could handle for a while.
Why did the busses disappear? Why did the trains disappear? The answer is oil. We now have much better cars and much better roads, so nobody wants to ride on public conveyances. Of course, the poor and the marginal still have to do so, and they are the ones who have been hurt worst by the collapse of public transportation on the Great Plains. Now, I would be the last one to claim that the advent of cheap oil has been entirely negative. Certainly it is more convenient to drive your own comfortable car wherever you want whenever you want. But the price is higher than we might think. Just ask the people of Iraq.
So the good old days were not always so good. There were aspects of them that needed to be eliminated. But Greyhound was not one of them. It was something that every country needs: basic transportation. True, it was patronized mainly by the poor. But there was a time when most people in this country were poor, and those times may well return. When they do, we will again need Greyhound, or something very much like it.
