When I caught a free bus ride to White River Junction on Advance Transit the other day, I thought of a photograph on my desk. A man in a uniform leans slightly into the open door of a bus, his left hand probably gripping the handle passengers used to pull themselves up onto the first step. With his heavy bus driver’s hat pushed back at a slightly rakish angle and his sleeves rolled almost to the elbow, he rests his right fist on his hip. His gaze is directed toward the road in front of the bus, not into the camera.
That’s my grandfather in 1950, and riding just behind him in his city bus as a kid was often an adventure, partly because he often led conversations. The only one I remember well now was brief, and it included two kids about my own age, 10. It was rush hour in downtown Portland, Ore., and my grandfather had just stood up to ask people standing in the aisle to move to the back of the bus so more people could get on. One of the kids asked his friend, “Does he mean us?” His friend replied, “No, he’s talking to the people.” My grandfather turned and smiled and reminded the boys that they were people too. I remember this because it became one of his favorite stories about rush hour.
My own ambition was to drive a long-distance bus, preferably the one they called the “Hound,” but when I mentioned this dream to my grandfather, he said drivers on the open road sometimes had to deal with unruly passengers. That hint of danger might have added to my sense that Hounds were for me, and for years I looked for reasons to ride long-distance buses. Those rides could be fascinating social events, but the best talk generally moved away from the driver’s seat. Long-distance drivers tend to be quiet unless they are making announcements or silencing unruly passengers with the loudspeaker, their chief instrument of social control.
On one of my long bus rides, in January 1980, I encountered such intense sociability aboard a bus that it began to feel like a real community. This was just after a blizzard shut down travel overnight as I hit Minneapolis on a bus from Chicago bound for Seattle. When we took off the next day, maybe the passengers assumed we might need to depend on each other if we had to spend time together in a ditch along the frozen road. A sullen man got on the bus in eastern Montana with his wife and young son, both of them with black eyes, and although we all probably assumed the father had beaten them, his apparent tendency to throw punches didn’t isolate the family. People went out of their way to talk with all of them, and before long both parents were asking what we knew about Olympia, Wash., where they were headed for the father’s new job.
I became an ardent listener to the talk on long-distance buses. And after failing to learn a lesson from my grandfather, I should have picked it up years later from my oldest grandson, Nate: Talk on local buses can be very interesting too. In 1993, my wife and I were flying from Portland, Ore., to Albany, N.Y., with Nate and his little sister when we ran into bad weather in Chicago and had to hole up overnight in a motel. On a bus to the motel filled with reluctant riders — many of them had been waiting in lines for hours, hoping to fly — 6-year-old Nate broke a brooding silence by asking a man holding fishing poles if he’d had any luck.
As it happened, the man had caught several trout in a Rocky Mountain stream, and he was happy to tell Nate all about them. It turned out several people on the bus had been having very different varieties of good times also. By the time we reached the motel, the bus was buzzing with lively talk, and I’m pretty sure everyone felt better.
While cellphones and other electronic devices reduce conversation aboard long-distance buses, you can still hear people talking on Advance Transit. There is no shortage of cellphones, especially among young people, but I hear conversations that have the sound of reunions, people sharing memories when they haven’t seen each other in a while. One day I heard three people speaking a beautiful African language I can’t identify.
And for the first time in months I hear talk of politics in public. Two older men who get on the bus at the VA Hospital are in the midst of criticizing the Democratic Party for the silly assumption that Trump would be easy to beat. One says, “Bernie doesn’t satisfy the Democrats.” And he adds: “To me, it’s a wake-up call.” A few days later, two other men share memories before they turn to politics, and then their voices drop. I have trouble hearing much of their political talk, but as one of them gets off the bus, the other says loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Make America great again. Well, here it is. Enjoy!” Later, when we pass a scene in which three police cruisers are gathered around a man who appears to be under arrest, a grandmotherly woman shouts to our driver so all of us can hear that she worries about the abuse of police power.
People leaving Advance Transit buses sometimes wish the drivers a good day, and young people often thank the drivers, a custom I noticed a few years ago on local buses in the English Cotswolds. I find this custom, which my Hanover grandson tells me is observed on school buses, a heartening sign of civility.
Sometimes the lively, varied talk aboard our buses can be inspiring because we seem to depend so heavily on social media for our conversations and live increasingly, as sociologists tell us, in neighborhoods with people likely to share our political views. Bus talk can remind you that considerable diversity persists in the melting pot that is our culture. And that diversity is an important part of what has made America great.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.