American Bus Ride, Part 1: A Horse With No Name

 On trail crew, we began every morning with a stretch circle and a question of the day. One July morning, someone posed the question to the group: “What are three things that are on your bucket list?”

This required some thought for me. I didn’t have a bucket list in any formal sense, and I seemed to rarely think about long-term aspirations. Making a bucket list always seemed like the first item on a bucket list I hadn’t yet gotten to.

I remembered the idea I had had on a recent bus ride from Boston to Springfield. Something about the thought that seemed to pop up when getting close to your stop—what if I just stayed on and kept going?—or at big stations with screens with far-off names—what if I just got on any one of these buses or trains? Like jumping into an unknown river and seeing where the tide would take you, like closing your eyes for a while to discover later where you will have floated.

I had been struck by Wanderlust at the ripe age of twenty-one, before that, having never considered myself someone who enjoyed traveling. But on that ride from Boston to Springfield, I had suddenly begun scheming a Simon-and-Garfunkel-esque road trip, even though I had taken enough buses by then to know that America’s bus system is nothing worth singing about. 

So when the circle got around to me, doing a hamstring stretch in the early morning sun, I tried to think of things that seemed big, like running a marathon, or doing an open water swim. “I want to go on a road trip,” I said. “But instead of by car, by buses.” 

“Where would you go?” someone asked. 

“I don’t know…” I said, “maybe not across the whole country. Maybe somewhere like New Mexico.” I don’t know where the idea of New Mexico came from, although I had just finished reading The Lovely Bones which had a single scene, no more than a few sentences, that took place in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and I had taken note of the unusual name.

I was my own biggest skeptic. That was what made it a bucket list item rather than a plan. I had two months between when my season ended, and when school started. I spent a while pondering what to do with that time. It was an awkward amount of time to find a new job, too long to do nothing. On a weekend I was visiting home, I went to the beach one day with my sister and her friend and her friend’s friends; an assortment of metropolitan twenty-somethings. I told them about my job doing trail work. So you’re like Bob the Builder in the woods? one of them said. I told them about the two months I would have, and they all said I should travel. I wish I had two months where I had no responsibilities. That seemed to be the sentiment among “real adults”—get out there while you can. I took it as a sign that I should do my trip. 

But when I brought up the idea to my mom, I was reminded of how old my grandmother was, how little time I had spent at home in the past year, or really since I got to college, and it gave me pause to make plans months in advance to be so far away. I did a one-eighty, and decided I would spend the two months at home, fulfilling my neglected familial duties. 

As the days marched into fall, the matter of “after this” began to crop up in conversations more. One cold October day, my supervisor asked me what I was looking forward to upon returning to “the real world.” It took me a long time to think of a response. 

It was later that evening that I went onto the WWOOF website. Back then, what I craved most was a respite from the cold. Perhaps it is best not to make decisions in a state of extreme, but at a cold New England campsite, I dreamed of the sun on my skin. 

****

I decided to spend a month at home and a month WWOOFing. I originally wanted to go to as many farms as possible, but without a car, the logistics seemed like a nightmare. I messaged farms in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and after what seemed like a too-simple process, I was set to stay on a farm in Arizona for three weeks, and another one in New Mexico for one week.

I dreamed of the desert for weeks, but the night before I was set to fly into Phoenix, I could barely sleep. Some combination of airport anxiety, and travelling alone for a month. I had bought a large backpack to fit all of my stuff into so I could be as mobile as possible, and the dimensions were two inches larger than what a carry-on was supposed to be. What if they wouldn’t let me board the plane? Or what if they did, and then I would be all by myself across the country?

****

After three weeks in Arizona, my last week in the desert was supposed to be in New Mexico. I arrived in Albuquerque late on a Sunday night, after a bus from El Paso, Texas, and before that, a bus from Lordsburg, New Mexico, where the family I had stayed with in Arizona had dropped me off. The other WWOOFer at the farm, a woman named Janet, picked me up from the bus station.

Janet showed me around the farm the next morning. The woman who owned the farm didn’t live there; she stopped by every once and a while to bring groceries and check in on how things were going. I could write pages and pages about Janet, but the important part for the story is that she left a day and a half after I came. Her sister was having a nervous breakdown in New Jersey, and so she packed up her things and drove there from Albuquerque. 

The next day I spent alone, plucking tumbleweed. The next night I spent alone in the bottom bunk of a room with two bunk beds, hallucinating footsteps, barely sleeping. It was hard to imagine a whole week of this. I didn’t want to spend the remainder of a trip that was ultimately supposed to be enjoyable afraid and tediously weeding, but I hadn’t planned to come back to New York until New Year’s, and I didn’t want to bail out and go home early. It was the first time I had traveled alone, and I wanted to see it to the end. So I decided to take the long way home.