The Trip from Hell

We live in a technologically advanced age which comes with its own benefits and detractions. The benefit is that we enjoy refrigerators, gastric bypass surgery, slurpees, and the plethora of other inventions science and Techne have provided for us. The bad news is that we come to expect and rely on the comfort and convenience technology provides for us. But sometimes technology does fail, especially in the face of our creator, Freaking God almighty. I found this fact out the hard way when i became a sacrificial lamb to the transportation gods in one of the most horrific odysseys since, well, The Odyssey.

The trouble started when Portland received a flurry of snow at the end of December last year. Usually Portland has a mild climate but this year global warming royally fucked things up and Portland was buried in a couple feet of snow. It wasn't a nice powdery coating like the white stuff on the slopes of Utah ski resorts. It was a heavy, sticky precipitation. I was in Oakland staying with a friend for the beginning of the winter break. My mom called me the day before my flight, "David, have you checked your flight. It's been snowing pretty hard up here. We're worried that your flight got canceled."

Sure enough my flight was cancelled and, after navigating through the labrynthine underground of Alaska Airlines automated phone service, I found out that they couldn't reschedule the flight until the 26th because of all the rescheduling and delays that had been caused by the snowstorm. The only solution I could come up with so that I could make it back for christmas was to buy a greyhound ticket and bus it up to Portland the next day. And thus began my own version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles (minus the fat guy and the trains).

My mother refers to her greyhound traveling experiences as 'riding the dawg.' If you haven't ridden greyhound before then let me clue you in on the delights of this outfit. Firstly, no one rides the bus in America unless they absolutely can't afford any other form of travel. Because of this greyhounds are often packed with colorful characters. One can count themselves lucky if there are merely some idiosyncratic charecters on the bus. My friend Romey related a delightful story to me about riding the greyhound from San Diego to Los angeles. In the seat behind him a surly fellow got angry at his girlfriend and stabbed her in the shoulder with a small pocket-knife. The bus had to stop for several hours while the cops carted the man away and a sanitation squad covered up the blood soaked chair. Then of course their's the famous beheading incident http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,396043,00.html but that happened in Canada so I wasn't too worried.

I loaded up on snacks and drinks in anticipation of the long ride (a projected 17 hours)before I boarded the bus. We left Oakland right on time and arrived in Sacramento a short two hours later. This is where we experienced our first delay, an hour waiting in Sacramento for another bus. No explanation was given to us poor passengers. I entertained myself by eating a hamburger in the station. It wasn't the best food I could have gotten but I was afraid to leave the station because I didn't know when exactly this bus would decide to show up and take us out of Sacramento, the polyp on San Francisco's asshole. In the station I met Sean, an old friend of mine from high school. He proved to be a lifesaver later on in the ride when my patience and sanity began to fray.

Once we left Sacramento we had a long haul ahead of us, up through the rest of Northern California and southern Oregon. I dealt with the boredom as best I could, listening to my ipod until it ran out of batteries then reading a book I had brought called "Farewell to Catalonia. I borrowed a book from Sean, Lolita, and was entertained by the musings of a pedophile for a couple hours. The farther north we got the colder it got and once we hit the pass between Oregon and California we were forced to stop for an hour and a half while the bus driver wrestled with winter chains which he probably had never had to put on his tires before. Shortly after the chain up stop we pulled into a gas station/convenience store for a piss/snack stop. Sean and I ran around in the snow, breath steaming out in front of us like little cumulous clouds. It was late night and the air was crisp and it felt good to stretch my legs which had been atrophying for the past 12 hours or so. We were all looking forward to getting through those last four or five hours of the ride and enjoying Christmas eve with our families. But fate, mother nature, that fickle old man in the sky, or whatever name you prefer to put to forces beyond human control had other plans.

***

I slept fitfully through the rest of the night and in the early morning we stop off in a little town called Medford. There's a small greyhound terminal there and we stop for a minute while the bus driver confers with people in the office. None of us think anything of it and we pay little attention as we he gets back on the bus and we take off again. About 10 minutes later we pull into a gas station and the driver stops, cuts the engine, and pulls up on the emergency break with a deffinitive "EEeeeek."

"Attention passengers. I have to inform you that, under Oregon law, I have reached the maximum number of hours that I can legally drive in a day. Because of this we are going to have to wait here until a relief driver shows up. This should only take a couple of hours. I'm sorry but there's nothing I can do. Now there's food inside so feel free to rest and eat until we are reay to go again."

Groans and inchoate rumblings followed this proclamation. Most of us trudged outside. Those who smoked, which seemed to be everyone on the bus except Sean and I, lit up and the rest of us shuffled our feet, huffed our breath, and shuffled about in the cold with our hands shoved firmly in our pockets.

"This is bullshit," Sean said. "Yeah man, I know." But there was nothing we can do.

Well the wait turned out to be longer than expected, eight hours longer to be exact. In this time we were treated to some less than chivalrous behaviour by Greyhound passengers and the staff of the gas station, Subway, and taco bell which made up this little slice of paradise we were in. To make matters more frustrating we were only a few hours from Portland with no mechanical issues or bad weather blocking our way. It was only the commercial driving laws which prevented us from making the rest of the journey.