Merged in a setting of browned and broken wall tiles, damaged electrical charging ports and scuffed flooring a rancid smell of stale cigarette smoke and sweat circumvent in a wafted current around the waiting room. Railed benches tarnished and scraped by the sharp sides of heavy luggage zips unveil a rusted copper beneath a chipped pastel paint coat, covered by children's cots and toys on top of bloated bin bags of clothes. Slumped in a beleaguered state, it’s late evening with the bus nearly set to depart. Waiting, sitting hour on hour between sorely pitched travel announcements and delayed arrivals, a defeated pace is maintained. Sordid with users, cons, and the ill, crudely paints harsh tones of a Hogarthian style picture transforming old English slums of the Victorian era into the forgotten of a new America. ‘All those travelling from Dallas to Albuquerque, stopping via Norman, Oklahoma City and Amarillo may y’all please be ready to present your tickets and secure your tags to your luggage’. Picking up belongings, passengers heavily heave their way towards the queue kiosk, barely lifting feet an inch off the floor as if weighted wearily by the defeat that there was little else they could do to speed their terminal boarding. After all, they were the last stop of a bus which had not even left the station.
Arriving at a context of how these terminals as outposts of outsiders exist and the people who use them, moves towards an understanding of an identity that is the epitome of what it isn’t to be a ‘True American’. The negative-correlation between poverty and car ownership suggests that many lack the basic mobility to react to life-changing events. Car ownership is less readily associated with the poorest fractions of a society built on the rights and sentiment of the gasoline pump and long-distance journeys. These people are stuck or waiting at the price. This is little seen as a primary index of poverty and discrimination in the US, and in my belief, it should be. There has been little commentary of it since the death of the original hitching Hobo, or up to the closing credits of Midnight Cowboy, with the protagonist Ratso passing of pneumonia at the back of the bus with the satisfaction of finally having arrived in sunny Florida.
Being sized up as I held my ticket, a man with worked leathered skin and sorely blistered dry eyes looked me up and down until he asked me how tall I was. He had ‘Red neck crazy’ tattooed on the back of his neck above the white cut trim of his worn vest, and an ink poked cross on the rook of his nose. Tempered on the surface exterior of his intimidating and imposing demeanour was a sensitivity which had been thawed and cracked by the grievances which he was troubled by. Unable to get a job coming in Auburn, he told me how he had decided to travel to Mobile in the hope of getting one. Meanwhile boarding the bus, Isiah who I had spent the remainder of fourteen hours conversing at the station with had already resumed a curled foetal position, tangling his legs between the crevasses of armrests and aisle levels. Only to wait for the cool morning to rise before showering at his house, prior to witnessing his two best friends on trial for suspicion of attempted homicide.
By 5:30 am, drifting and humming, the driven stretched chassis continues to file down the central route, only disrupted by the faulted oil cracks across the asphalt and excited cries of infants bouncing buoyantly on top of their mother’s thigh, vaulting over and under stiff seating and planting their clammed hands on the cool side of the window. Gawping at faint shadows of heavy wielding trucks hurtling in the opposite direction to their next mid-stop with their small eyes, is an innocent distraction to the eery reality of mundane life. Unrested, hungry and parched with unsavoury crusted sour lips, I only watch, nestling into the cushion of my jumper while other passengers mulch in the comfort of travel-worn pyjamas donned in frayed fur-lined slippers. The novelty of my form of travel is not a reflection of the lived experiences of people who consistently use this form of locomotion in moments of genuine need and daily life. I must stress this, as someone ‘on vacation’ and for those people who will continue to uncomfortably depend on it, even amidst the turn of the transformative pandemic. Any place of destination is already determined, on the journey itself, and any type of life an individual can expect to live, to be left picking up the pieces and scrapes of a broken and fixed country on top of all other belongings.
