The Road West
Grand Tour of the East Coast
Grand Tour of the East Coast
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| Interior of the South Station Bus Depot. |
This leg of the trip was on a Peter Pan bus (not Greyhound). Pulling out of South Station, I was treated with striking views of Boston at sunset. The ride through Massachusetts and Connecticut was noteless.
I was excited about seeing Manhattan at night, since I had yet to see the entire skyline illuminated in electrical brilliance. But I was disappointed. Newark is a good place to approach Manhattan. So, I assume in reverse, is Brooklyn. The Bronx is not. The Midtown skyline is obscured by Harlem's dinginess, and the bridge to Manhattan is so uninspiring I almost missed it.
Although the midnight Manhattan encounter disappointed my expectations, it still had good points. Glancing up 50th Street, I thrilled at the soaring heights of the Rockefeller Center. And up 42nd Street, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Chrysler Building's gleaming cap.
After pulling into the Port Authority Bus Terminal at midnight, I had a three-hour layover. On my first encounter with the place, when I arrived in Manhattan, I did not see much of it. I discovered readily that I had not missed anything. The bus terminal is a sprawling complex several stories tall, representing the worst of 1960s architecture. It's big, ugly, dirty, and poorly planned. The designers did not consider the obvious problem of seating for travelers waiting between buses. There is not a bench, chair, or ledge to be found outside of the food court. I quickly learned that if I hoped to get any rest on my three-hour layover, I would have to find a quiet place and sit on the floor, clutching my bags and doubled over, face-down, like the vagrant I had become.
Behold the hope of him is in vain. After about twenty minutes of frightened half-dozing, it appeared that I was about to be blocked off from the rest of the terminal by a metal gate. The whole terminal never closes in the City that Never Sleeps, but some parts of it lie dormant late at night. I lugged my bags downstairs near my gate, where it was crowded and noisy and even dirtier than above.
I got in line hours before my bus was scheduled to leave. My fellow passengers, at least, were interesting, but they could ease the misery of the wait only so much. We finally boarded our bus, filling every last seat. I chose the left side so I could see Manhattan on the way out in Newark, as if I even wanted to be concious then. I dozed going through the Lincoln Tunnel, then forced myself awake to look at the skyline. It wasn't worth it. At 3:30 am, most of the glamorous lights on the buildings were extinguished. In my sleepy stupor I could identify only the Empire State Building, and its airship mast wasn't even lit.
My conciousness dropped to a mere glimmer, rolling in and out like waves but never really dropping off entirely. My seatmate had a nasty cuddling habit; I would wake up periodically, shake her head off my shoulder, doze off, repeat.
I guess my sleep improved, and morning arrived blearily. We seemed magically transported from New Jersey to Philadelphia. Likenesses of Ben Franklin were all over the place, along with a towevering city hall upon which William Penn in bronze was perched.
Now that the sun was up, I could actually sleep. Almost the next thing I knew, Harrisburg stood before me in the misty Pennsylvanian morning. Driving through downtown, I caught a glimpse of the state capitol, and I was stunned. The dome was not gray or gold, but a brilliant emerald green.
I stayed awake after that, writing in my journal and watching the countryside. The hills rose and dropped and rose higher and dropped, forming into the Allghennies. They're not exactly mountains by my standards, but I liked them. Pennsylvania is a pretty state, from what I saw. It was certainly a welcome relief after the endless urbanization of much of the East Coast.
The bus passed through a narrow spit of West Virginia thrust awkwardly between Pennsylvania and Ohio. I doubt John Denver had this part of the state in mind when he sang about "almost heaven." It seemed mostly featureless. We stopped in Wheeling, a town I had not known existed until I encountered it. I thought the place had nothing to recommend it. Later I learned that Wheeling has some interesting history, because delegates met there in 1861 and voted to secede from Virginia, which had in turn seceded from the United States. But nowadays the town looks rather run-down.
Crossing over the Ohio River for the second time (the first in Pittsburg), I arrived in the state by the same name. I had hoped to savor the experience a little longer, but I finished reading East of Eden in one of Ohio's nondescript dorfs. It was a good pick for a long, pre-1980 American book. I found the ending quite moving, not that I cared to show it on a bus.
This "nondescript dorf" was Cambridge. The only distinguishing feature, I thought, was that the McDonald's near the freeway flew its "M" flag higher than its American flag. Several months later, I found that John Glenn was born in Cambridge in 1921.
Ohio has more than its share of metropolitan areas. As far as I'm concerned, no state needs more than two. Colorado has Denver and Colorado Springs, Oklahoma has Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and Washington has Seattle and Spokane. I encountered two of Ohio's metropolitan areas: Columbus and Dayton. The latter seems an unassuming place to have witnessed the invention of the airplane.
The sun was setting as I left Dayton behind, and I fell asleep easily. The next thing I knew, I was in Indianapolis. This was my second encounter with said city, and I actually remember my first time to see it. These two experiences were almost exactly fourteen years apart. At the age of six, I found Indianapolis monotonous and scary. But this time I thought it quite impressive. In the downtown, there seemed to be beautiful Victorian and Neoclassical buildings on every block. The whole place seemed to have a magical aura. Maybe that was because it had recently stopped raining, so everything sparkled in the city lights. Or maybe my mind wasn't quite working correctly yet, since I had just awoken.
It was around midnight when my bus pulled into the Greyhound terminal in Indianapolis. I was intrigued to see wooden waiting benches reminiscent of those in Los Angeles' Union Station. It was the first bit of character I'd seen in any Greyhound terminal encountered so far.
I missed the rest of Indiana and almost all of Illinois. Only at stops did I awake and hear the bus driver describe apocryphal origins of place names. It might have been amusing in the daytime, but in the dead hours of night I was not particularly entertained. At least it was evidence of a sense of humor on the part of a Greyhound driver, something I had not noticed before.
Small searchlights swept slowly over the aluminum exterior of the Gateway Arch as I crossed the Mississippi and returned to the West. The aluminum skin looked rough in the searchlights, not smooth as I had expected. I couldn't help but think about inverted catenaries and a hyperbolic trigonometry problem I worked freshman year to distract myself from assigned Calculus problems.
The Greyhound terminal in St. Louis was a glorious suprise. The walls (above standard human reach) and the ceiling were decked out in carved plaster baroque motifs. Wow! I would have enjoyed it more had I not been worried about getting on my next bus. Having come all of the way from New York City, it was time to transfer to the St. Louis-Oklahoma City bus. Hours later (I really don't remember how many), I squeezed onto the packed bus and quickly fell asleep. I must have slept solidly for at least two hours because it was light next time I opened my eyes.
I was in the home stretch now. Missouri didn't seem to have much in the way of cities or interesting landscape, and before long I passed into Oklahoma City. Tulsa was probably the one city I wasn't particularly excited to see, because I had been there recently and seen most of what it had to offer. It was sunny when I visited in December, but now it was cloudy. I was ready to get back home.
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| An unfinished high-rise in Tulsa. |
Oklahoma City appeared without any fanfare, and I excitedly dragged myself off the bus and claimed my backpack. A short way down I-35, then home at last. Parts of three days on a bus left me filthy. This wasn't the naturalistic filthiness of a camping trip, which feels good even though it's gross. No, this was the filth of the civilized world, the same filth of trampled gum and spilled coffee and cigarette butts.
Redressing after my much-needed shower, I looked around my bathroom, and then my room, and realized that I had last been here in what seemed like a different life. In a way, I was right. A year's worth of experiences had been packed into four weeks. I had seen much, written copiously, and pondered incessantly. Of my two objectives, to find myself and to find my country, I achieved both.
To the disappointment of most everyone besides me, I find myself utterly incapable of describing what I found. I think it is more a feeling than anything factual I can recite. I was looking for a reason to love my country, like I love Austria and Germany, and I have found more reasons than I could have imagined. Heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been enough, but I found more. The monumental scale of the Mall. The Smithsonian's gloriously free admission for all museums. New York's breathtaking skyscrapers along 50th or Wall Streets. Walden Pond. And I can't ignore the gleaming cities of Memphis, Nashville, Harrisburg, and Indianapolis, or the rolling green Alleghenies.
If I start to sound like Irving Berlin, I apologize. I have discovered things I never knew I could find. That, I think, is no small accomplishment.
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| Clouds over Oklahoma City. |
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Grand Tour |
next: Appendices |
willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org