Da Bus -- part 3

The girl across the aisle from me -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/toadaway/386733754/ -- the one with the piercings and the bright yellow snap-up pants, was making cellphone calls, too. Her purse had been stolen somewhere back down the line, but she still had her phone. "I'm so pissed at mom. (pause) She was drunk again." But she was cool. She was almost to her destination, Sioux Falls. I'm not sure where she had come from, but she was wearing a Dillon, MT, sweatshirt that declared, "Everyone in this town is high -- 5,280 feet."

Seven hours down the road, to the sound of the worn-out wipers attempting to remove the freezing rain, we arrived in Sioux Falls. The Sioux Falls bus depot actually has four computer stations, with a neon sign over them proclaiming, "Internet Cafe." Except there is not really a cafe -- only an assortment of chips and microwavable lunches to be purchased from a woman at a card table set up in the middle of the room.

She has worked there for four years, she says, and that a snowstorm forced her to spend a night there once, except that she spent the night outside in the cold because she felt safer there. The old guy with the red-dyed hair is giving her a hard time: "I'm legally blind so just count it out for me. I gave you a 50 dollar bill." So she puts the bills and coins in his hand one at a time. "There," he concludes, "we both learned something. You just learned to make change."

Although "fuck" is part of the working vocabulary of the gaunt young woman selling tickets, this is a high-tech bus depot. Arrivals and departures flash on LCD screens, and the lobby TV is set to the soccer channel, which no one is watching.

Partly because the "vow of poverty" woman, the gray-haired lady with the severe underbite, is crying. "I'm hopeless," she whimpers as she shuffles across the waiting room. The station manager is assisting her, and patting her on the shoulder, but she shuffles off again, wipes tears. I think at first that she has left some valuable item back at her point of origin, but when I offer assistance I learn that she's come to Sioux Falls with a one-way ticket, to relocate for some reason. "54 years old and I have to come here where I have no place to live, and I know nobody. This shouldn't be happening," she says. But the nice station manager has called and found a place for her to go, and is going to give her a ride. Somebody tells her there are worse places to end up. And I would have taken her to be 70.

By now the two kids are out of control, running and twirling and nearly knocking people down. The young mother with the missing front tooth is ordering them to stop, with no effect. They still have 13 hours to go before she reunites where her boyfriend in detox, and I assure her that they will run out of energy sooner or later. She looks at me blankly.

A couple of guys, one in his 30s and one in his 40s, I would guess, have struck up a conversation. Bus people talk to each other much more readily than airplane people. The younger man is wearing a Carhardt jacket and a baseball cap, and he says affably that he started out in Jackson at 6 AM and has only made it this far. The bus ride isn't so bad, it's waiting for hours in the depot. He gestures to his small bag and says with a grin, "This is all the luggage I have. All I need is in there. All I've got." He's bought a ticket as far south as he can afford, to start over. "I hope this is the last time," he says.

The other guy is going to bus all the way to Los Angeles, and then north from there. "Central coast," he says. "Pismo Beach. I lived there for 20 years."

By the ticket counter, I see a skinny, nervous woman with dirty blonde hair squatting down, and I'm surprised when I walk past her to see that she's ancient -- one of those shriveled up old women of indeterminate age. I don't realize it then, of course, but I'm going to hear her life story between Sioux Falls and Omaha.

(to be continued)