Sooey Says

I reconnected with bus people recently when my beau and I attempted a return trip from Ottawa to Pembroke and back again to Ottawa. I used to be a bus person, myself, but once you've owned a house and car, even if you give up both, you're never really a bus person again. You're only ever a poseur, as I realized when the return bus to Ottawa failed to arrive in the laundromat parking lot where we were waiting with our bus people comrades-in-resignation - and my beau phoned his parents to come and pick us up and drive us home to Ottawa in his mom's Le Baron four-door convertible.

Boy, did I ever feel like a desserter on the front line. We'd formed a real bond with our little group of bus people, regulars on the Ottawa-Pembroke circuit, sharing our bus stories and commiserating about the sorry state of private inter-city bus service in this Trans-Canada'ed country of ours. So it was a little like "smell yuz later, suckers!" when we sheepishly backed away from our new bus friends as if we weren't headed over to the gleaming white convertible with my beau's mom hanging out the window, "pile in - I've brought a pumpkin pie for the trip!"

It all started out fine. I'd even read 100 pages of "The Book of Negroes" for my book club by the time we reached Pembroke on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, which I'd been able to do because we couldn't sit together on account of there were only single seats left by the time we got on the bus - in spite of our very early arrival to the bus station. I had a sense of foreboding about that, too, because there were people left behind who couldn't get on the bus at all and I wondered how Greyhound planned to address that issue. Or IF it planned to address that issue. Because it didn't appear at all to me, as we pulled out of the station, that it had any such plans at all.

Yet, if I'd known about the no-return trip in spite of pre-payment Greyhound treatment awaiting us on Thanksgiving Monday, I'd have been grateful to be one of those lucky bastards stranded in Ottawa, giving the departing bus the finger and resignedly heading back inside to wait. For what I don't know. The next day's bus to Pembroke, perhaps?

Anyway, Thanksgiving came and went with my beau's parents and Monday afternoon his mom drove us to the laudromat to wait for the bus. That's right. The laundromat. It's where one catches the Greyhound out of Pembroke. We waited in the car, joking about the crowd gathering for the bus - who was the most likely to behead someone, who was most likely to be the beheadee, the usual bus humour circa 2008. After a couple of hours of waiting, a bus showed up, my boyfriend's mom headed home and we joined the group of bus people lining up to get out of Pembroke. Then we noticed the bus was full of people and nobody was getting off - except the bus driver, who ignored us completely, went into the laundromat to use the facilities, walked by us again without making eye contact, got back on the bus, and drove away. With the bus!

"WTF?!" the little bubble over my head shrieked. I felt like the time I was making my way home from school on my crutches (I had a broken leg), the only humanoid in sight, and my mom drove by me without noticing my desperately waving crutch attempting to flag her down - but the other bus people, the real bus people, just rolled their eyes. "Happens all the time", said the potential beheader in the plaid shorts and Metallica tee-shirt. "They treat us like dirt, don't give us any information, just drive off like we're not even human", said the potential beheadee in what looked to be a candy striper outfit, although she was well into her fifties and had what appeared to be a months worth of luggage with her - including an ancient mother who just nodded "yes" to everything she said and kept both hands firmly on her purse.

"Are they sending another bus?" I asked, incredulous. "Oh, they'll say they are. Go into the laundromat and every twenty minutes or so the lady behind the counter will say they're sending another bus from Petawawa. But the buses come from North Bay so she's full of you-know-what", said a student looking type who turned out to work for a tech company in Ottawa and who was in his thirties.

"Shit?" smirked the beheader, wiping off his pop bottle glasses on his tee-shirt. He was quite sane as it turned out, just a bit of a fashion disaster, with a very matter-of-fact attitude towards the lot of bus people in this country, one of those hapless fellows who takes bad luck with a knowing shake of the head followed by a far off look-see for the good times down the road that are no doubt going to pass him by soon, too. Maybe even splatter him with a bit of mud as they head off in search of the horseshoe-up-the-ass guys who get all the luck and don't have a weight problem.

"But we've pre-paid, we have return tickets. Surely they would have known in North Bay that they'd need another bus for passengers getting on between North Bay and Ottawa." I have trouble with random corporate injustice. It makes me so crazy I vote NDP every chance I get - which is often these days, as it turns out.

"Oh, they know. They just don't care. It's a monopoly, Greyhound sucks, the drivers hate their jobs. There might be another bus, but I've waited for buses that never came, not even just to drive by leaving you running after them screaming at the top of your lungs to STOP - LET ME ON - I'LL STAND. They just don't show up." The beheader sat down on his flowered suitcase.

And then I remembered another time I'd been stranded in Pembroke. It was just after Greyhound closed the Pembroke bus station and opened up the laundromat parking lot for bus people to wait in for buses that would never come. It was winter, too, and we were just lucky that our ride had waited long enough to take us back home after two hours of waiting. I spent the night sleeping in (on?) an easy chair, while my beau luxurated on the loveseat, our beds having been bequeathed to another set of guests.

Meanwhile, I was watching a young woman who had a three-year-old with her, thinking back to the time I took three pre-teens on the bus to Toronto and my middle one had seen a truck load of little pigs go by on their way to market. She looked at me, with that look of knowing, two big tears rolling down her cheeks. "They don't know" was the best I could do, but it wouldn't have mattered what I said. She knew.

Eventually, the taxi that had taken the techie to the laundromat parking lot hours earlier showed up with passengers for the next bus. The driver make incredulous gestures that his earlier fare was still waiting and the discussion turned to the possibility of pooling our resources to take a taxi from Pembroke to Ottawa. Seriously. I mean, bus people aren't the type of people who can just not show up for work - regardless of whose fault it is (Greyhound's). They don't have credit cards to rent cars with. They depend on an affordable and reliable inter-city bus service to get them back home again after brief holiday visits to friends and families. Their next best option was to share a taxi - and for $200 split four ways, it was looking a helluva lot more attractive than spending the night in a laundromat parking lot in Pembroke.

That was when my beau's mom showed up and we turned back into the car people we really are even though we don't own a car.

Still, I'm not so fair weather a bus friend that I won't say this to every Tom, Dick and Harry I meet now so maybe you'll want to cross the street when you see me coming: Canadians need a National Bus Line.