March 2007
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From the comfort of his sleeper seat, our correspondent remembers the first time he went to New York and travelled to California on a Greyhound bus
Nowadays, when I travel for work, I tend to sit in the front of the plane. My parsimonious employers make most BBC people travel at the back, but I’m allowed some latitude.
It’s not just my age and inflated title; I injured my knee during the 1999 Kosovo campaign and have an awkward chunk of American shrapnel in my hip from the Iraqi invasion. That makes me a mutilé de guerre, like the ones you should give up your seat for on the Paris Metro.
So I flew to New York in conditions of some comfort and was driven by limousine to my pleasant hotel. But it’s important to remember real life. I have come here to the Port Authority bus terminal in New York, to see the place where, 43 years ago, I started one of the most memorable journeys of my life.
I was a hard-up student of 19, planning to spend Christmas with my new American girlfriend in southern California. And, because money counted, I was going to travel by Greyhound bus. It was an emotional time. President Kennedy had just been assassinated. The flags were at half-mast, and people were still wearing black ties or scarves.
The terminal looks very different today, but the same air of seediness hangs over everything. The glassed-in booths where I spent the night of Thursday 19 December 1963 have all disappeared.
My bus was due to leave at 8am the next morning, but I had no money for a hotel room or anything more than a coffee and the cheapest hamburger on the menu. So I hung around the Port Authority terminal, sleeping in the telephone booths for half an hour at a time until the patrolling cops winkled me out with their nightsticks. But that night, fumbling in the returned-coin slots of the phones, I found a total of 21 cents – enough for breakfast, given that a McDonald’s burger cost 17 cents.
My journey to San Diego by Greyhound bus took 58 hours of nonstop travelling. It was exhausting, yet deeply exhilarating.
There were no reserved seats, no onboard toilets and of course I had no Walkman or iPod to keep me occupied. You slept, thought, talked or read.
Since I was studying English, I had plenty of books with me; and, to this day, when I reread George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss, my mental pictures are not those of the English Lincolnshire countryside but the dreary industrial landscape outside Pittsburgh and the immense, featureless plains of Ohio and Indiana; and, when I read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady I think of the snowy mountain passes of Colorado, not 19th-century drawing rooms.
With hindsight, what a journey it was. On the first afternoon, a strange old man in smelly clothes played a mouth organ, and people clapped and sang.
In Pennsylvania, a figure who seemed to come from the distant past sat beside me wearing an odd hat and an odder jacket, which looked even more out of place than my tweed one, talking to the man in the seat in front of him in Low German. I had never heard of the Amish people in those days.
We halted for minutes at a time at places like the one in the Marilyn Monroe film Bus Stop. I learned the mysteries of American counter food, which I still like much better than the more elaborate things you get at expensive New York restaurants.
As I walked into a rest-stop in Ohio, a black guy who towered over my 6ft 2in rested his arm on my shoulder, and asked me if I was one of those long-haired Beatles they’d been hearing about.
A girl cried down my lapel for an entire stage of the journey in Illinois about the death of John F Kennedy. Later, two others in the seats behind me kept asking me questions so they could hear my accent.
The bus was usually full of cigarette smoke. The drivers, a strange and idiosyncratic group, were treated as if they were royalty by the waitresses at the rest-stops. When I tried to get into conversation with one during the night in Arizona he pointed silently at the notice that warned passengers not to distract him.
On two occasions some passengers who saw that I was hard-up and hungry shared their sandwiches with me, and a quiet and thoughtful steelworker from, I think, Detroit, bought me an entire meal. He was on his way to St Louis to meet a girl whom he had promised to marry, but he seemed to be having second thoughts about her.
This was a different America from the one I had seen on the movie screen: it was poorer, more basic and more frank.
I liked it a great deal, even though there were plenty of strange characters looking like Anthony Perkins in Psycho whom I tried to avoid sitting next to. You could tell which state you were in by the accents of the people around you, and the regional styles of cooking at the rest-stops.
And then we left winter behind, and my tweed jacket became even more absurd and intolerably hot, and the Joshua trees were succeeded by palm trees and scarlet and pink flowers and brilliant white buildings, and the menus at the rest-stops offered things in Spanish.
“San Diego, San Diego, this is as far as we go,” the driver sang out in rhyme. I climbed stiffly off the bus into the brilliant sunlight, and a wholly new chapter of my life began.
Tomorrow I will enjoy flying in Club class to the West Coast. But my heart will be 30,000 ft below, in a cramped, slow, romantic silver bus.
John Simpson is the BBC world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected flights
