Must really like the bus

Butte, Montana

The next Greyhound driver is missing in action
And I’m stuck in the Butte station again
Inside you can buy fruit salad for 2.99 or watch television
Outside there is real grass
Where last time I saw loose dogs play tug-o-war with someone’s lost Mountain Dew
Today I sit at the gray picnic tables
Provided as if any of the people I have seen from Pittsburgh to Great Falls
Travel with a full picnic basket and the all the time to settle down in Butte

At the table are mostly Montanans who haven’t met before
A gray-haired, plump woman in pink seems pleased with herself
She tells stories of her hometown somewhere North
That she knows we’re so eager to hear
And the man beside her, a stranger, listens with such a look
That I want to take his photo, or have the hands to capture him in blue pen or black pencil
He is lovely and gray, like he’s worked hard all his life but kept his temper
He has a Styrofoam cup of coffee, that should taste good but certainly doesn’t
A cigarette is either in his left hand, or I’ve put it there afterwards
He’s handsome like a different Lee Harvey Oswald or my dead Grandfather
Who gave three quarters of his life for the pipes of Anaconda Copper
And this man at my table
Could have made pancakes on a Sunday morning for my mother
Could have told my Aunt Julie, as the oldest girl, that he was so sorry
He just couldn’t say those things, you know he loved her, though
Of course he loved her

But this man is less complicated than my mother half-orphaned at 12
He is just the momentary falling in love with a kind face
With listening to a well-meaning, tactless stranger
With two days of bus stations, their people inside
With the moment the sky opens up, somewhere past Wisconsin
The way it peels away the sides and tops and just blossoms
And with my Greyhound bus, God bless the late driver
Who is putting one more moment between home and me

More Not Friends poems

(This is what I look like on a greyhound bus.)

Poems written for my this semester's poetry class. Obviously based on the afore-written-about people, but it was an interesting and weirdly difficult experience to make up some details.


Smoking in Helena

The bus driver in blue, chews his sweet-burning pipe,
Paces under the mute station lights,
His face is long-gone handsome and furrowed with impatience,
He wants to make it to Great Falls before midnight turns too far into tomorrow
Maybe his wife is waiting, maybe just a mealy Motel-Six --
Still, you can’t leave pretty girls with freckles and third babies on the way
In a closed up capital city,
So we’ll all smoke together for a while.

The bus driver makes mean jokes that are funny, too
While Charity, Marissa and I sit on cold black benches
Our hands brush as Charity passes white wisps of cigarettes,
We try not to drop them or burn each other’s fingers,
Trading DNA with strangers, with pregnant Marissa, Charity
Who used to love meth, now with her big brown folder of children’s drawings,
Community saved her life, she tell us as we watch the dark.
And we wait for maybe an hour, suspended like this,
In all atmospheric intimacy, swapping spit, passing poison
We release white puffs onto the black,
There’s nobody else here to breath it in.

The bus driver says we’ve got to go,
We say we’re sorry to leave her like this,
We hope for car lights to take her home,
Marissa says it’s alright, and she holds her cigarette close,
Green sweater taut over her stomach,
Cheap red luggage clustered round her delicate little shoes.

---

Moonshine country

I‘ve never tasted moonshine,
But I’ve curled up on a Greyhound bus, cutting though the Montana dark,
A slight hell-raiser from Great Falls
Named Asia in the seat behind,
Kicked out and heading East to find a boy
Watched out for the moment by a thick, tattooed man called
Spider, heading down South to see his mama
-- And Asia was talking about moonshine,
How she sat a table once drinking glass after glass feeling fine
Then she stood up and fell cold on her face
Then this boy took her home and they spent four days together,
That’s all it took, and she’s New Hampshire-bound, leaving the West
And I hope it’s true love, because I like a bad idea to turn into the meant to be
But I just don’t know if Asia’s country song would end that way or not.

--

(If I'm ever gonna write good poetry again, I may need to take another bus trip to Montana. And this time I will take more photos! I almost entirely dropped the ball on that -- maybe I was sleeping too much?)

Charity and Marissa

A bus window sunset somewhere in the non-specific West. At least it's the right journey...

More Montana 2008 bus trip. On the way to Great Falls. Once again, so many of the details I wish I still had were lost.

Sometime late at night, we stopped in Helena. At a closed down for the night bus station, in the most deserted capital city you could ever imagine, our whole bus was waiting for Marissa's relatives to show up. Marissa was blonde, freckled, 23, and pregnant with her third child. We were waiting for her hated Aunt to come and take reluctant custody of her. Marissa was at least happy to be returning to her children, though, after a few days away.

While we waited, Charity, Marissa, an older woman from the endless stop in Butte, and I smoked cigarettes. The older woman smoked her own, the three younger girls and I shared Charity's handrolled, whispy white ones. There is an immediate, pleasing intimacy, or at least honest friendliness, to quick drags and passing and fumbling for the burning, flimsy paper with strangers.

The older woman told us stories, Marissa told us about her horrible Aunt. The bus driver was a strange mixture of funny and humorless. A teenage girl came up to him as he smoked his sweet-smelling pipe beside us and reported that someone was drinking on the bus. He boarded it, only to quickly return to the outside to tell us that it had just been root beer. Then he insulted the girl's intelligence cheerfully and wearily, once she was back on the bus. I don't remember the details of the insult but it was about 50-50 mean to funny.

Minutes passed, and Marissa's Aunt had still not arrived. The busdriver wasn't supposed to leave passengers alone -- especially not pretty, young, pregnant ones, but we couldn't sit there all night. I wondered why Helena didn't seem to have a single resident -- late night or not, you expect to see somebody when you're waiting for more than an hour.

We smoked and waited. I had occasional disturbed pangs that I was smoking with a pregnant girl, but if I hadn't told my first busbuddy, Laura, to leave her abusive boyfriend (I too weakly and vaguely suggested when we parted that "if it doesn't work out, you can do something else!" after wishing her luck) I wasn't going to be nosy just about smoking.

Charity and Marissa had been bus acquaintances for the last few hours --they were already talking like old friends. Charity was coming from somewhere in Northen Montana. She had been babysitting a friend's child for a few days. Now she was eager to get back to her boyfriend in Great Falls -- she borrowed my cell phone twice to text him, because our bus was late and her phone was misbehaving. Charity was beautiful, younger than I, and had had a wild past, like all my bus girls. She was part Native American and she used to do drugs. She admitted this easily, like people usually do on buses, but I still felt strange listening to her talk about a certain rehab center to a wonderfully "yes ma'am, no ma'am" sort of a marine who had had some trouble with that himself. His present buddy had also gotten a DUI and done rehab and boot camp. Thanks to her substance troubles, Charity had done community service at a children's museum, did that explain the massive folder she carried and kept careful eye on? I thought I saw colors and paper peaking out that suggested a childish hand.

By the strange nothingness of the locked-tight bus station, we sat and sat. The driver, gray haired and looking part Native-American and long-gone handsome, still smoked his wonderful pipe. He worried more and more about making it to Great Falls in time, but kept saying he wasn't supposed to leave passengers alone. I wondered why the hell they had decided to close the bus station then. Finally, Marissa convinced the driver it was time for us to go. I can see her still pretty and far too young, dressed in a green sweater, luggage around her feet, sitting on the park bench smoking, stomach sticking out far and full. We all waved and wished her luck, saying we were sorry we had to leave her that way.

I wondered if either of the girls, the busdriver, or the mostly forgotten old woman had seen our hour like I -- sitting on our benches in an empty capital, filling our lungs with poison in the dark, not a loved one or familiar face in sight, feeling like you could wait all night and you wouldn't mind.

Asia

Butte, Montana bus station.

Last August I bought a bus ticket for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Great Falls, Montana at 9:30 pm -- the bus left at midnight. People hate Greyhound buses, but I spent the next two, dirty, strange days having the time of my life. It was a little dull until I got to Wisconsin and beyond the Midwest, but after that it was West. Quite possibly all I need in life is a dark highway, a bus, and the Carter Family and Old Crow Medicine Show in my ears. Another perk of traveling by bus is the people. You spend huge chunks of time with certain people, and it's so much more than sitting next to someone on an airplane. You get comfortable with them being around, their faces seem familiar, and sometimes you talk. I met a lot of girls about my age on that trip, all with rather down and out tales to tell. I'll start near the end though, because right now I feel like writing about Asia.


I first saw Asia in the Great Falls bus station at seven in the morning. She was crying, and I immediately needed to know her story. I was on my way home after six short days in my favorite place on earth, here was someone else who maybe didn't want to leave. She was fooling with her bags and saying goodbye to a little girl who I first imagined to be her child (just the daughter of a friend, it turned out.) Aunt Molly, Tobin, Chloe and I watched the this skinny, pierced, pretty brunette plead with the man behind the desk. Sorry, your luggage is over sized, you have to pay the fees. Asia cried more, saying she wouldn't have any food if she paid, that was her food money, didn't he get it? She could hardly starve for three days. Before I could formulate any sort of response to this awful little scene, Molly was handing a twenty dollar pill to the girl. Asia was shocked and grateful, she hugged my Aunt, and the cousins and I exchanged quiet looks of pride in our relative.

Our bus was ready to go, I loaded my big back underneath, hugged my relatives a sad goodbye, and struggled under the weight of my overstuffed backpack up the stairs, and to a seat. I chose one beside the girl, who was crying again. As we waited to leave Great Falls, I fought a quiet battle with my shyness. I hate to bother upset people, thereby drawing attention to their tears (something I don't like when I am in the unfortunate position of crying in public), but I wanted to talk. My bag of tiny chocolate bars seemed an icebreaker, so I offered and the girl took some happily. She asked if the woman who had given her the money was my mother, I said my Aunt, and Asia complimented my choice in Aunts.

I was with her for the next many hours, and during this time, Asia turned my first impressions upside down. Like so many other girls I had met on buses, she was a wild child. Born and raised in Great Falls, she drank and partied hard, beat up the 15 year old skank who had taken her man, and raised hell in what sounded like the ultimate small (ish) town fashion. She was also only 18. Her little sister had ratted to their parents about Asia's doings, and now she was booted. So, she was packing her life into a few oversized bags and moving to New Hampshire, where a boy she hoped might be special lived. She had met the boy during his months ago trip to Great Falls -- Yes, yes, Asia was moving across the country to live with a boy she had spent less than a week with. It would make a kick-ass song, but seemed like a pretty bad plan in real life. Yet, I was impressed. Bold, stupid leaps like that just tickle me. I wish I were more like that.

She talked more than I did, and I can't remember everything she said. A lot about her life, a little about mine. I do know that once I was on a Greyhound bus, gliding through the Montana dark, talking to a girl named Asia and a man named Spider about moonshine. I had yet to partake (still haven't), but Asia and Spider were fans. She told a tale about drinking moonshine at a table at some party. She felt fine, she felt fine, then she tried to stand up and just fell flat on her face.

Asia was not the tearful grownup woman, leaving her home to seek her fortune that I thought at first look. She was a silly, wild little girl in many ways. Nobody I would want to be best friends with, a little self-absorbed, but she was a hell of a companion all through the night as we rode to Billings. Not shy in the least, she asked me questions that I can't remember now, and the conversation rolled smoothly for hours.

Spider and Asia left me in Billings, they had a 3 AM bus and I had to clutch my backpack and curl up to sleep until about 8. I actually saw Asia again in Columbus, more than a day later. She told me about her adventures since then and saying goodbye to Spider, who was heading somewhere more Southernly (he was one of two males who had found her interesting in her two days of travel. New Hampshire boy might want to worry a bit, I thought.) I was pleased to see her in Ohio, it was one of those false feelings of friendship, like we had made plans to meet. We stuck together for a few hours, during which Asia acousted a scruffy-looking boy who was traveling all over the USA by bus. My "friend" was absurdly, rudely, hilariously, forward and may have actually asked if he was gay. The boy was more amused than anything else, and I wish I could remember some of the interesting things he said.

I wished Asia the best of luck, and was too shy to ask if I could take her picture. I soundly regret that now. She was an awful, wild little thing, but she made her mark on me, if only for the moonshine talk in the middle of Montana. I even looked for her on myspace (we discussed friending each other), assuming that Asia must not be a common name, but I never found her. Like the rest of my foolish, messed up Greyhound girls, I hope everything worked out for her in her new life. Hell, maybe New Hampshire boy was the one, but I don't know if the country song would end that way or not.

Montana Wheat

I feel like I should rewrite this specifically for the blog, but in the meantime, Matt the Farmer is a definite Not Friend. I met him on a trip to Montana with my parents in Summer '07.

2/20/08
We sit high above the endless wheat and Matt wants to know why I think it’s so strange that he’s only 22.

The combine we ride in is a handsome, intimidating machine. It seems to move light and easy, but the long line of teeth that separate and pick up the good parts of the wheat suggest a monster I don’t want to mess with. It might belong to any old farm you pass by, but in the inside cabin where Mom and I squeeze together beside Matt, there is AC and a computer that tells him about bushels and acres.

I don’t know how big this field is, but the road that brought us here is a distant strip. We are lost in wheat and I am delighted. The moment my parents and I stepped out of the farmer’s truck, and found ourselves sweltering under miles of no shade, I felt deliciously out of place. There is nothing more American than farmers but that doesn’t mean the workings of them are anything familiar to me.

Dad rides with the old man, asking questions about how this operation works. The old man looks exactly like an ancient farmer should, stout, strong and white-haired -- even dressed in overalls.

Matt, who might be good-looking somewhere under his ball-cap and sunglasses isn’t quite laconic, but fittingly is no chatterbox. Dependable Mom starts him off with questions about working here at Montana Wheat, and eventually we move to true conversation. There’s something about this man’s North-Western accent that is desperately charming. He seems to enjoy my attempts at witty remark, and I realize with satisfaction that he is one of those people whose laughter is rewarding to cause. He seems charmingly surprised by some of the things I say – so usual that I can’t remember what it was now, but I am glad the novelty here is mutual

I am going to be in love with him for the next few days, like I was with the friendly redheaded girl in the century-old soda-shop in Lewistown. These are people I will never see again and I wish there was something to make us smitten with one another, or at least friends. But our interactions are nothing more than passing interest, not based on any deep connection.

I still halfway regret being here with my parents, squished childishly close to my mother. I wish I was some lone traveler who met Matt in a more spontaneous fashion than my dad’s journalistic curiosity about the wheat business. I wish I was more beautiful and much tougher – like the West.

Everything sounds so easy as Matt controls this monstrous, graceful machine hungrily gathering wheat. He works 15 hours a day at the peak of harvest season. He graduated from college in something scientific and fit for farming. And then there’s his land a few miles from here. He has his own thousand acres for his own crops. The promise of way out West says that a man has to own land. Matt thinks nothing of it, and is politely amused by my incredulousness at his youth.

I’m here with my parents, three days drive from the East. We spend our evenings exhausted from staying indoors, zoned out in front of movies. I’ve come on this family vacation and I am two years younger than Matt. It hurts me to sit in this wheat field and feel so firmly tied to loving apron strings. Because a decade ago, I assumed I would be brilliant, bold, and brave. The moment I turned 18, I would kiss my attachments goodbye, and head in some new direction towards my own life.