Waiting at the Greyhound station, again

I was waiting in line at the Greyhound station, sweating through the summer heat but still unflagging in my excitement to hit the road and enter that strange land that lay a few scant hours drive to the south. I was heading to Calgary—for the first time in my life, in fact—in order to attend the Calgary Folk Music Festival. It promised to be a delightful weekend, filled with wonderful music, but one thing stood in my way—Greyhound itself.

Need it even be said? The wait was excruciating. Behind me, a woman from Quebec was talking in fractured English to two other passengers, resulting in a bizarre multi-lingual parody of an Abbott and Costello routine as they tried to decipher whether or not she lived east or west of Montreal. At first I thought they simply did not grasp the distinction between “est” and “ouest,” but as the wait dragged on it seemed more likely they were just stretching out the pointless conversation in order to pass the time.

The boredom was broken by a crash coming from somewhere behind us. An angry man cursed loudly as he stormed out of the station. He had kicked over a magazine rack for some unknown reason, and two security guards followed him into the street.

The initial confrontation took place right outside the doors of the Greyhound station, but we—the bored passengers standing in line and drinking up this excitement like a parched man discovering a bottle of water in desert—couldn’t hear a word that was said, despite voices obviously being raised. Still, we could see that the angry man had puffed up his chest in the international sign of “You wanna go, huh?” For their part, the guards were not about to be scared off, and one pointed up at what was presumably a security camera, daring the man to make a move.

The angry man—a fairly thick young dude in a printed t-shirt (which I believe is the international sign for “I’m a douchebag and drive a big truck”)—started to walk away, but the guards followed, apparently goading him to pick a fight. A block of pay phones and arcade machines blocked our view from inside the station, but when they reappeared on the other side of the obstruction, one of the security guards had the man in a headlock and the duo was grappling in the street.

At this point the security guard who had been rifling through our carry-on luggage for knives and nuclear warheads bolted outside to help his colleague, leaving our already late bus to wait a little longer. I believe this is what is known as a “routine delay” at the downtown Edmonton Greyhound station.

A customer service agent not interested in street wrestling finished searching our bags and sniffing our beverage bottles for booze (“Do you want to smell my water?” I offered helpfully, but she declined for some reason). Tensions were starting to build. Most of us had been in line for almost an hour, and the mood was starting to simmer with the suppressed rage of boredom. The bus driver was threatening to refuse to allow a large family on the bus because their baby was crying. He relented, but only after making it clear that he was only tolerating their presence on the bus out of the generosity of his heart, and not because they had paid for a ticket or anything like that. An old woman was caught smuggling nail clippers and a book of matches onto the bus and had to put them in her luggage going underneath the bus. Disaster narrowly averted again. Can you imagine those headlines? “Grandmother of five beheads bus passenger, sets fire to corpse.” Sorry, psycho. You’ll just have to nap or watch “Bedazzled” instead.

(Actually, scratch that last bit. Greyhound stopped playing movies on their buses a while back, presumably for fear of overstimulating their numbed clientele. After the combination of boredom and discomfort that is the bus station experience, the company expects its ridership to sit in a respectfully catatonic state. Or perhaps Greyhound was too cash-strapped to afford a membership at Blockbuster any longer.)

All that remained was to board the bus and head out on my adventure into the strange world (which I was starting to think could not be any stranger than this bus station). More trouble was in the air, however. The driver called everyone going to Red Deer to board, as they were running out of space and couldn’t fit everyone in the line. I was left five people back in line, eyeing the others as if we were passengers on the Titanic staring at the last life raft and contemplating whether to draw straws or just push your way through.

The driver came back after boarding the Red Deer crowd and said there was room for one more. And with that said, the person at the front of the line jumped into the life raft, beat back our flailing hands with an oar, and said goodbye suckers, leaving us to swim with the icebergs.

This was really the Greyhound experience at its purest—the always present sense of mild chaos, of anger and discomfort restrained by a bureaucratic system so expertly devised to demean and dehumanize that even the Soviets would have been jealous. How dare we defile Greyhound’s fine buses with our foul, stinking humanity! We should be grateful they even let us in the station. I made the mistake of asking if I could get a refund, which elicited only condescension from the customer service agent who pointed to the words “non-refundable” on my ticket and then carefully explained with a weary sigh that this is what the ticket says, as if I couldn’t read.

I was tempted to point out the part of the ticket that says “July 24, 2009, 1:30 to Calgary,” and to explain how I understand that the tickets say non-refundable, but if Greyhound can't hold up their end of the bargain (i.e., allowing me to board a bus at the agreed upon date and time), then surely the obligation lies with them…ah, but I stopped myself. Explaining the concept of customer service to a customer service agent would surely only irritate her, just as her assumption that I’m a sub-literate goon irritated me as a professional proofreader. This is a road that ends with me in a headlock in the middle of the street, while the drunks in the parking lot across the way cheer us on and place bets with bottle caps. Thanks, but no thanks.

Instead, I called a coworker who was going to Calgary later that day and arranged to hitch a ride (thanks Lilly!), thus sparing me the prolonged agony of the Greyhound experience. And so I left behind me the bus station and the dark future it promised. No street fights, no searches, no penny-ante dictators lording their meagre authority over the hapless, helpless, and hopeless fools who have the gall to give them money in exchange for a service—I would just have to settle for comfort and convenience instead. C'est la vie.

Waiting at the Greyhound station

In the past, Greyhound stations were a mess come boarding time. People clustered around the admitting entrances forming lines within lines, a maze of dazed and irritable travelers. Everyone would wait in the seats along the edge of the station until enough people had formed a line at the admitting booth—usually after five or six people had stood up and staked out their position with a phalanx of luggage, the rest of the passengers would flood in, leading to a crushed, deformed line.

Even worse, the lines for the other bus routes would start to blend with your own, making such a mess of things that you would wonder if you were actually boarding the right bus. The secret terror of this moment was not the chaos or the crowds, but the dreadful possibility that you might find yourself stuck somewhere in a town so little known that even the residents don’t know where it is (perhaps they too boarded the wrong bus).

Now, as a result of heightened security measures, we have to form lines. The station security officers scan us for metal and search our carry-on luggage for shampoo, and in order to do this, we must be neatly ordered in rows. The advantage of this new method—aside from staving off the boarding-time panic attacks that I had come to believe were just a natural part of the system—is that instead of nervously watching for people butting in line and making sure I’m not accidentally going to Manitoba, I can actually take in the varied and strange characters that so vitally enrich the Greyhound experience. The following is an example of one such notable person encountered during my last trip:

A man and his young son pull up to the back of a line running parallel to my own, just a couple of feet away from myself. The boy seems to be four or five, the man probably no older than his early 30s. Trying to kill some time and ease his son’s restlessness, the father asks the boy, “Want to dance?” The son nods and so the father pulls out his cell phone, which plays the unmistakable opening chords of AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” The boy stomps along to the music and we all laugh at this four-year-old thrashing along to the song. He begins stomping on father’s feet and the man chastises him, saying, “Hey, don’t dirty daddy’s shoes—I cleaned them for baba, okay?” After the song stops (only the opening portion plays), the man puts his phone away and sighs wistfully, “They just don’t make them like this anymore.”

Another man gets into line behind them and drops his three bags on the floor. He looks at the father’s luggage and realizes that he has forgotten his own tags. “Where do you get those?” he asks, and the father points to the ticket counter, where a long line of fidgeting passengers waits, immobile and anxious. The man picks up his luggage, sighs and trudges off to stand in another line. “I hear you,” the father says as the man walks away, not even listening. “Next time, I’ll pack everything into one bag, right, Jake?” His son looks blankly at him.

“Next time?” he corrects himself. “There won’t be a next time. Never again.” The man with the luggage is long since out of earshot, but the father continues speaking, either to no one or everyone. “Man, losing your license sucks. It’s almost as bad as getting your balls chopped off. No—worse.”

Another man chimes in with a supportive “yeah,” which encourages the father to continue. “One time, one time—and you lose your license. I had two beers, and then as we’re leaving my buddy leaves behind a full beer on the table. I’m like, ‘That’s four bucks! Are you crazy?’ So I down it, and of course there’s a check stop right outside. Two minutes after I leave, and I’m just over the limit. Just barely.”

He shakes his head ruefully as a new passenger comes to stand behind him in the line. This man wears a hoodie and has sideburns that end somewhere just below his jaw line. Distracted by this sight, the father looks over the man approvingly and declares, “Buddy, those are the best sideburns I’ve ever seen. How long did that take you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They used to be bigger, but I shaved them for work,” the man says diffidently, a little embarrassed but still amiable.

“Ho-lee shit,” the father drawls in amazement. The man with the sideburns laughs at this, but noiselessly, repressing the sound so that it stays in his belly and causes his whole body to shake. The father glances down at his son, who is crouching, tired from standing so long in line. “Hey, Jake,” the father says sternly. “Stand up like a man.”

The boy solemnly pulls himself up to his full height. “That’s a good boy,” the father says, putting his hand on his son's head. “Daddy loves you. Be good.”