I’d just made a comment about Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. I didn’t mean to be prophetic.
We were traveling by Greyhound from Mount Vernon, Washington, to Vancouver, British Columbia. That’s Canada, for those who don’t know, and, despite several idiotic statements by a clown living in the same house as a man who guided the United States through a real civil war, it really is a different country.
In Steinbeck’s lesser-known but superb novel, a diverse group of passengers tries to cope with the obstacles and challenges presented by a bus — their bus — breaking down far from the comforts and amenities of modern civilization. It’s a brilliant character study from a writer who knew a thing or two about human nature.
I had no reason to recall the book, other than we were on a bus with a bunch of people I presumed were very different. We weren’t diverse by today’s standards, but, like Steinbeck’s characters, I’m sure we had very different personalities, and I know we were all judging and forming strong opinions about what was happening to us and why.
Outside the station in Mount Vernon, we talked to the driver briefly before heading north into Canada. How long would it take to get there, I asked her. She wisely replied with the party-line, that we should get there by the time advertised on our tickets.
She was calm, relaxed, confident even— stretching and exercising while we were talking — and I had no reason to believe she was anything but competent a professional. In fact, the way she answered my questions made me think she’d done this a thousand times.
How do you know when someone’s properly trained? You give them information and tools to do the job, and then you cut them loose. But until they get some on-the-job experience, you know things are going to be rocky.
On this Greyhound to Canada, I honestly believe this was not the case. Nothing about her operation of the vehicle gave me any reason to think she wasn’t capable. Clearly, she was given the right tools.
But someone had failed — miserably, I might add — to provide her with all the information she needed to perform her job.
About five miles south of the border, an older woman walked to the front of the bus and asked the driver, rather loudly, why she hadn’t given us customs forms to fill out. The act seemed fussy and dramatic to me, and I criticized it to my wife. Why would she risk distracting the driver, I said. Was it that important?
I commented that the behavior seemed like that of an older person we knew, someone who had lived long enough to not care about what people thought.
“Let’s be honest,” said my wife, “that’s me in fifteen years.”
So, I was laughing. Without a care in the world. For once.
I guess I shouldn’t have been. I guess I should have been worried.
We reached the border — Peace Arch — and the driver took the far right lane. How were we to know her employer taught her how to drive a large passenger vehicle and then said, “Here, take these folks to Canada.”
We could hear her talking to a border-patrol agent in the booth. The agent asked her how many people were on the bus. “About 40, maybe 50,” said the driver. I’m not sure why it mattered, because nothing was going to prevent them from making her turn around and go to a different crossing station.
So that’s what she did. She turned the whole thing around on I-5 and went right back into the United States.
Forty-five minutes later, after finding the right station and having us fill out all the right forms and answer all the stupid questions, we were back on the road to Canada. We could see the suburbs of Vancouver and towering mountains rising up from the mainland.
But again, something was wrong. We weren’t headed toward glitzy, glassy downtown Vancouver. We were going somewhere else entirely. The driver had made a wrong turn, and now we were motoring through an area that looked more like Gary, Indiana, in the dead of winter.
What in the actual hell was going on here? We wouldn’t figure it out until later, long after the driver had pulled into a Greyhound maintenance yard, where a few workers exited the shop to see exactly what a bus looked like with passengers on it. The look on their faces. Utter confusion.
Before we even made it out of the maintenance yard, a female passenger behind us moved to the front of the bus and took over. Using her phone’s GPS, she navigated while the driver, who gladly accepted help, guided the bus back to the highway. As we approached downtown, the woman switched seats with another passenger who knew how to get to the bus station. He and the driver brought us home.
Unlike The Wayward Bus, it was an example of what people can do when they stay calm and help each other. There were so many opportunities for passengers to lose it and turn on the driver, but we didn’t. Some kind of collective moral compass or group conscience guided everyone, reminding us that it wasn’t her fault and getting mad would only make it worse.