Quest journeys by Greyhound

Holland Carter had an interesting piece in the NY Times recently, in which he reminisced about a Greyhound bus trip he took across a good portion of the U.S. in the 1960s when he was still a teenager. The story is a worthwhile read for Cotter’s descriptions of American life as viewed from the road a few decades ago.

Next I crashed with a cousin, John, a young professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smart, tense, busy with summer school, he gave me a tour of the neat, green campus, then said, ”I want to show you another part of town.” He drove me a short distance from the university to a road lined with falling-down houses, where African-Americans lived. I had never seen such poverty.

He asked to look at my Greyhound map, and he traced with his finger the route I was taking to Texas. ”Look,” he said, ”when you get to Mississippi, stay on the bus. Don’t get off. Go straight through.” Just a few days earlier three civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North, had disappeared near Meridian. The word was that they’d been murdered. This was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Bad things were happening, beatings, burnings. John was afraid the South was going to blow.

After North Carolina the trip was different because I was different, on the alert. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street — a name I knew from ”Gone With the Wind” — I saw a restaurant with a side window for serving blacks and drinking fountains labeled ”black” and ”white.” I lost my wallet there and slept overnight in the bus station and then later in a park in Montgomery, Ala. A recruiting street preacher found me there, brought me to a soup kitchen breakfast, then gave me the third degree: ”Have you found the Lord? Are you saved?” I honestly didn’t know.

Of course I got off the bus in Mississippi, more than once. In Jackson I wanted to find Eudora Welty, but her name wasn’t in the phone book. By this time lack ofsleep, combined with hot weather, gave the days a kind of hallucinatory looseness. I was at ease on the road for the first time.

I also found this other paragraph interesting, because of the author’s sense that his experience may be difficult to re-create in the contemporary U.S.

I couldn’t know that within the year Malcolm would be dead; that the bombing of North Vietnam, and the anger in response to it, would begin; that Kerouac’s Beat would become a period artifact, replaced temporarily by something called Flower Power. Or that in a new century Americans would stop making quest-journeys, would spiritually stay put, put on weight, wait for the world to come to them.

What do you think? Have Americans become complacent? Have we stopped making quest-journeys?

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3. On the American road with Paul Theroux ...