On a Greyhound Bus

This happened in 1977, when I was ten. I was riding a Greyhound bus, unsupervised by any adult family members. Back then, children could travel unaccompanied. I had already flown on a plane by myself numerous times. I was worldly. I have since realized that during the entire decade of the 1970’s, every American over the age of twenty-one was completely smashed, except our Grandparents. The driver of that bus was probably completely smashed. And yes, I enjoy writing the words "completely smashed." I imagine that putting your kids alone on a bus or a plane must have been like a vacation for many people.

Anyway, I was riding the bus in South Dakota, from Custer to Aberdeen, roughly four hundred miles, all day, with my little cousin, Lori. We had been visiting our grandparents and she was heading home. This was my last stop before returning home to St. Paul. My dad was waiting for me at her house. It was summer vacation and I wanted time to stand still. Lori was five. And scared. This was unprecedented, unheard of, an abomination in the whole right versus wrong debate as understood by a five-year-old. Where were the parents, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles? Being without grown-ups was wrong. Why, we could just walk off the bus when it stopped, we could do anything, and nobody would tell us not to! We could rob a bank. We could run and shout and sing if we wanted to. What if we got lost somewhere and the driver left us? What if we got off the bus to get food and the driver left us? What if we had to get off the bus to pee and the driver left us? What if we got hurt or needed comfort? What if we missed our stop and never made it home? We could not possibly be on this bus alone!

But we were. At ten, I was incredibly unbothered by all the possibilities. I was sophisticated and calm. I said things like “pssshhhh” to Lori as she worried and, at one point, cried. She wanted her mom. She wanted to be home. She missed her dog, Davey. She wanted her world to be right again. I overcompensated with false bravado, for her sake. Right. The truth was I didn’t know how to act around a younger kid. I was used to being the youngest of my cousins at home, so I acted like how I thought “brave”should look.

I didn’t know it but I think that bus ride defined our entire relationship as children, such as it was with the distance. I always did everything I could to escape the adults, (who were still completely smashed). We remember different things. She remembers us riding bikes all over town. I remember that she would worry about the littlest things and I would sigh at her in exasperation. I had to be the “cool” one. It was the law of cousins who are five years apart. As a teenager, I started smoking; she panicked that I would get caught. I can still hear her intake of breath the first time she saw me take out a cigarette. A giant gasp. A gasp with feeling. But never mind that she was not doing anything wrong. She sensed the possibility of getting into trouble by proxy. I think when you love someone and they get in trouble, you feel it too. But I needed someone to worry about me, someone who wasn’t my mom or dad or a teacher. It made me feel good—to be cared about in some way by someone who had nothing to gain by it, in spite of all my angst and smug teenage confidence. When I was around Lori, I had to be real.