It’s 11:23 pm on a Saturday night at the Amtrak station in Savannah, Georgia. There are no more trains for the night. We sit in the waiting room with those who have nowhere else to go — two men wrapped in blankets, a red-faced blonde, a very obese middle-aged white woman with an empty 2L Gatorade bottle. The station is air-conditioned and needlingly cold, a welcome refuge from the muggy, heavy night air outside. Half of the hall is blocked off for renovation, letting us peek through to a faded pastel mural depicting the historic buildings of Savannah. The massively obese woman, who came from Charleston in the same train as us, suddenly huffs, stands up, and walks out into the night, as if spurred by a sudden act of will.

The men mumble intelligibly to each other. One of the overnighters is watching a video on his phone, volume turned way up, in which a woman is panting and moaning.

The red-faced blonde traps a couple of elderly people who just walked in as a captive audience. She tells them war stories: she served in the military. She shakes the hand of the old man, one veteran to another. She tells them her family lore, the saga of mothers and grandmothers and daughters and granddaughters. She drones on and on. The old couple has obviously lost interest, their smiles uneasy, but they nod.

After a few hours, it is time for us to leave. Our Uber driver to the Greyhound station is in a terrible mood and also on some substance — speed or Adderall, my boyfriend thinks, and is foul mouthed and erratic. He is serving his third year in the army base in Savannah, and is originally from Coney Island. “It’s too fucking hot here,” he says of the south, then tells us we can smoke in his car.

“I hope I get another deployment in the next two years,” he says. He’s already been on two, to Afghanistan and Kuwait.

The Greyhound station is bigger than we thought. Single-parent families, lost souls, two French backpackers in the fray. Greyhound lines are like this country’s veins, I think to myself, carrying carless voyagers and down-on-their-luck screw-ups, tattooed gangsters and single mothers. There is, without a doubt, a common acknowledgement of social class in the waiting rooms and buses. People largely ignore each other, and treat each other with suspicion and distance. They are careful whom they stand or sit next to. Every time anyone gets up to use the bathroom or have a cigarette outside, they are followed by a collective stare.

Obviously our bus arrives with delay, and when we board we are greeted with an almost full bus reeking of urine and bathroom chemical solution. Row after row we meet hostile eyes daring us to ask them for a seat next to them, and the back of the bus seems exclusively staked out by hoarders with possessions spilling out of the seats. We return to the very front and sit diagonally behind the driver. The AC is freezing and the vent flap has been entirely removed, leaving a hole through which the cold air blows. Everyone dozes off in the complete darkness, but we are woken up every couple hours because the whole bus needs to disembark every time we make a stop.

We stand in line, somnolent, waiting for re-entry on the bus in Jacksonville. It is 4:25 am. When an agent comes to check our tickets, I hand him mine: “We are going to Orlando.”

“Congratulations,” he says sarcastically.

A poster by the gate offers help to runaway youth between 12–20 who are trying to escape counselable familial woes. A new bus driver pleads that “please, please, please, no one smoke in the toilet in the back, no one uses illegal drugs, no one drink beer, or you’ll deal straight with the state troopers.” But mostly the night bus is quiet, without much buoyancy.

“When we are thirty or forty, and richer, do you think we’ll ever travel like this again?” I ask my boyfriend.

When I first came to America and visited a friend’s family for Thanksgiving break at age 16, my friend’s mother had woken up at 4 am to drive me to the Stamford, CT Greyhound station. It took 10 hours for me to get back to Boston, via Rhode Island. In college, every time I visited someone on the same coast, I also took the bus — slowly learning that Megabus double-deckers were cheap and had Wi-Fi, that Greyhound tickets needed to be printed in advance, that Peter Pan was merely Greyhound camouflaged. After graduation, taking buses between DC and New York to visit my boyfriend became a haunting refrain of long delays on the I-95 and Sunday night treks to the decrepit industrial lots by the Javits Center in NYC. Over the course of the years, I probably have taken no less than 100 Greyhound and other buses — mostly out of financial necessity. It’s be a lie to say that I did not fantasize about a day where I would sit in a plush train or airplane seat to arrive to my destination not crusted by the sweat and grime of all of the travelers who had previously sat in these leather Greyhound seats.

“We probably will still have to take the bus, sometimes,” he answers.

26 hours into the trip, my eyes blink open to the blinding sun and blue skies of Southern Florida. In the distance, the high-rises and seaside resorts of Fort Lauderdale glimmer in the white light. Suddenly, just like that, we pull into a narrow strip mall and disembark. I thank the bus driver. “Okay,” he says.

There are no goodbyes or pleasantries exchanged between the passengers. We dissipate along the palm-lined streets, another day in America, another Greyhound journey.

*

This essay originally appeared in Ripple Journal.

Header photo by Simone Hutsch