On Impermanence: Home is Where the Bus Stops

[georginasand]

This was written on a greyhound bus returning to my home town after a weekend visiting my nine-months-home, while wishing I was back in London. I'd kill for a tardis, but then again, maybe that's not what I am looking for.

 

On Impermanence: Home is Where the Bus Stops

 

In the part of my memory created by childhood fiction, buses seem inherent in adventure. My first expectations of travel were not formed by family vacations, but by tales of girls who hopped onto buses which whisked them off to sail across the Atlantic, or live in hollowed trees in the Adirondacks. The luckiest were children who rode the city buses of Manhattan to school, because it meant their daily lives were imbued with adventure that mine would never have. My family are road trip people, so while sixteen hours meandering across the country, through cornfields and small towns, to new mountains and deserts were simply the way of the world, buses captures my imagination as the ticket to adventure. Trans too, seemed exotic and appealing, but like the stagecoach (a ride in which I have lusted after even before I read Pride and Prejudice) was too foreign to my existence to be considered dependable escapism. My first plane ride happened at six months old, and frequently there after, so those magnificent men and their flying machines never had the same magic as the bus.

            Which is not to say airplanes are without romance, but there is the romance of science fiction, of the un-understandable. So few truly understand the laws that keep airplanes up in the sky, and we who do not much accept the following premise: it shouldn’t fly, but it does. This is a surprisingly mundane, but no less astounding, miracle. Perhaps even more surreal than aerodynamics is the time commitment involved in modern air travel. The 2,000 miles from St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California takes the average air traveler three hours. A similar journey too the Pacific Ocean took Meriwether Lewis and William Clark twenty-four months. The journey which required of the US government money and supplies nearing $2,500 (not to mention the lands to be explored, $ 15 million), and of Lewis and Clark, courage, determination, and the life of one traveling companion, now asks of the modern traveler no more than the patience to endure inane security measures and the sacrifice of leg room.

            This is not to say every journey needs to be an Odyssey, but simply that the newness of convenient travel should be considered: wanderlust is as old as the wise men, but travel with out major commitment is positively newfangled. Though I have no primary source experience beyond 1989, I would venture that it is only in the last sixty-five years—since the building of the interstate, the establishment of major airlines, and the manufacture of reliable, cheap automobiles—that travel has become simple enough to change how we feel geography. It is no longer necessary, or even possible to leave a place forever. Only absolute disgust with the climate or inhabitant need separate us permanently from the places we visit. Furthermore, there is no longer any reason to call the place of our birth our only home.

         Now that our journey's no longer have the gravity of the Oregon trail, what more than perhaps an affection for a particular skyline or mountain range do we have to keep us grounded? Humans, though once nomadic, are not migratory creatures. The nomad tread on every foot of the land they traveled, and around every footstep was their homes. Their closeness to the land itself, if not a particular location, kept them rooted; their perpetual motion must have sated their wanderlust. as I make my own migration, from home town to college town, I hold on to the illusion that riding the bus makes me a modern nomad, that rolling, if not walking over each inch between here and there ground me in the in-between and widens the space I call home. One day I'll stand on the very brink of reality, ready to seek my fortune  and find my own home. When that day comes, the bus will waiting for me. And what an adventure it will be!
 

I remain,

 

Georgie