The Bus Came By and I Got On
Greyhound Station
I recently learned that the Greyhound station in Cleveland, Ohio closed its doors.
It felt like the end of something I didn’t realize I was still carrying with me. That surprised me more than I expected. Because it reminded me of the first time I realized I’d already gotten on the bus, long before I knew where it was headed.
We set out on foot, walking over 25 miles a day, trying to get to our destination. Where we were going, we weren’t entirely sure, is anyone ever really sure, but we thought we were going to California, where the Grateful Dead lived. How sweet is that, the sentiments of a young 13 year old girl.
Little did we know they were touring around the country, exactly in the area we were in at that very moment. I remember thinking, The timing felt unreal, as if something larger had already been set in motion and we were simply stepping into its path.
The date was August, 1994. The middle of summer.
Before our feet hit the pavement, before the miles added up, before the sole of my shoe began to give way, there had already been another bus. Not the one we stepped onto first, but one that had been moving through the collective imagination for decades.
In 1964, a group calling themselves the Merry Pranksters set out from California in a painted school bus they called Further. At the wheel, more often than not, was Neal Cassady, with Ken Kesey riding along, not entirely sure where they were headed either, only certain they needed to go. East. Toward experience. Toward whatever waited beyond the familiar.
Further: 1964
Their journey wasn’t just a road trip. It was a declaration. A willingness to step outside the known edges of identity, to live inside questions inside of answers, to trust motion over certainty. They weren’t escaping anything so much as leaning into something, curiosity, freedom, risk, expansion.
We didn’t know their story in detail then. We weren’t consciously following a map laid out decades earlier. And yet, the spirit felt unmistakably familiar. The same pull. The same yes. The same quiet understanding that to begin a real adventure, you have to carry a certain disposition in your being. A tolerance for uncertainty. A reverence for experience. A willingness to be changed by what you meet along the way.
There is a particular moment in coming of age when movement stops being recreational and starts becoming formative. When the act of going sets a tone that echoes forward. You may not recognize it while it’s happening, but later you understand it as the moment you stepped outside the norm and never fully returned. The moment you signaled, to yourself and to others, that you were willing to explore further than expected.
That is the kind of spirit that gets on the bus.
And once you’re on, there’s no real turning back, only the road unfolding, one step, one mile, one choice at a time.
Cleveland was where we got on our first Greyhound bus. And it didn’t end there. We would end up getting on so many more of those buses that it became a kind of rhythm for us, until we were old enough to drive. Now that this former chapter of my life has been completing, in middle-age, it’s therapeutic to begin to understand it. Somewhere in me, that bus is still idling.
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