Greyhound Breakdown

Below is a column I wrote for the Augustana College Mirror in March of this year:

If being present were merely a spiritually responsible way to live, what would be the attraction? Certainly there would be a group of people who would find egoic pleasure in it the same way they have found pleasure in their more restrictive religious traditions. The rest of us wouldn’t see the point.

But being present—that is, observing your emotions and reserving judgment instead of becoming entangled with the situation and getting upset—provides greater benefits than that. Remember the Staples commercials with the Easy Button? The Easy Button is a great metaphor for the power of being present. No matter what’s happening, even if your body is in a great deal of pain or discomfort, you can observe it and remain at peace, unattached.

My most recent experience of this phenomenon occurred just last week when, because my Greyhound bus was full, the Greyhound manager asked eight of us to ride in a taxi van.

If I had known what would follow, I would never have agreed to the arrangement.

Fifteen minutes into the trip, a tire blew out, and we almost careened off the road. Unfortunately, the spare was worthless because no one had bothered to replace it after it had gone flat. We later learned that the driver had informed the Greyhound manager of this minor detail before he had even agreed to haul us, but the manager had ignored it and demanded the driver take us anyway.

We waited on the side of a busy highway for over two hours. No one stopped for the first hour and a half. Even a cop passed by. Though we were only a few minutes from a tire store where the driver could have purchased a new tire, the manager decided it would be preferable, somehow, to drive a tire in from two hours away.

To explain the benefit of remaining present in this situation, let me back up for a moment to note my circumstances. My health has been less than ideal in the last several years, and traveling is never easy for me. I hadn’t eaten anything that day, and without more than a granola bar in my backpack, it appeared I would be forced to wait until 8:00 that evening to get a meal. I was tired, my muscles were beginning to hurt worse than usual, and the driver drove like he was on speed. Worse still, everyone in the van smoked like an 18th-century factory.

To add to the ordeal, the assortment of characters surrounding me in the van could not have been stranger. In the front passenger seat sat a recovering crack addict, a middle-aged white man with rotted front teeth and gangster apparel who claimed to be tight with the rappers Paul Wall (“Hey, dog, I’mma get my man Paul Wall on da phone so we kin talk ta him, and he get us a ride, my man Paul Wall get us a ride.”) and Snoop Dogg.

Even when everyone began to ignore his ramblings, he would mutter to himself about his two-million dollar mansion and the girls he had waiting at home. The only truth in his rambling, it seemed, was the part about his being a recovering crack addict—with a definite emphasis on the fact that he was still in the process.

Beside me sat a one-eyed, cane-wielding old man named Dominique. He wore a stocking hat and sweats and threatened a class action lawsuit against Greyhound for getting us stuck on the side of the road. “We don’t deserve this shit,” he complained. “Somebody owes me for this.” He even made a few phone calls—allegedly to the Greyhound corporate office and to his lawyer—for effect.

I could have freaked out. Some of the others, like Dominique, did. But I realized that if I allowed myself to act unconsciously—that is, to allow my thoughts and emotions to run away with me—I would end up miserable, pissed off, and probably requesting to be added as a plaintiff in Dominique’s class action lawsuit. Interestingly, though, my remaining present apparently had more effect than I expected: what could have turned into an impressive explosion of tempers remained a few cross-armed men cursing and grumbling. Given the colorful people surrounding me, the situation could have turned dangerous.

So I chose to remain present and reserve judgment. As I observed the situation, “allowing” it to unfold as it would, I quickly realized how ridiculously funny it was.

Speaking to the kid next to me, I commented, “You couldn’t write this shit if you tried!”

“It’s stranger than fiction,” he agreed.

I located my camera and began taking pictures and recording video—of the people, the broken down van, the story—so that later, when removing my laptop from my backpack wouldn’t get me robbed, I could write it all down.

Could it potentially turn into part of a book? Perhaps. If nothing else, that unexpected day provided me with another installment for this column.