"thanks for freedom:" tales from a northbound greyhound
(So I'm back, for the moment at least, in the old haunts and strong winds of Saskatchewan, where you're always the centre of a circle the size of the horizon, the most insignificant point, the least rooted, and I'm finally reflecting on that scattered and serendipitous final leg of the journey north.)
(a few names have been changed, just in case they'd prefer it that way)
~~~
"We live and die by the highway, and in between
we sit in cramped seats waiting to get somewhere,
forgetting where we're going."
- al burian, _burn collector_
"We would do this anywhere.... Anywhere we go
we will make gardens with whatever seeds are
available to us."
- kika, _off the map_
I never would have spent three days in Austin, Texas, helping polish off a keg of microbrew pale ale and talking PoMo theory and radical politics with a group of anthropology grad students, if i hadn't unexpectedly run into my friend Geneva in the Revolución Bar in San Cristóbal, Chiapas a few weeks earlier. And I certainly wouldn't have spent Semana Santa (Holy Week) in a kiddie pool on a rooftop in Guatemala City, while firecrackers popped and the vast and solemn Easter processions wove past, day and night.
I had crossed over into southern Mexico from Guatemala a couple of days before, and was chowing down on some nachos and guacamole, sipping a Sol, and interpreting between a Dutch couple and three Mexican law students (who were suddenly the best of friends with the couple, me, and everyone else they encountered, due to the large quantity of tequila they were consuming). Things were getting more and more out of hand when I glanced up to see a familiar-looking girl staring at me in disbelief. "Geneva?", I asked, bewildered. I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, and we had lost touch in the meantime. Last I'd heard she was heading south to "not be political for a while." It's always such a rush, bumping into someone you know in entirely unfamiliar surroundings. How nice that it seems to happen so often.
After we got over the initial shock of running into each other, and the rest of the bar returned to their conversations after having some Canadian girl interrupt them with the force of her greeting, Geneva told me that she had been living in San Cristóbal for the past several months, and invited me to crash at her place for a few days. Very soon I also had an offer of a ride to Texas in a week with a friend of hers, if I didn't mind sharing the driving.
Also, Geneva and a couple of friends were planning on traveling south to Guatemala for Semana Santa. Almost everyone I knew in Central America was going to be in Antigua, Guatemala, and I had very reluctantly decided to head north instead of joining them there, so I decided I might as well follow the coincidences and tag along back south. After twelve hours of chicken busses and a border crossing we rolled grimy and stiff into Antigua, which was bursting at the seams with Guatemalan and foreign tourists. We managed to find accommodations at the same musty little posada where Simon, Rebecca, Jen and Cathy were staying, and I made the introductions.
We all headed for supper at a cafe where a friend of mine (from the Maya Pedal project in Itzapa) was playing guitar that night, and in the midst of an intense round of Jungle Speed (the full-contact card game, not the drug) we discovered we had a critical mass of Canadians, and the conversation turned inexorably to CBC personalities and Canadian politics, over the good-natured bewilderment of the San Franciscan and the Parisian in our midst.
Semana Santa in Antigua is a huge event, and none of us really had room for huge events in our budget, so we soon parted ways, the San Cris crew to Lago Atitlan and the former Haligonians to Guatemala City. We must have been the only tourists around to choose gun-packing, gang-spawning Guatemala City as our Semana Santa destination, but we had a supply of rum, a place to stay very near to where the processions would pass, and a kiddie pool and a rooftop to plant it on.
Semana Santa is actually a huge event all over Guatemala, and it truly defies description. For days, vast and colourful processions weave through the towns and cities, as hundreds or thousands of people carry enormous depictions of scenes from the crucifixion through the streets on their shoulders. Almost every square inch of the parade route is decorated before-hand with colourful "carpets" of dyed sawdust, pine needles and flower pedals, in elaborate and breathtaking designs. These "carpets" take hours of work, often right through the night. They are crafted with such pride and skill, and are then obliterated beneath the feet of the procession, and swept away.
Similar events were occurring in Guatemala City as in Antigua, but the two scenes couldn't have been more different. Unlike Antigua, the streets of Guatemala City were eerily deserted by day, as all the shops closed down for Easter and everyone who could leave town, did. We would walk streets that were usually bustling with people and see neither pedestrians nor cars for blocks at a time.
By night, on the other hand, the streets of Guatemala City are usually empty, but for once we found them full of music and children, as if a curfew of a year's duration had been lifted for just a few nights. One night we left Cathy's apartment and wandered the streets for hours, playing balancing games on the parking barriers and watching whole families work lovingly on the "carpets" in front of their unbarred homes. Any other night we would have been insane to do such a thing, but we felt perfectly safe. It was very surreal.
~
"Other people aspire to be doctors or successes;
I just want to have too much time on my hands."
- cathy
When we weren't wandering the streets or playing around the increasingly smog-scummy kiddie pool we held searching thoughtful conversations on the trajectory of the world and our place in it while Simon and Cathy composed ribald poetry in rhyming couplets and Cathy's roommates' dog Tammy peed on the floor and cringed at everything. We made large breakfasts and lounged around a lot. To mark the occasion of Simon's birthday we bestowed savage beatings upon Clifford-the-Dog and Elmo-on-Crack piñatas.
With a day to get back to San Cristóbal before my ride to Texas was due to depart, I once again took my leave of Guatemala City and boarded the northbound bus. The next morning I met Alison and Megan to pack the car and run last minute errands, before we finally set off for Texas at the crack of noon. Alison is working on a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Texas, and has lived off-and-on in Chiapas for much of the last ten years. Megan had been working at the Casa Naranja, a workspace for people of colour working in solidarity with the Zapatistas. We were three days to Austin, with a couple of hours at a beach in Veracruz and many far-ranging conversations along the way.
Massive speed bumps seem to be the preferred means of traffic control in Mexico. They were everywhere. I managed to hit only one of them at a significant velocity, which was, of course, one too many for Alison, but seemed a pretty good score to me, considering just how bloody many there were of them. I didn't try to rationalize this to her.
I had expected the worst from Texas, especially the crossing-the-border part, but that went smoothly, just before dawn, and in general I was blown away by how genuinely friendly everyone we met was. And Austin is a great city; it's like a liberal pond in a conservative swamp. I stayed for three days at Alison's house, wandering the city and the university campus.
There were still a few certifiably texan moments, like talking to the dude in the bus depot who sold me my ticket. As he punched the destination into the computer, he confessed casually, "you know, I like the idea and the attitude of Canada. But I don't think I could ever actually *live* there."
"Yeah? Why not?," I asked, curious.
"Oh, the cold... And the loneliness."
I never did ask him what he thought "the idea and the attitude" of Canada are. I wish I had.
~
It took me a couple of days to get psyched up for the final leg of the journey. The only bus north from Austin left at 1:30 in the morning. It was 2 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes, and 2136 miles to Moose Jaw. While I was in Austin I read this hilarious and frightening account of a cross-country greyhound trip in a book of 'zines (the household's bathroom reading). It's about a bus trip from New York to Portland, or, in the author's words, "...a three-day safari into the realm of the damned, a suck at the teat of the darkest, most sordid American cultural underbelly you might every willingly end up subjecting yourself to."
I read on, with mixed fascination and dread:
"You don't really sleep on the bus; mainly you just contort exhaustedly, trying vainly to unlock the secret yoga-position that will facilitate comfort in the cramped seats. We stop every two hours and the driver wakes the passengers, whose scrambles to the counters of the mind-numbingly interchangeable convenience stores become increasingly lethargic and herd-like, the one constant routine which maintains a sense of civilization cranking along as usual, out here in the tarmac tundra where towns trickle into an oblivion of fast-food no man's lands, where the polite, toothless vestiges of regionalism are boiled away and the bleached bones of America-with-a-capital-A gaze at you matter-of-factly, and offer you beef Jerky and Mountain Dew Big Slams.
"This ritual will continue unabated for three days; it will not come to seem like deliberate, methodical torture until midway through the second day."
- al burian
Amen. Steeled for the journey, I finally set off at the ungodliest hour, and passed like giardia through the belly of the beast, up the Great Plains between the Red River and the 100th meridian, north via Dallas to Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fargo, and Winnipeg, and finally west to Saskatchewan.
In Omaha, Nebraska, we stopped for a bus servicing at 3 am, and spent a demented hour pacing the tiny, grimy, and for some reason, full-to-the-brim bus depot, before reboarding. Somewhere in there I took up with two guys named Dan and Rob who were also heading north, and who apparently thought the hours between 4 and 6 am were best spent talking loudly and cracking jokes on a bus. Before Wichita all the passengers had been men; now there were a few women, but they all sat way up at the front of the bus, far from us.
Rob was a black man in his 40s, on his way to Detroit in search of a job, and Dan was a chubby white guy with a brush cut, on his way home from a short vacation. Our conversation turned to politics, and for some reason, I could not keep from voicing my opinions, thereby instigating a two-hour, full-volume (though still more-or-less civil) discussion in which my two travelling companions expressed the following opinions:
1. That the US, historically, has been way too nice about going to bail out other countries when they plead for help, and that other countries don't know the meaning of gratitude for US sacrifices in exporting democracy to the world.
2. That the Iraq war was about control of oil, self-defence, and bringing freedom and democracy to a place of tyranny (in that order).
3. That Clinton is a lying lousy scumbag and GW Bush is an honest man who did not shirk his national guard duty. And John Kerry can't be trusted, because he once accused US soldiers in Viet Nam of committing atrocities.
4. That Al Qaeda training camps were found in Iraq.
5. That mobile weapons labs were also found, and may have contained a bio-weapon that causes people to eat themselves uncontrollably.
6. That "by 2050, Planet Earth will be known as Planet America."
7. That "they" deserve everything they get, cuz of what "they" did to America on 9/11.
8. That soon everything will be fine in Iraq, "as soon as there's a Pizza Hut on every corner and an American Express card in every hand."
9. That poverty is the fault of poor people.
10. That America is the land of opportunity, where a black woman can be National Security Advisor and a black man can be Secretary of State.
11. That the US Gov'ment is too "socialistic" and CNN is a left-wing news network.
and finally...
12. That "it's all about the short skirt."
I had never heard so many of the unspoken assumptions of the American right wing stated so baldly. It was somewhere around there that, under cross-examination, Rob got carried away and contradicted his earlier statements about US benevolence towards other countries by conceding that yes, democracy was a problem -- *the* problem, overseas -- because it got in the way of (American) capitalism, and that, for the US government, military intervention was sometimes the only solution to this problem.
Except for our perspectives, we were, for once, in complete agreement. I could see no further point talking with these two.
By this time, the barest hint of dawn was blooming in the east as we pulled into some city, and Rob got up to change buses. Before he left, he told me conciliatorily, "you know, if you're 25 and not a liberal, you have no heart. But," he added with a grin, "if you're 35 and not a conservative, you have no brains." "No balls," Dan corrected. He'd obviously heard this line before. “Yeah, I was trying to be polite,” Rob replied. I thanked them both for their concern for my political maturation, and said I would just have to see how it went.
By now I'd been riding the bus for about 30 hours, and had spent the last two of them arguing in the dark with neo-fascists, so I thought I'd try to get a little sleep. But Dan, for some reason, had taken a liking to me (or perhaps just felt sorry for me and my bleeding heart) and decided to rekindle the conversation.
I learned that Dan had recently retired from the US military, after 16 years of service. He had served in Colombia, Iraq (the first time around), the Philippines, and Kosovo, among other places. He looked like Michael Moore with a brush-cut. He was traveling home from what he called his "first vacation ever" (he had gone to visit a few buddies in Colorado), which he had hated. He just couldn't handle so much "downtime." He was coming home a day early. "What do you do with your spare time?" was a question he had taken to asking everyone he met, as if he were compiling a list he could refer to later, in times of crisis.
He had retired at his wife's request (she was recovering from breast cancer), but he was going out of his head with too much time on his hands, and couldn't deal with having, as he put it, "no sense of purpose." I confessed I struggled with the same problem sometimes, and could understand the attraction of having a very small and focused area of concern in which you gave everything of yourself to one task, and didn't have to think much about the broader context, since you fully believed that the one thing you were working so hard at would eventually make the world a better place. I said that's how I felt about my work last summer.
Around 9 am we stopped for breakfast at a Subway. At that point we were arguing about the upcoming transfer of "sovereignty" in Iraq, which earned us some strange looks from the sandwich artists. Dan claimed he could tell the Subway staff were more sympathetic to my point of view, based on how they had served us. I wondered if they had given him too many jalapenos or something.
Back on the bus, the conversation returned to Dan's dilemma of what to do with his life. He said he had published a couple of short stories -- but he didn't think he could do that full-time. He thought about opening a firing range, but figured he would get bored doing that. Everything he had been trained to do, he told me, just had no place in civilian life. He was an expert in every weapon he had handled. He could inflict seven lethal wounds with a set of keys in under three seconds.
Watching everything go wrong in Iraq, where he had many friends, was driving him crazy with the feeling he should be there too -- regardless of whether the war was justified. He confessed he had gone on vacation only at his wife's insistence, to get him out of the house. "I was driving her nuts," he confessed. He said he was considering going to Iraq with a defence contractor. When I asked, he said that while he totally disagreed with the aims of Tim McVeigh (another Gulf War vet), he could understand what had happened to him, what he had gone through. It was 9 years and 2 days since the Oklahoma City bombings, and less than a day since I'd passed through Oklahoma City.
In spite of the vast gulf between us, I was taking a liking to Dan in spite of myself. I was genuinely curious to understand how he justified the Iraq war in his own mind, but he seemed reluctant to talk about that, given how things were going in Iraq and how flimsy the initial justifications were (which just weren't things he was capable of admitting, to himself or to anyone). As he had already told me, he wasn't used to thinking outside a very narrow frame of concern -- but he was smart enough that he was finding the exercise troubling, now that he had the freedom to do so.
Throughout the trip, we disagreed on almost everything we talked about, but before he got off the bus in Fargo, he told me that our conversation had been the most enjoyable part of his vacation. Which, he added wryly, didn't say much for his vacation.
I honestly couldn't say those hours talking with Rob and Dan had been the most enjoyable part of my vacation, but the trip north from Omaha certainly wasn't something I would ever forget. We shook hands, and I wished him a happy and peaceful retirement, and meant it.
~
Driving through Grand Forks, we passed a billboard that read:
"Grand Forks Air Base: Thanks for Freedom"
I was still 12 hours from home, and very, very tired.
~
"But is home the place you come back to when you're
full, or is it where you go to be filled up again?"
- hibickina, _off the map_
~
The bus let me off in Moose Jaw at 3 am. My parents were out of town, and their house was dark and empty. I walked there from the bus depot, carrying everything I hadn't already left behind somewhere.
My pack seemed impossibly light after so much travel.
(a few names have been changed, just in case they'd prefer it that way)
~~~
"We live and die by the highway, and in between
we sit in cramped seats waiting to get somewhere,
forgetting where we're going."
- al burian, _burn collector_
"We would do this anywhere.... Anywhere we go
we will make gardens with whatever seeds are
available to us."
- kika, _off the map_
I never would have spent three days in Austin, Texas, helping polish off a keg of microbrew pale ale and talking PoMo theory and radical politics with a group of anthropology grad students, if i hadn't unexpectedly run into my friend Geneva in the Revolución Bar in San Cristóbal, Chiapas a few weeks earlier. And I certainly wouldn't have spent Semana Santa (Holy Week) in a kiddie pool on a rooftop in Guatemala City, while firecrackers popped and the vast and solemn Easter processions wove past, day and night.
I had crossed over into southern Mexico from Guatemala a couple of days before, and was chowing down on some nachos and guacamole, sipping a Sol, and interpreting between a Dutch couple and three Mexican law students (who were suddenly the best of friends with the couple, me, and everyone else they encountered, due to the large quantity of tequila they were consuming). Things were getting more and more out of hand when I glanced up to see a familiar-looking girl staring at me in disbelief. "Geneva?", I asked, bewildered. I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, and we had lost touch in the meantime. Last I'd heard she was heading south to "not be political for a while." It's always such a rush, bumping into someone you know in entirely unfamiliar surroundings. How nice that it seems to happen so often.
After we got over the initial shock of running into each other, and the rest of the bar returned to their conversations after having some Canadian girl interrupt them with the force of her greeting, Geneva told me that she had been living in San Cristóbal for the past several months, and invited me to crash at her place for a few days. Very soon I also had an offer of a ride to Texas in a week with a friend of hers, if I didn't mind sharing the driving.
Also, Geneva and a couple of friends were planning on traveling south to Guatemala for Semana Santa. Almost everyone I knew in Central America was going to be in Antigua, Guatemala, and I had very reluctantly decided to head north instead of joining them there, so I decided I might as well follow the coincidences and tag along back south. After twelve hours of chicken busses and a border crossing we rolled grimy and stiff into Antigua, which was bursting at the seams with Guatemalan and foreign tourists. We managed to find accommodations at the same musty little posada where Simon, Rebecca, Jen and Cathy were staying, and I made the introductions.
We all headed for supper at a cafe where a friend of mine (from the Maya Pedal project in Itzapa) was playing guitar that night, and in the midst of an intense round of Jungle Speed (the full-contact card game, not the drug) we discovered we had a critical mass of Canadians, and the conversation turned inexorably to CBC personalities and Canadian politics, over the good-natured bewilderment of the San Franciscan and the Parisian in our midst.
Semana Santa in Antigua is a huge event, and none of us really had room for huge events in our budget, so we soon parted ways, the San Cris crew to Lago Atitlan and the former Haligonians to Guatemala City. We must have been the only tourists around to choose gun-packing, gang-spawning Guatemala City as our Semana Santa destination, but we had a supply of rum, a place to stay very near to where the processions would pass, and a kiddie pool and a rooftop to plant it on.
Semana Santa is actually a huge event all over Guatemala, and it truly defies description. For days, vast and colourful processions weave through the towns and cities, as hundreds or thousands of people carry enormous depictions of scenes from the crucifixion through the streets on their shoulders. Almost every square inch of the parade route is decorated before-hand with colourful "carpets" of dyed sawdust, pine needles and flower pedals, in elaborate and breathtaking designs. These "carpets" take hours of work, often right through the night. They are crafted with such pride and skill, and are then obliterated beneath the feet of the procession, and swept away.
Similar events were occurring in Guatemala City as in Antigua, but the two scenes couldn't have been more different. Unlike Antigua, the streets of Guatemala City were eerily deserted by day, as all the shops closed down for Easter and everyone who could leave town, did. We would walk streets that were usually bustling with people and see neither pedestrians nor cars for blocks at a time.
By night, on the other hand, the streets of Guatemala City are usually empty, but for once we found them full of music and children, as if a curfew of a year's duration had been lifted for just a few nights. One night we left Cathy's apartment and wandered the streets for hours, playing balancing games on the parking barriers and watching whole families work lovingly on the "carpets" in front of their unbarred homes. Any other night we would have been insane to do such a thing, but we felt perfectly safe. It was very surreal.
~
"Other people aspire to be doctors or successes;
I just want to have too much time on my hands."
- cathy
When we weren't wandering the streets or playing around the increasingly smog-scummy kiddie pool we held searching thoughtful conversations on the trajectory of the world and our place in it while Simon and Cathy composed ribald poetry in rhyming couplets and Cathy's roommates' dog Tammy peed on the floor and cringed at everything. We made large breakfasts and lounged around a lot. To mark the occasion of Simon's birthday we bestowed savage beatings upon Clifford-the-Dog and Elmo-on-Crack piñatas.
With a day to get back to San Cristóbal before my ride to Texas was due to depart, I once again took my leave of Guatemala City and boarded the northbound bus. The next morning I met Alison and Megan to pack the car and run last minute errands, before we finally set off for Texas at the crack of noon. Alison is working on a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Texas, and has lived off-and-on in Chiapas for much of the last ten years. Megan had been working at the Casa Naranja, a workspace for people of colour working in solidarity with the Zapatistas. We were three days to Austin, with a couple of hours at a beach in Veracruz and many far-ranging conversations along the way.
Massive speed bumps seem to be the preferred means of traffic control in Mexico. They were everywhere. I managed to hit only one of them at a significant velocity, which was, of course, one too many for Alison, but seemed a pretty good score to me, considering just how bloody many there were of them. I didn't try to rationalize this to her.
I had expected the worst from Texas, especially the crossing-the-border part, but that went smoothly, just before dawn, and in general I was blown away by how genuinely friendly everyone we met was. And Austin is a great city; it's like a liberal pond in a conservative swamp. I stayed for three days at Alison's house, wandering the city and the university campus.
There were still a few certifiably texan moments, like talking to the dude in the bus depot who sold me my ticket. As he punched the destination into the computer, he confessed casually, "you know, I like the idea and the attitude of Canada. But I don't think I could ever actually *live* there."
"Yeah? Why not?," I asked, curious.
"Oh, the cold... And the loneliness."
I never did ask him what he thought "the idea and the attitude" of Canada are. I wish I had.
~
It took me a couple of days to get psyched up for the final leg of the journey. The only bus north from Austin left at 1:30 in the morning. It was 2 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes, and 2136 miles to Moose Jaw. While I was in Austin I read this hilarious and frightening account of a cross-country greyhound trip in a book of 'zines (the household's bathroom reading). It's about a bus trip from New York to Portland, or, in the author's words, "...a three-day safari into the realm of the damned, a suck at the teat of the darkest, most sordid American cultural underbelly you might every willingly end up subjecting yourself to."
I read on, with mixed fascination and dread:
"You don't really sleep on the bus; mainly you just contort exhaustedly, trying vainly to unlock the secret yoga-position that will facilitate comfort in the cramped seats. We stop every two hours and the driver wakes the passengers, whose scrambles to the counters of the mind-numbingly interchangeable convenience stores become increasingly lethargic and herd-like, the one constant routine which maintains a sense of civilization cranking along as usual, out here in the tarmac tundra where towns trickle into an oblivion of fast-food no man's lands, where the polite, toothless vestiges of regionalism are boiled away and the bleached bones of America-with-a-capital-A gaze at you matter-of-factly, and offer you beef Jerky and Mountain Dew Big Slams.
"This ritual will continue unabated for three days; it will not come to seem like deliberate, methodical torture until midway through the second day."
- al burian
Amen. Steeled for the journey, I finally set off at the ungodliest hour, and passed like giardia through the belly of the beast, up the Great Plains between the Red River and the 100th meridian, north via Dallas to Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fargo, and Winnipeg, and finally west to Saskatchewan.
In Omaha, Nebraska, we stopped for a bus servicing at 3 am, and spent a demented hour pacing the tiny, grimy, and for some reason, full-to-the-brim bus depot, before reboarding. Somewhere in there I took up with two guys named Dan and Rob who were also heading north, and who apparently thought the hours between 4 and 6 am were best spent talking loudly and cracking jokes on a bus. Before Wichita all the passengers had been men; now there were a few women, but they all sat way up at the front of the bus, far from us.
Rob was a black man in his 40s, on his way to Detroit in search of a job, and Dan was a chubby white guy with a brush cut, on his way home from a short vacation. Our conversation turned to politics, and for some reason, I could not keep from voicing my opinions, thereby instigating a two-hour, full-volume (though still more-or-less civil) discussion in which my two travelling companions expressed the following opinions:
1. That the US, historically, has been way too nice about going to bail out other countries when they plead for help, and that other countries don't know the meaning of gratitude for US sacrifices in exporting democracy to the world.
2. That the Iraq war was about control of oil, self-defence, and bringing freedom and democracy to a place of tyranny (in that order).
3. That Clinton is a lying lousy scumbag and GW Bush is an honest man who did not shirk his national guard duty. And John Kerry can't be trusted, because he once accused US soldiers in Viet Nam of committing atrocities.
4. That Al Qaeda training camps were found in Iraq.
5. That mobile weapons labs were also found, and may have contained a bio-weapon that causes people to eat themselves uncontrollably.
6. That "by 2050, Planet Earth will be known as Planet America."
7. That "they" deserve everything they get, cuz of what "they" did to America on 9/11.
8. That soon everything will be fine in Iraq, "as soon as there's a Pizza Hut on every corner and an American Express card in every hand."
9. That poverty is the fault of poor people.
10. That America is the land of opportunity, where a black woman can be National Security Advisor and a black man can be Secretary of State.
11. That the US Gov'ment is too "socialistic" and CNN is a left-wing news network.
and finally...
12. That "it's all about the short skirt."
I had never heard so many of the unspoken assumptions of the American right wing stated so baldly. It was somewhere around there that, under cross-examination, Rob got carried away and contradicted his earlier statements about US benevolence towards other countries by conceding that yes, democracy was a problem -- *the* problem, overseas -- because it got in the way of (American) capitalism, and that, for the US government, military intervention was sometimes the only solution to this problem.
Except for our perspectives, we were, for once, in complete agreement. I could see no further point talking with these two.
By this time, the barest hint of dawn was blooming in the east as we pulled into some city, and Rob got up to change buses. Before he left, he told me conciliatorily, "you know, if you're 25 and not a liberal, you have no heart. But," he added with a grin, "if you're 35 and not a conservative, you have no brains." "No balls," Dan corrected. He'd obviously heard this line before. “Yeah, I was trying to be polite,” Rob replied. I thanked them both for their concern for my political maturation, and said I would just have to see how it went.
By now I'd been riding the bus for about 30 hours, and had spent the last two of them arguing in the dark with neo-fascists, so I thought I'd try to get a little sleep. But Dan, for some reason, had taken a liking to me (or perhaps just felt sorry for me and my bleeding heart) and decided to rekindle the conversation.
I learned that Dan had recently retired from the US military, after 16 years of service. He had served in Colombia, Iraq (the first time around), the Philippines, and Kosovo, among other places. He looked like Michael Moore with a brush-cut. He was traveling home from what he called his "first vacation ever" (he had gone to visit a few buddies in Colorado), which he had hated. He just couldn't handle so much "downtime." He was coming home a day early. "What do you do with your spare time?" was a question he had taken to asking everyone he met, as if he were compiling a list he could refer to later, in times of crisis.
He had retired at his wife's request (she was recovering from breast cancer), but he was going out of his head with too much time on his hands, and couldn't deal with having, as he put it, "no sense of purpose." I confessed I struggled with the same problem sometimes, and could understand the attraction of having a very small and focused area of concern in which you gave everything of yourself to one task, and didn't have to think much about the broader context, since you fully believed that the one thing you were working so hard at would eventually make the world a better place. I said that's how I felt about my work last summer.
Around 9 am we stopped for breakfast at a Subway. At that point we were arguing about the upcoming transfer of "sovereignty" in Iraq, which earned us some strange looks from the sandwich artists. Dan claimed he could tell the Subway staff were more sympathetic to my point of view, based on how they had served us. I wondered if they had given him too many jalapenos or something.
Back on the bus, the conversation returned to Dan's dilemma of what to do with his life. He said he had published a couple of short stories -- but he didn't think he could do that full-time. He thought about opening a firing range, but figured he would get bored doing that. Everything he had been trained to do, he told me, just had no place in civilian life. He was an expert in every weapon he had handled. He could inflict seven lethal wounds with a set of keys in under three seconds.
Watching everything go wrong in Iraq, where he had many friends, was driving him crazy with the feeling he should be there too -- regardless of whether the war was justified. He confessed he had gone on vacation only at his wife's insistence, to get him out of the house. "I was driving her nuts," he confessed. He said he was considering going to Iraq with a defence contractor. When I asked, he said that while he totally disagreed with the aims of Tim McVeigh (another Gulf War vet), he could understand what had happened to him, what he had gone through. It was 9 years and 2 days since the Oklahoma City bombings, and less than a day since I'd passed through Oklahoma City.
In spite of the vast gulf between us, I was taking a liking to Dan in spite of myself. I was genuinely curious to understand how he justified the Iraq war in his own mind, but he seemed reluctant to talk about that, given how things were going in Iraq and how flimsy the initial justifications were (which just weren't things he was capable of admitting, to himself or to anyone). As he had already told me, he wasn't used to thinking outside a very narrow frame of concern -- but he was smart enough that he was finding the exercise troubling, now that he had the freedom to do so.
Throughout the trip, we disagreed on almost everything we talked about, but before he got off the bus in Fargo, he told me that our conversation had been the most enjoyable part of his vacation. Which, he added wryly, didn't say much for his vacation.
I honestly couldn't say those hours talking with Rob and Dan had been the most enjoyable part of my vacation, but the trip north from Omaha certainly wasn't something I would ever forget. We shook hands, and I wished him a happy and peaceful retirement, and meant it.
~
Driving through Grand Forks, we passed a billboard that read:
"Grand Forks Air Base: Thanks for Freedom"
I was still 12 hours from home, and very, very tired.
~
"But is home the place you come back to when you're
full, or is it where you go to be filled up again?"
- hibickina, _off the map_
~
The bus let me off in Moose Jaw at 3 am. My parents were out of town, and their house was dark and empty. I walked there from the bus depot, carrying everything I hadn't already left behind somewhere.
My pack seemed impossibly light after so much travel.
posted by oswald | 5:07 PM
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