Nick Jimenez

Sunday, September 3, 2000

Big bus got me home . . . on time, too

Take this comparison of traveling times and make of it what you will.
   Recently I traveled from Corpus Christi to Nashville. I went to the airport at about 3 p.m. on a Friday. Because of weather delays, rerouted flights, missed connections and, despite one hell-bent-for-leather sprint through a major terminal, arrived in Nashville on Saturday, 23 hours later.
   Last weekend, I went from Athens, Ga., to Corpus Christi, a fairly comparable distance. I arrived at every point just when the schedule said I'd be there and in fact pulled into Corpus Christi within five minutes of the scheduled arrival time.
   Of course, the trip took 22 hours and was by Greyhound bus, but the point is that the bus delivered what it promised.
   The bus is an unassuming mode of travel. Unlike being aboard a jet plane, your fellow passenger is not likely to be on the first leg of a honeymoon trip to Paris, or on an expense-account paid trip to cut a major business deal. Your bus seat mate is probably off to visit Grandma in Birmingham, on the way to Tupelo for a baby shower or headed for Montgomery in hopes of landing a construction job.
   "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen," the driver said over the loudspeaker said as we pulled out of Athens in the early evening dusk. Silence.
   "I'll try that again," the soft drawling voice said. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen."
   "Good afternoon," we replied in unison, getting the broad hint.
   Then we were off into the Georgia countryside, past small stores, farmhouses and rural outposts. Interstate highways are the big red lines on the map, the American autobahns. They connect the nation like a vast web, the McDonald's of land travel: they're uniform, fast but mostly tasteless.
   It is on the blue lines, the old U.S. highways and state roads, where America lives. On roads like U.S. 11 that springs somewhere near New Orleans and dies far north of the Blue Ridge or U.S. 83 that trails up from the Valley north to where the moose roam on the Canadian border.
   It's 3 a.m. and we disgorge into glare of the terminal at Mobile. But we might as well be in Cuernavaca, or Saltillo or San Luis Potosi. The whole world is speaking Spanish. It is the future and we are seeing it in the wee hours of the morning.
   Almost without exception here, the passengers are Hispanic and the bus drivers, desk clerks and supervisors are black. The communication between these two slices of America is, at best, spotty.
   "Everyone on the Laredo bus must change to the bus next to it," a uniformed bus person is shouting. The crowd is murmuring in Spanish. "Do you understand?" the uniformed man booms. Why do we think shouting makes up for translation, as if to speak another language is to be mute?
   "Isn't there anyone here who can speak Spanish?" one bus person says to another.
   Over my bus trips I've come to expect this encounter with the this surge of immigrant Hispanics over the South. The census says that food processing plants, chicken farms and service jobs are pulling this demographic wave into Georgia and other southern states.
   Like all immigrants, the Spanish-speaking passengers are hardy survivors and good-natured adapters. Soon they are on their way, on the right bus, too, and so are we, dawn and Baton Rouge now just over the horizon.
   We rush over the Sabine River, but we're not home yet. There's still a half day of travel to go. No matter which way I travel by car or bus out of South Texas going north, there's always one point when I know I've reached home.
   By midafternoon, we cross the Guadalupe River and we're in the coastal plains of Texas. This is where I live.
  

 
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