The Grey Rabbit

It was 1980, near the end of the era when strangers would pick up a hitchhiker, and I had no problem getting rides. I was on the road, hitching back and forth across the country and to Florida, and was now out west, visiting uncles in California and an aunt in Las Vegas, picking up day labor here and there. I was twenty-three and a year out of college, with no ambition greater than to go where no one knew me; I'd hardly been anywhere in my life, so that left a lot of options.

It was also the dawn of the Reagan era, though we didn't know it yet, as he campaigned hard against America's moral decline, against hippies and long-hairs and liberals. People like me. He would capture the White House that fall. None of us could name it but it felt like the end of something, and a turn toward a generally darker America, no matter how optimistic the lines that actor recited.

I happened to be visiting a friend in LA when I saw an ad for a cheap bus that ran from San Francisco to Alaska, a hippie-run outfit called The Grey Tortoise. I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest so that sounded like fun so I took a local bus to San Francisco and then boarded the Tortoise. The old Greyhound sported a technicolored paint job and all the seats had been removed and plywood platforms with foam mats set up at various levels all through it. You stuffed your backpack under a platform and found a spot anywhere. It was a leisurely two-day drive with plenty of stops to get out and walk around or throw a frisbee, even a few hours at the Pacific Ocean. Near the end of the ride, a guy walked around handing out leaflets promising good-paying jobs working on fishing boats in Alaska, but that sounded like hard work so I got off in Seattle, where I planned to stay in youth hostels for a few days and just look around.

It was a beautiful city, Paris compared to my grimy little coal camp hometown. I loved everything about it except it already had a large homeless population—of which I was perilously close to becoming a member. I didn't care, I was learning more about life and the world and myself from having to talk to so many different kinds of people than I could have ever learned in school. I'm sure I looked like just another unkempt long-haired kid but I'd never been happier.

I soon made my way down to Portland, intending to stay just a short while, but I liked it so much that I was there for seven months. I got my first gig washing cars and shoveling the ash that had settled all over town from the recent explosion of Mount Saint Helens, then went door to door collecting donations for Greenpeace before I found a full-time job at a small restaurant and coffeehouse near where I was staying. I could walk just a block and gaze up at snow-covered Mount Hood in the distance, and it was an easy walk to Powell's Books, the best used bookstore I'd ever seen.

As the year wound down and Christmas approached I knew I needed to get back to West Virginia for at least a visit, as my mother wasn't well. I had only a few hundred dollars to my name and wasn't looking forward to cobbling together more rides back east and it was too cold to hitchhike. I was tired of that anyway, and it didn't feel safe anymore. Two hitchhikers had been murdered in the Monongahela National Forest, near where I'd gone to college and where I'd been hiking several times. Those murders remain unsolved these many years later, and during my time on the road I'd crossed paths with a lot of people who seemed to have no one who would try to find them if they simply disappeared.

I found a ride south from Portland to LA and then took a regional bus to San Francisco before boarding the hippie bus again, the cross-country version being called the Grey Rabbit. The fare from San Francisco to New York was just $75, and I planned to take it as far as Charleston, West Virginia, which is only an hour from my parents' home.

As with the Tortoise, there were no seats on the bus, only the plywood platforms, and again you found a space to lay your sleeping bag out wherever you could. I had a guitar with me, one of half a dozen on board. It would be a long trip, as the bus would take I-40 into Oklahoma before turning north to the Great Lakes and then heading back south through Cincinnati. The summer version of the cross-country Rabbit would meander its way through Yellowstone and Montana and through Chicago, with frequent stops for outdoor activities; but this was the dead of winter, with nothing much to see across the bleak southern route. We settled in.

There was no alcohol on the bus, not because there was a rule against it but because we couldn't stop that often to pee. There was a constant aroma of marijuana, offset only by the scent of thirty young people crowded into a bus with no air conditioning. We bundled up and always left a few windows open even though it was freezing out. I wondered why no cops ever stopped our strange-looking bus and searched it for dope, but one of the other passengers, a seasoned Grey Rabbit rider, explained that the bus always stuck to the Interstates, never sped, and the drivers never smoked or had weed on them. Also, it must have given any cop pause to think they'd have to search every nook and cranny in the crammed-to-the-gills bus.

When I wasn't reading or journaling or playing music, I talked to the other passengers, all of whom were interesting and weird, in a good way. There were clowns, singers, jugglers, and writers. There were even a couple of mimes, though I never saw them in whiteface. Several riders played guitars or flutes with varying degrees of skill and others sang, for better or worse. One young woman was an excellent seamstress and not only mended old clothes but worked on intricate needlepoints, ignoring the rocking of the bus.

One young woman was traveling with her daughter, who was about five. Both her and her daughter's hair was cut very short, as if growing out from being shaved. Out of her earshot another passenger told me they were on the run from a cult, Synanon. The woman looked exhausted and fearful and the kid had free run of the bus. I have no idea what she thought about all the funny smoke.

I talked to a lot of the passengers as we rode along. Many were old-time, authentic hippies who had been living in communal housing of some kind or just on the streets. Some were perfectly at peace living outside the normal American rhythms and expectations of life, unburdened by politics or middle-class concerns. Some were older than me but many were younger and already burned out, limping their damaged souls home to families back east, to squares whom they had cut out of their lives, to fathers and mothers who would have no choice but to take them in. Some were refugees from the free love and drug experiments of Haight-Ashbury or its LA equivalent. The dawn of the Reagan era and the emergence of much harsher street drugs made all that freedom seem naïve and dangerous, and free love had run into the reality of human nature and antibiotic-resistant disease. AIDS wasn't a word yet but was on the horizon.

The Rabbit would stop every few hours at a rest area and at one the woman on the run from Synanon just disappeared, along with her child, and no one knew where they went. We searched the rest area but couldn't find them and after an hour we drove off.

Our bus made it as far as tiny Shamrock, Texas, about an hour east of Amarillo, where it broke down. The locals were not happy to have such a motley crew inside their establishments so we huddled out in the cold or stayed on the broken bus under our sleeping bags. None of us had much money for restaurants anyway. We passed the time talking and singing and I asked one of the jugglers to show me a few things while we milled around outside.

After our bus was repaired we rumbled on through the night and all the following day and it got us as far as Milwaukee, where it broke down again, this time for good. Christmas was only a few days away and the snow was deep. I had just enough money left to get a real Greyhound bus to Charleston.

Soon the Grey Rabbit fleet (two buses) and the names were bought out by Greyhound. The operation closed entirely a few years later when Reagan-era airline deregulation made airfares much cheaper.