Greyhound E-Book

Joanna Pocock

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 458

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.

Leseprobe

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‘In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers.’ — Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

‘Greyhound is a cool, generous book, an eyewitness account of the end of an empire. I liked crossing the USA in Pocock’s company – she is open in her encounters and thinks carefully about it all: appification, motel breakfasts, dawn over the mountains, the people who queue at the bus stop. The journey felt seamless and absorbing, like a long take.’ — Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency

‘Pocock’s writing is intellectually and emotionally thrilling. In Greyhound she brings us on a road trip through America’s alienated hinterlands – anonymous motels, all-night diners, blighted backstreets – as she builds a kind of philosophy of transience. I’d follow her anywhere.’ — Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

‘Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound manages to be two things at once: a perfect American road trip story in the model of John Steinbeck and Simone de Beauvoir, and a brilliant critique of that most seductive and insidious of genres. In her hands, the American road is rendered in all its gorgeous complexity, a place of violence and inequality, as well as a route to liberation.’ — Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest4

‘Pocock reveals a complicated American landscape from the shabby seats of Greyhound buses and through a pinhole of grief as she retraces her past and a country’s past and finds suffering and redemption in both. She is at the mercy of the communities and the country she encounters, which, like the nation itself, is also gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson’s Angels and Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamorous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil.’ — Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town

‘Joanna Pocock’s haunting, haunted journey across America’s edgelands tells a troubled story of the country’s journey to a more insular version of itself. Yet the dream of travel still holds, and the way we move can still move us. Her eye for the beauty of the gas station and the entrancing ennui of motel-land call to mind the photographs of Robert Adams and Blood in the Tracks-era Dylan. Most of all, she captures the camaraderie and transcendence of bus travel, where “strangers are connected by the simple need to get somewhere”. Greyhound is as expansive as the landscape it travels through.’ — David Farrier, author of Nature’s Genius

‘Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, Joanna Pocock rides the bus through our broken America with the eyes of a time traveller, on highways that are also paths through memory, skillfully intertwining narratives of her own journeys through different stages of life and others who have traced similar routes. Greyhound bears witness to how the damage we feel in our own lives and communities is rooted in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live, and in doing so provides a powerful prism through which to think about where we have been, where we are going, and other roads we could take.’ — Christopher Brown, author of A Natural History of Empty Lots5

‘Greyhound is an instant classic, a chronicle of desperation, anger and violence, as well as the luminous beauty and humanity that four decades of neoliberal looting have been unable to kill off from the American countryside. Pocock’s eye is sharp and her prose crackles with wistfulness, fleeting camaraderie and vitality. Not since William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways has a book so captured the feeling of the road.’ — Daegan Miller, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent

Praise for Surrender

‘This is a bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock’s elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.’ — Tom Smalley, Spectator

‘Pocock is an environmentalist, yet she is also clearly a humanist. She is always willing to hear people out, no matter how extreme their points of view, and to accept the limits of her own knowledge…. [W]hether it is climate crisis or midlife crisis, Pocock holds her themes lightly, allowing the “fluidity of life” to run its course.’ — Clare Saxby, Times Literary Supplement

‘Land and water, flesh and blood. The planet and the body. Society and the person. Surrender maps these profound fractal relationships with a precision and sensitivity that stunned me. Here is a singular spiritual travelogue of the American West that is worthy of D. H. Lawrence.’ — Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air 6

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GREYHOUND

JOANNA POCOCK

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For Jason and Eve10

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‘The Anglo-American… fells the forests and drains the marshes; lakes as large as seas and huge rivers resist its triumphant march in vain. The wilds become villages, and the villages towns. The American, the daily witness of such wonders, does not see anything astonishing in all this. This incredible destruction, this even more surprising growth, seems to him the usual progress of things in this world. He gets accustomed to it as to the unalterable order of nature.’ — Alexis de Tocqueville, A Fortnight in the Wilderness (1832), tr. Gerald Bevan

‘O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you / you express me better than I can express myself.’ — Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Open Road’ (1855)

‘According to Hedges & Company, there were 286.9 million registered cars in the US in 2020. That’s 0.84% more than 2019’s 284.5 million units. The same study also suggests that by the end of 2021, 289.5 million vehicles would be roaming the roads of America. The US automotive industry has experienced its fair share of ups and downs. This is due to factors such as the oil and energy crisis, improvement of fuel economy, fluctuation of gas prices, innovative upgrades, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some factors have a larger impact than others.’ — financesonline.com12

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphGreyhoundPlaylist from my Greyhound Bus TripsBibliographyIllustrationsAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

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Greyhound

¶ Travelling on a Greyhound bus, you can disappear.

The day hadn’t yet begun as we pulled out of Detroit. We were heading to St. Louis through lashing rain under a black sky. The only sounds were the regular swish of windshield wipers and the rhythmic sucking of rubber tyres on wet tarmac. It was too early for conversation. The people around me seemed weary. Some looked like they hadn’t slept in days. Others had come prepared with pillows, eye masks and blankets. The woman next to me appeared lost in her thoughts. No phone, no book, she was just sitting. I could sense she was working something out in her mind. The reading lights didn’t work and I nodded off.

When I woke from a light sleep, I could just make out the skeletons of electricity pylons and the sprawling bodies of industrial buildings through the large foggy window. Every now and then the bright lights of gas stations and truck stops veered into view, signalling food, rest, a break from the grey monotony of the highway.

As I became more awake I noted fields, the outline of scrubby trees, ads for RV campgrounds, enormous parking lots, 18-wheelers, truck dealerships, farms, phone masts, a U-Haul storage centre with electric yellow windows lit from the inside, rusting CN boxcars, factories, the odd small opalescent body of water just about visible under the tungsten glow of the edgelands – a glow that dimmed with the brightening of the dawn. We passed a building whose chimney was on fire. No one seemed aware of it. The flames carried on burning in the muted landscape as we sped past.

It was March 2023 and I was on a Greyhound bus retracing a 2,300-mile journey from Detroit to Los Angeles – a trip I had taken in 2006. As a non-driver, 14my only options for crossing the continent solo consist of hitchhiking, taking a train, or a bus. For several years, I’d felt a pull to remake this journey, to revisit the motels, diners, highways, parking lots, towns, cities, suburbs and truck stops. I was curious to see how the places I had travelled through in 2006 had changed, while simultaneously catching a glimpse of the person I had been then. A ragged person running away from loss.

Marc Augé, the late French anthropologist, sees these revisited ‘places of memory’ as opportunities to face ‘the image of what we are no longer’. A place can offer a palimpsest of one’s past and present: the superimposition of our current selves onto the memories we have of a place allow us to be, in Augé’s words, ‘tourists of the private’.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I tried to satisfy my urge to strike out across the United States by immersing myself in the literature of the Great American Road Trip. My journeying would be a literary one, as I followed fictional characters and writers into temporal and spatial zones forbidden to me.

I travelled with Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac’s narrator in On the Road, in his search for the beating heart of the artist and visionary, for transcendence, for that sense of immensity and freedom that comes from racing across a continent chasing the unknown. And there was John Steinbeck, who in 1960, drove from Long Island to the Pacific coast and back again with his poodle and documented his 10,000-mile journey in Travels with Charley. In 1934, almost forty years before Steinbeck, the journalist and author James Rorty drove from Easton, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, interviewing people along the way and describing their working conditions in fields and factories. Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental 15American Journey is an extraordinary and angry work.

16‘I encountered nothing,’ Rorty wrote,

in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to makebelieve. Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it. Of all the facts I dug up, none seemed so significant or so dangerous as the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it.

The book that spoke to me the most was Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon, a Missouri-born author of Irish, English and Osage ancestry. In 1978, Least Heat-Moon lost his job teaching English. On the day that he was fired, his wife, from whom he’d been separated for nine months, announced that she was now seeing ‘her “friend” Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.’ Least Heat-Moon decided to head off in his van across the US the very next day. ‘A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,’ he wrote. I knew this feeling well: a sense that fleeing was the best way to face change and loss.

Once the pandemic began to lift and my thoughts returned to the Greyhound, I wondered how I would feel sitting in the enclosed space of a bus. Would I be imagining the vectors of aerosols from my fellow passengers as they talked? Would I be envisioning traces of the virus on my armrest tracked in from a motel reception area? The innocent and unquestioned sharing of air with other people had become infected with fear. But my desire to revisit these places and a younger version of myself became too insistent to ignore.

I needed to know what it would be like as an older woman, a less vital and sexually adventurous one, a more 17circumspect one, to revisit my 2006 journey and re-engage with the world in our post-pandemic landscape. I wanted to see how I would respond to the sleeping head of a passenger as it tilted towards me on the bus, how I would react to the offer of sharing a pair of headphones or a bag of crisps. Would it be met with the Covid-infected knee-jerk ‘No, thanks’ of self-preservation and paranoia? Or the grace, humour and gratitude from the before times?

I would not only be revisiting the motels, cities, highways, parking lots, edgelands and upholstered seats of the Greyhound (that is, if they still existed) – I would also be revisiting my younger self. I would be trying to recapture Marc Augé’s ‘fugitive feelings … where all there is to do is “see what happens.”’ I put away my books and my fear and bought an airline ticket so I could make the journey that seventeen years earlier had emerged from a sense of profound grief. 18

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¶ It was a cold January morning in 2006, when my husband Jason and I got to the Royal London hospital. I knew it was dead. I had been mourning my sister Mary for eighteen months and now there was another death, but this one was inside me. The familiar jelly was rubbed onto my stomach and the nurse standing at the ultrasound machine gave me the news I was expecting: there was no heartbeat. It was my third miscarriage. I had become adept at recognizing the exact moment life ceased inside me: my morning sickness lifted, the metallic taste in my mouth disappeared, fatigue drained from my limbs and my appetite returned. I no longer retched when I smelled coffee, alcohol or frying garlic.

My husband Jason’s face wore a sombre expression. We said nothing to each other for some time. There really was nothing to say. It took several weeks for us to return to those normal conversations about what we might cook for dinner, what film we might watch, which friends we might invite over, how work was going. I worried that the double punch of another miscarriage with the death of my sister could damage me for life, that I might never again experience any sort of levity or joy, that I had to accept life without children, life as a trail of disappointments and deaths.

I held these losses close and while turning them around in my mind, I decided that I needed to do something that I would not have been able to do if I were cradling an infant in my arms. I decided that what I needed was to travel, to move, to remind myself how good it felt to be unencumbered. I wanted to escape my desire for a child, and my grief, and revel in being unburdened by domesticity. I could achieve this, I thought, by crossing the United States from east to west on a Greyhound bus.

Jason gave me £1,000 to help with my trip; in 2006 that 20covered most of it. Then, I got out the maps. I spent weeks staring at them, reading out the names of places while working out my route. So many of the names were stories, erasures, fabrications and myths. The place names in Kentucky seemed the most visceral and evocative: Decoy, Subtle, Mud Lick, Mummie, Neon, Minnie, Mousie, Hazard, Viper and Defiance. But my route wouldn’t be taking in Kentucky: I would start in my home province of Ontario and finish in Los Angeles.

While my sister in Toronto was dying, a fictional character called Karl Jones appeared in my imagination. A no-bullshit, androgynous eighteen-year-old from Napanee, Ontario, she became my companion as well as the central character in a novel I had started writing which opens with Karl nursing her terminally ill father. After his death, Karl (like me) is grief-stricken. During her father’s final weeks, Karl’s estranged mother, Jean, has begun calling and leaving desperate messages. Karl hasn’t spoken to Jean in thirteen years. The phone calls are like guerrilla attacks: her mother is broke and wants the house in Napanee. Freed of her caring duties, angry and uncertain about her future Karl gets on a Greyhound bus and heads to Las Vegas where Jean is working as a waitress at the El Cortez. I would travel in Karl’s footsteps and stake out her friends, see where she grew up and look out the Greyhound window partly through the eyes of a smart, funny teenager. That way I could grieve and keep moving and I had something to write, a character and a plot to develop. Having a project and a plan filled the gaps left in the absence of joy and the sense of a future worth heading towards.

When I landed in Toronto on 10 March 2023 to begin my most recent cross-country journey, I walked under a 21glowering sky from the airport concourse to a bus stop where I was to board a Megabus to Napanee. Snow was coming down in large clumps and I had that awful post-long-haul flight taste in my mouth: of bad food, cheap wine, no sleep and recirculated air. And I was about to face a five-hour bus trip.

I stood next to pillar C8 in the departures area, where the Megabus app told me I would find my stop. A blizzard was whirling and I worried that my bus might not show up. Inside the airport, I found an information desk and asked the woman behind the counter whether buses would be running in this weather. She leaned forward to look out a window where wind was smearing dirty white gobs of snow across the glass. She looked at me, puzzled. ‘Oh, this is nothing. Nothing at all! Your bus will be fine.’ I had been out of Canada for too long. I had forgotten what winter was like here.

I waited in the warmth of the airport, with one eye on pillar C8. Nearby, a young woman with three kids sat on the floor Facetiming someone on her phone. She was crying. Her kids were playing with a luggage trolley, blocking out her tears by inhabiting their own alternate reality. The woman was begging for something, but I was too far away to hear what she was saying. A security guard showed up and squatted next to her. I could tell from his body language and the tone of his voice that he had come to offer help rather than to move her on. She was sobbing now and her phone was on the floor next to her, her face in her hands, her children ignoring what was going on. I headed out into the blizzard to stand by pillar C8, feeling haunted by this woman. She wasn’t wearing a winter coat, nor were her kids.

The bus shelter was on a paved section of the airport departures area where people were being dropped off 22by taxis, friends, family. It was dark now and very cold. A young guy showed up and stood next to me in the little bus shelter. He was holding one long-stemmed white rose.

‘Do you know if this is the bus stop for Kingston?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m going to Napanee and I think it’s the same bus.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘London,’ pause, ‘England.’ You have to say ‘England’ in Canada or people will think you mean London, Ontario.

‘Cool. What are you doing going to Napanee?’

I told him I was working on a book, a travel book. I hadn’t decided what I would tell people yet when they asked, which I knew they would. I am superstitious about talking about my writing. The White Rose Guy wanted to know more. I said I was writing about crossing the US on a Greyhound bus.

‘Sweet,’ he said. And then I got his story: he was twenty-one, had studied firefighting – structural, rather than wildfires – and he was going to visit his girlfriend in Kingston, hence the rose.

‘But you’re having a real adventure,’ he said.

Looking down at my phone for the live Megabus route, I noticed that the little bus icon had passed the airport and was on the way to Napanee. White Rose Guy checked his phone and it said the same thing. We both panicked and questioned whether the bus could have shown up while we were chatting. Did we miss it? How could we have? It was dark and blizzarding, but we could see the road right next to us. By this time, it was 7 p.m. in Toronto, which made it 2 a.m. for me. I was cold and tired and worried that I’d have to conjure somewhere to 23sleep. Just as White Rose Guy and I were discussing what we might do, the bus appeared, a ghostly apparition in the snow. It hadn’t passed us at all; the Megabus app was wrong.

The ride to Napanee was treacherous. Snow turned to freezing rain. High winds made the bus feel unstable on the road. The highway was littered with accidents and vehicles were stuck in snow drifts. Snowplows and large trucks outnumbered cars. Our bus skidded. I could feel ice under the wheels. There were no overhead lights so I couldn’t read, but I was too anxious to sleep. All I could do was stare out at the occasional flashing lights of emergency vehicles emerging from the white-out.

We got to Belleville at ten o’clock. An older passenger got off the bus and was greeted by a young man. Both of them in parkas. They hugged like bears.

I got dropped off just after eleven at a giant Petro-Canada station on Highway 41 bordering the outskirts of Napanee. Eighteen-wheelers were parked in rows next to a 24-hour Denny’s. I found myself in a brilliantly lit oasis in the snow, like a frozen stage set constructed to showcase a diner, a gas station, semi-trailer trucks and giant cars. Across the highway from this bright petroleum-fuelled tableau and through the flying snow I could just make out the backlit Royal Napanee Inn sign. I ran across the empty road and rang the bell. Despite the late hour, someone magically appeared to hand me my room key. There was no one around, just gigantic snow drifts, sleeping trucks and neon signs designed to be seen by drivers in their cars from miles away. I flopped into bed.

I was woken at 7.30 in the morning with a noise that took me straight back to childhood: the scrape of a metal shovel on icy concrete. I opened the door of my motel room onto 24blinding sunlight, reflecting off dazzling, fresh snow. The person shovelling – or scraping – the hardened snow from the motel steps was Betty, a sweet woman in a knitted tuque embroidered with I CANADA. She lived rent-free in the motel in return for doing jobs around the place.

25I showered, dressed and headed across the highway through a maze of parked fuel trucks in the forecourt of the Petro-Canada station. All these machines looked strangely beautiful covered in glittering snow under a pure, clear blue sky. In Denny’s, I was greeted by a small sea of baseball caps and chequered shirts, and made my way to a table by a window where dust motes danced in the rays of sunshine. The talk among customers was last night’s blizzard. I looked out onto the parking lot at the polished, silver tanker trucks.

‘So nice to see the sun, eh, after last night’s storm,’ the waitress said as she poured my coffee.

After breakfast I checked out of the Royal Napanee Inn. I had stayed there for logistical reasons: it was the only motel within walking distance of the bus stop. My actual destination had always been the Fox Motor Inn, where I had stayed in 2006. I asked Roger, the owner of the Royal Napanee Inn, if he could call me a taxi. He needed to know where I was going and I had to come clean.

‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘I could have offered you a deal on two nights.’

What I didn’t tell him was that the Fox Motor Inn was where my previous trip had begun, when I had gone looking for the house of the fictional Karl Jones who, at the beginning of my novel, is working as a catering assistant. Instead, we wished each other well and I thanked him.

As I waited for my taxi in the parking lot, a guy pulled up in a Dodge Ram 1500. ‘You need sunglasses,’ 26he shouted. His English was accented. Russian, maybe. He got out of his truck waving his arms frantically. ‘Your brain can’t compute all these rays going into your retinas.’ He went on about the percentage of the sun’s rays going into our bodies and how they are processed by our minds and the damage I was doing to myself standing in this parking lot. I squinted at him as he stood against the rising sun. I was unable to comprehend what he was telling me and I needed coffee.

I was grateful when my taxi arrived. It dropped me in front of the Fox Motor Inn, an anonymous chalet-style motel sprawled along Highway 2, a road which began its life as a stagecoach trail and was now a paved highway stretching across southern Ontario. My diary entry from 2006 also mentions a taxi journey to the Fox Motor Inn. The date was 3 April 2006, a date which was to take on huge significance the following year, though I did not know this then. There were no Ubers, so I had shared a cab to the motel with a guy a few years younger than me, in his mid- to late-thirties, handsome in a clean-cut sort of way. He asked where I was from, and I told him I was from Canada but that I now lived in England. He was from Buckinghamshire but lived in Napanee. Our driver piped up. He had come from Dorset as a teenager to work in Canada. I was the only Canadian-born person in the cab, but I didn’t live in Canada, which felt somehow very Canadian.

There were no shared taxis on this recent trip. Jim, the owner, greeted me and asked how I’d liked the Royal Napanee Inn.

‘How did you know I stayed there?’ I asked, confused.

‘When you called me earlier to ask about an early check-in, I recognized the phone number.’

‘Oh,’ I replied. 27

28‘But, it’s fine. We’re friends, Roger and I. We’re both from India.’

The Hotel Wars in Napanee seemed convivial enough.

March can be an ugly time of year in Ontario. The snow is often just beginning to melt, and scruffy yellow patches of grass appear like small, hairy scabs. In 2006, I had arrived terribly underdressed, having forgotten that spring could be so cold. This time, I bought a puffy down coat especially for the trip. I looked like the smallest figure in one of those Russian nesting dolls, tiny and rounded. Fresh snow was piled high on every surface, from spindly tree branches to gabled roofs like towers of marshmallow fluff. A big blue sky hovered above everything.

After checking into the Fox, I walked along the main road into town. The outskirts hadn’t changed much, but as I approached the centre, I noticed many of the cafés and restaurants I remembered were no longer there, although a couple of new ones had sprung up. The frozen banks of the Napanee River looked the same: like jagged teeth around the liquid mercury tongue of the water.

I was sad to see the Superior Restaurant & Tavern on Dundas Street had closed. The place had been decorated with larger-than-life photomurals of autumn woodlands, waterfalls and undulating farmland. Moose antlers, taxidermy, dusty Christmas decorations and knick-knacks had made their way into every corner. Back in 2006 the owner had greeted me with the Greek welcome, tikanis. There had been only one other customer that night: a man eating alone. I remember ordering the vegetarian moussaka.

The other diner, who was at a nearby table, shouted, ‘Good choice! Not like that Kraft stuff, that white stuff,’ he 29mysteriously added.

30After we’d both eaten our meals in silence, he approached and told me how he used to be into photography but now that he was blind, he had to see what everyone else sees in his own head. He asked how I’d liked my moussaka and whether I was a tourist. Before I could answer, he said that there were better months to be a tourist in Napanee.

‘My timing is always terrible,’ I said.

He replied, ‘Your timing is beautiful because I got to talk to you,’ and then turned and walked out.

As I left the Superior that night, snow began to fall, great huge flakes of it.

The Superior Restaurant & Tavern has now become the Touch of Class fashion boutique, ‘a “one stop shop” for women of all ages filled with smart casual wear, resort, formal wear, shoes, jewelry, handbags and accessories’. There was no one there to tell me my timing was beautiful.

I wandered around Napanee in the cold, taking photographs until my fingers froze. At Conservation Park, the ‘Greater Napanee’ sign read ‘Greater for Many Reasons’. I marvelled that someone had presumably been paid to provide branding of such extreme vagueness. Two joggers in shorts and sneakers were heading in my direction. I was wearing boots and could easily navigate the snowbank, so I scrambled aside to give them space. They both effusively huffed a very Canadian ‘thank you’. I walked along County Road 2, the first paved road in Canada, which joins Kingston and Toronto. It turns into the town’s main street, Dundas Street, where it crosses the Napanee River. There were fewer restaurants and bars, fewer places where people could gather. This would turn out to be a portent of what was to come. 31

As the sun dipped and the sky turned a cold, hard black, 32I headed to the Loaf N’ Ale, one of the few downtown restaurants still going. I sat at the bar nursing a glass of wine from the vineyard of the much-loved Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky. The place still flew its union flags, but it had been refurbished and updated. I remembered the conversation I’d had here back in 2006. The man next to me at the bar had been talking to the barmaid about Gerard, who had smoked like a chimney, worked hard and played hard; he’d died of a heart attack a few days before my visit. The wake was to be that very night. The guy next to me kept saying, in his British accent, ‘It is just too damn bad about Gerard.’ The barmaid replied, ‘He tried to smoke his troubles away,’ shaking her blonde head.

Another man at the bar, this one in a tweed jacket and a flat cap, noticed me writing in my journal and came over to tell me that his wife had just written a novel. He asked where I lived and when I told him, he said he hated London because there were too many ‘different colours and people from all over’ – words that tumbled straight into my journal. The owner of the Loaf N’ Ale heard I was from out of town. He sat on the stool next to mine and told me he had emigrated from Kent. He was another London-hater. ‘No one bloody speaks English there!’ They all laughed.

I had always known Karl would leave Napanee. It was becoming clearer to me why.

As I got my wallet out to pay, the Englishman said, ‘It’s already been taken care of.’ I felt ashamed that despite my protests about London being not at all as they described it, these men still saw me as one of them. 33

34After my glasses of Wayne Gretzky wine, I walked along the icy, deserted streets back to the Fox Motor Inn. It was a Saturday night, but no one was out. I slipped into bed and wondered how different this trip would be to the one I had done all those years ago. How many of the changes I was noticing were inside me – as fugitive feelings – and how many were in the landscape, on the pavement, in other people and in the ether?

Downtown Napanee on a Sunday morning offered very little by way of cafés or diners. Some shopfronts were boarded up – possible casualties of a lethal combination of Covid-19, the exodus to online shopping and big-box stores out of town. Thankfully Tammy’s, a diner serving bottomless cups of coffee, was still going. I rocked up at four minutes to eight on the morning of my departure. An elderly couple was waiting in their truck for the place to open. As soon as a waitress appeared, they stepped out of their vehicle. The elderly gentleman held the diner door open for his wife and then for me. They took their seats at a window table. A man in Day-Glo orange gloves, a hunting cap, jeans, a red-and-black chequered shirt walked in gingerly using a cane.

‘Hello Den,’ the elderly couple said in unison.

The waitress asked, ‘Do you need a menu, Den?’

‘Nope,’ Den said as he took a seat.

The talk this morning was about daylight savings. The elderly gentleman noted that the restaurant was quieter than usual.

‘I guess everyone is sleeping in ’cuz the clocks changed,’ the gentleman said, although it was still only twelve minutes past eight on a Sunday morning. As people parked up outside the large plate glass window and entered, they wiped their feet, greeted each other with a tip of the hat, a handshake or a pat on the back. They all 35knew each other by name.

I am wary of romanticizing the excruciating claustrophobia 36and conservatism that can exist in small communities where everyone knows who’s getting divorced, whose kids are buying weed, whose teenager has just had an abortion, and so on. But this wariness exists in tandem with my knowledge that our state and public institutions are often failing when it comes to looking after our welfare. Communities are left to do the work that larger public bodies have been tasked with, but can often no longer provide. What I sensed here in Tammy’s was the cohesiveness of a close-knit community. I could imagine the casseroles left on back porches for bereaved families, the sandwiches tucked into a kid’s backpack by someone who knows his parents are struggling financially, the offers of a drive to that difficult hospital appointment, the quiet, unremarkable kindnesses that make up the social fabric of small towns. It was palpable in this restaurant at 8.15 on a Sunday morning.

The waitress refilled the coffees of the elderly couple. ‘How is everything tasting,’ she asked.

‘Excellent,’ the gentleman replied, ‘as always. It never changes, which is how I like it.’

I knew what he meant.

I finished eating and wandered with my suitcase into town towards the VIA Rail station where I would be getting a train to Toronto and then on to Windsor, where I’d catch a shuttle bus to Detroit. That was where my real trip would begin. I bought a sandwich for the journey from the one place open, the unfortunately named ‘Butter My Buns’. Armed with a giant Havarti roll, I bumped into the guy who had lectured me outside my motel about UV rays and the damage they were doing to my retinas. He didn’t 37recognize me. Again, he came a bit too close: ‘You know the terrible thing is that the only people who actually care are the Karens! Everyone gets them wrong. They are the only people who care.’

38He wandered off.

A woman caught my eye and leaned in, ‘I see you’ve met the Crazy Mathematician,’ she whispered. ‘He was in Tim Horton’s and I had to leave. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take all of them. One guy was literally talking to the wall.’ She looked a bit sad herself. ‘But the thing is, they’ve got nowhere else to go.’

I got to the train station early. It was empty. By ‘empty’, I mean derelict. It was boarded up and graffitied and looked to be out of commission. I wasn’t expecting a human to be there, but I thought maybe there would be a sign with some information, or a timetable pinned up somewhere. Perhaps a bench. I wondered whether the station’s permanent closure meant that trains no longer stopped here. I had a ticket, but maybe there was another station I didn’t know about. I looked online and it seemed Napanee had only one train station and that I was standing at it. What I could see in front of me – a deserted and boarded up station – did not correspond to what I was seeing on the screen of my phone. I was forced to trust the algorithm and was feeling unmoored by this disassociation between reality and its online version.

I was standing outside in the cold wondering where I could find a warm place to wait when the Crazy Mathematician re-appeared. He lived in Montreal, he told me, and he had been planning to buy a house in Belleville where the ‘jobs were plentiful and the girls were pretty’, but he’d missed that boat. Belleville was booming so he was going to buy in Napanee instead. As he talked, 39he scoured the ground picking up cigarette butts. He claimed to be looking for his cell phone. He asked me where I was going. ‘Toronto, Windsor, then Detroit,’ I told him.

He told me he was from the Czech Republic and then added, ‘You know women make more incorrect statements than men. It’s a fact.’

I tried projecting disinterest. My reading glasses were on, my finger still firmly holding the place in my book.

He added cryptically, ‘When a man forces himself on a woman, it’s a boy. When he is forced to pull out early, it’s a waste.’

A car pulled up. A guy with long grey hair sat in the driver’s seat smoking a joint, listening to Bob Marley. Canada geese flew in formation overhead. Finally, my train arrived. 40

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¶ From Napanee I had to get myself back to Toronto, where I spent a night with family, in order to get the 6 a.m. train to Windsor, Ontario – which is just across the American–Canadian border from Detroit. It was dark when I set out for Union Station and the Toronto streets were covered in slush. Greyhound Canada went out of business in 2021, so I would have to make this journey by train. In my carriage, people either hunkered down over laptops or slept. As we approached Windsor, a flat disc of sun emerged from behind thin metallic clouds. Snow fell faintly. The ground turned the colour of zinc. The scene was oddly romantic in a grim way, like the background to an early Gus Van Sant film where the protagonist’s yearning doesn’t extend much beyond the need to ‘get out’. I wandered around Windsor’s train station looking for a coffee shop. Everything was shut. It was freezing. I gave up and walked back to the train station to get a taxi to the Windsor–Detroit terminal. My taxi driver said he wasn’t sure the buses to Detroit were running.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘They stopped running during Covid. I’m not sure they’re back up yet.’ I felt that familiar fear creep up inside me. Whenever I cross a border, I am hit with neurotic guilt as if I’ve committed a crime unknown even to myself. There is also the fear of simply getting everything wrong, of reading the instructions incorrectly.

‘Most people take a taxi across to Detroit,’ he said.

‘How much does that cost?’

‘Sixty dollars.’

‘Well, the bus is seven-fifty, so I’m going with that.’

‘If it’s running,’ he said, fixing me with a stare in his mirror.

‘Right. If it’s running,’ I repeated. 44

As we drove along the river towards the Tunnel Bus, 45the snow got heavier. Big, proper flakes. The kind that as a child I would run outside for, to feel them melt on my tongue. Even in this fluffy white blanket, the border town of Windsor looked bleak. It’s sometimes referred to as the smog capital of Canada, partly because of its own car industry and also because it is at the end of a peninsula which juts south and west into Lake Erie and almost hits Detroit, a town with its own pollution problems.

The Detroit River, which separates Canada from the US, was named by the French: détroit meaning the ‘strait’ or the ‘narrow’ of a waterway. In 1701, the French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, gave the waterway the full name of ‘le détroit du Lac Érie’, as it joined the smallest of the Great Lakes with Lake St Clair. In 1908, Detroit News called the river ‘the Greatest Commercial Artery on Earth’. By then it was carrying almost 60 million metric tonnes of cargo from Detroit to ports around the world. To put this in perspective, in that same year, the port of London shipped fewer than 17 million tonnes and New York 18 million tonnes.

This beast of a waterway has carried birchbark canoes, freighters loaded with lumber, ships filled with furs, minerals and liquid chemicals. And there it was in a fog of frozen mist as we whizzed past. My cab driver dropped me at the station, where a bus was leaving for Detroit in thirty minutes. So much for the taxi driver’s if it’s running. I looked for somewhere to get coffee and found nothing nearby. I had been up since 5 a.m. and it was now 11, and I had been fuelled soley by adrenaline. I sat next to my bag on the floor, leaned my back against the wall and closed my eyes.

On this grey, drizzly morning only six of us were heading from Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, Michigan. The last 46time I had crossed this same border, I had been grilled by the customs officer. Canada still had Greyhounds running in 2006, so I had taken the bus from Napanee to Windsor, which then connected to the Tunnel Bus. At the border, we filed out of the bus into a small immigration office where a guard interrogated me. I explained that I was taking a Greyhound bus trip because I needed a break, I needed to get away, I’d lost another baby, I was sad. None of this went down very well. Where was my husband, she asked. In London, I replied. She wasn’t happy with this either. When she asked why I was really going to the US, I mumbled something about my dead sister and travelling as a way of getting over my grief. Her stare got more penetrating and she crossed her arms. It was one of those situations where the truth seemed to get me nowhere. I tried one more thing: I told her that I was writing a novel and my character was making this trip to find her estranged mother. At this her face lit up. I got to hear about the college course she was taking in novel writing. She was top of the class, working on her first book. She stuffed my things back into my bag and wished me a pleasant stay.

When I emerged from the tunnel in Detroit on thattrip, it was all smoking manhole covers, burnt-out buildings and overly large cars from the 1970s and 1980s spewing exhaust. People pushed shopping trolleys loaded with broken computers, keyboards, cans of food, stuffed toys and clothing. An indescribable sadness seeped straight up into me from the pavement. Beautifully ornamented Art Deco buildings sat empty. Back then, only the property developers seemed hopeful. Façades were hung with large plastic banners advertising LOFTS FOR SALE. I could hear the real estate jargon about up-and-coming neighbourhoods, revitalization, creative 47community hubs and curated retail spaces.

Off Detroit’s main drag were side streets lined 48with turreted late Victorian red brick houses like structures brought to life from an Edward Hopper painting, except none of Hopper’s yellow lights burned inside. Much of downtown was populated by pigeons and people who had either shot up or smoked something or were looking to. Karl, I thought, would want to stay in Detroit, at least for a night, to explore this foreign place. It was so close to Canada and yet it felt so completely alien.

While planning my 2023 bus trip, I tried to find small, independent motels close to the Greyhound stations I’d be stopping in. Detroit had none. The first thing that came up when I googled ‘Motel in Detroit’ was:

Fugitives | Kara | Detroit Become Human Walkthrough – To sleep in the motel, Kara needs to steal money from the grocery store and the clothes inside the laundromat. Kara doesn’t need the gun from Todd’s house to steal the money. Once both items were stolen, simply go towards the motel and use the money there.

This was followed by several questions:

How do you get into the abandoned house in Detroit: Become Human?

Can you escape the camp in Detroit: Become Human?

How do I cut a human fence in Detroit?

I couldn’t make sense of it. After several readings, I realized that the motel in Detroit that Google wanted me to 49walk through was virtual and part of an elaborate game. So, I added an ‘s’ to my search: ‘Motels Detroit’ and I got several in Windsor, which is not even in the same country. This trip would need patience.

The only cheap room I could find in the centre of Detroit was in a small building owned by a company called Sonder. I had tried to resist staying anywhere that required an app or that boasted of a ‘digital concierge’ and a ‘self check-in’ but here I was forced to give in to the appification of travel. The Tunnel Bus from Windsor dropped me right around the corner from the Sonder. My check-in time was three in the afternoon. I still had several hours to wait until I would hear my phone ping with the code for the building.

It was freezing. Snow was falling. The sky was grey and low. Downtown Detroit was not how I remembered it. Where burnt-out buildings with gaping windows lined the empty streets in 2006, there was now a Gucci, a Lululemon, vegan restaurants, cocktail bars and cash-free cafés selling $7 croissants. I was stunned by the change.

Smartly dressed Detroiters walked down the street clutching creamy pink coffee cups emblazoned with the word ‘Cannelle’ in a pretty, old-fashioned script. I headed in the direction they were coming from. This small café on Griswold Street was one block up from State Street, where Seymour Finney, an abolitionist tailor from New York, ran a livery stable in the 1850s that served as a crucial hideaway for freedom-seeking enslaved African Americans, en route to Canada on the Underground Railroad.

When I went to pay for my coffee in Cannelle, my Canadian debit card wouldn’t work, nor my British one. (I also had a Montana bank card which was equally useless.) 50Unlike many of the cafés and restaurants I was to visit, this one still accepted cash. I excavated the ‘emergency’ $100 bill from my wallet and handed it to the server. ‘Oh, an old one,’ she said holding the bill up to the light. ‘Did you make it this morning?’

‘I brought it with me from the UK via Toronto,’ as if telling her my itinerary would go some way to explaining the ‘old’ money.

‘Oh, so you made it yesterday,’ she quipped.

A familiar nervousness rose in me.

Our steady march towards a cashless society has created a growing sense of unease within me. When you have to rely on the digital realm for the privilege of buying food or other essentials, you are being asked to trust in something other than a belief in the value of money. You are being asked to trust in technology – the very same system that monitors us, harvests and sells our data and nudges into our social media with misinformation and advertising. This move towards a cash-free world fuels an existential anxiety that I will be denied service, be shut out of the smooth running of society by having my physical money rejected. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, many businesses had become ‘cash-free’, ostensibly for safety and hygiene reasons. And many have remained that way. This is yet another form of exclusion. It leaves out those who work in a cash economy while simultaneously keeping the rest of us plugged into the giant database tracking our consumption, our movements, our ‘spending power’. It increases the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the tracked and those who aren’t ‘in the system’.

I tuned in to the French chansons: Françoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, Édith Piaf playing in Cannelle. I felt incredibly tired but logged on to my laptop to see if any of the 51urban farms I had contacted had replied. In 2006, these places were only just springing up. I had heard that there were now over 200 acres of urban farms in and around Detroit. Not one had replied to my requests to visit. This was partly because everything was still frozen – it was minus 10 degrees Celsius, and nothing would be growing outside of a greenhouse. The volunteering that urban farms rely on for planting seeds, transplanting seedlings and harvesting had not yet begun. I had arrived in Detroit just a bit too early in the season.

My phone beeped with the code for my room at the Sonder. I was surprised that it was the same as the code for the front door on the street. Shouldn’t they be different? In a frenzy of panic partly fuelled by sleeplessness, I wrote the number on my hand, in my journal, in the ‘notes’ on my phone and emailed it to myself. I had covered every potential code loss. Then I received a text saying that one of the texts from the Sonder wasn’t secure and could be spam. How could I know what was spam and what was genuine? How can any of us know? I ignored the text, hoping that when I got to the building, the code would work. It did.

It is odd staying in a building that is not a hotel, nor an apartment building. One feels untethered in these spaces. There was a security person at the front desk and elevators to take you to your floor, but the place had a strange in-between feeling to it, akin to watching a cleverly made advertorial – you sense something is off but it’s hard to put it into words. All communication with the Sonder is done via the app or via email. There are no humans involved. I know this is the way everything is moving, but it’s destabilizing.

The apartment was spacious. The bedding was well 52made. It was clean. I googled ‘who owns the Sonder’ just to give myself a sense that there might be a person behind it, to make me feel that it wasn’t a completely disembodied space. The co-founder and CEO, Francis Davidson, had studied at McGill University – like my mother and two of my nephews (a link!). A deeper dive took me to an article Davidson had written. He talked of the ‘culture’ he was creating with his business – the culture that is ‘lived day-to-day’ by his employees. Davidson went on to define culture:

Culture isn’t perks, or fun events organized by the company. It’s a much broader, more meaningful idea which defines the behavioral code of every person in the organization. A well communicated culture should clearly spell out what behaviors are expected, and which are deemed unacceptable. This is accomplished by filtering who joins, who’s asked to leave, who rises up, and how everyone adapts their way of working and communicating to fit the management system.

This business speak, with its focus on efficiency and behaviour management, is chilling. ‘New recruits,’ Davidson wrote, ‘are filtered through a systematic hiring process. Onboarding feels close to a culture shock – much needs to be unlearned as new habits are formed.’ Onboarding? The forming of new habits? Isn’t this the language of cults? There was more: ‘The goal isn’t to get everyone to recite all values on day 1. The goal is to drive behavior. It’s OK if it takes months, or even years, to master all principles.’ Here I was sleeping in a bed built by corporate ideology and zealotry. There was a dishwasher, a washing machine, a tumble dryer, a shower and ample, good-quality toiletries. I was safe. I was warm. And yet it 53all felt so wrong.

The contrast between my night in the Sonder and my first night in Detroit, seventeen years ago, was stark. In 2006, I had planned to stay at the Temple Hotel, where it was rumoured Harry Houdini had visited in the 1920s – a detail Karl would have enjoyed. I called in advance but the woman who answered the phone told me that the owner wouldn’t let her give out the rates over the phone. When I got there, I realized it was a flop house. It was falling apart. People were lying on the front steps in various states of intoxication and the rooms were rentable by the hour. Number 72 Temple Street is now a vacant lot. After wandering off from the Temple Hotel, I had found myself in Greektown, where I came upon the Golden Fleece Restaurant, which back then had those classic blue and white chequered tablecloths and a simple, cheap menu.

Before taking my order, the owner, Vassilis, asked for ID before giving me a beer.

‘I’m forty years old,’ I retorted.

‘It’s the law.’

Vassilis joined me for a drink while the young and very pretty waitress showed customers to their tables. He asked me the same question as the woman at the border, ‘Where’s your husband?’

This was to become a refrain I would hear over and over during the next couple of weeks on that 2006 trip. I had never been asked this anywhere else in the world.

There are only three accounts of women undertaking the Great American Road Trip that I know of: Simone de Beauvoir’s 1948 America Day by Day (beautifully translated by Carol Cosman), British writer Ethel Mannin’s travelogue, An American Journey, written some twenty years later and The Great American Bus Ride by Irma Kurtz 54which was published in 1993. Unlike accounts by male writers, all three of these involve travel by Greyhound bus.