I grew up in the sixties and seventies. The expression “on the bus” had a special connotation. Ken Kesey coined it, “Are you on the bus, or off the bus?” I so wanted to be on the bus. Haight-Ashbury, free love, tuning in/turning on /dropping out, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, communes, happenings…..oh, I read about it all. The Civil Rights Movement in the States, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, protest marches….oh, I read and read and read all about it. I worked my way through the current history sections and the poetry and the cutting edge literature and….I was the reader. I was inflamed. I was not on the bus, or I was, but my teenage self was still in Niagara Falls, Ontario, at the library.
I had invitations to move to communes “somewhere north of Toronto.” To hitchhike to California, to take stuff, do stuff, and jump right in to everything my little heart was so attracted to. But the drug stuff didn’t appeal, and I knew that I was too young. So much could go wrong if I followed every trail. But I felt so trapped. I wanted in to the serious stuff. My heroes were the ones that were changing history, that lived their beliefs and were ahead of the pack. I knew even then that I would probably not agree with or even like these people as individuals, but I could certainly understand their importance in changing minds, that they were original thinkers.
I am thinking of busses. A Midland bus went by and I see the transit system is called EZRIDER. How ironic. I ride the busses back home in the Lower Mainland. It doesn’t bother me too much to be car-less. I think it has helped keep me grounded. That’s ironic, too. My last two losses were the car and the dog. The last of the big stuff. As I watched myself having to let go of people and places and things in my life, some voluntarily and by choice, others with an enormous amount of grief, I started to welcome the simplicity more and more. Acceptance. Just me. Just me. Just me.
“Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.”
This past summer taking the three busses and the one Skytrain that it takes for me to get where I go to in Vancouver has never been without some kind of illumination. I have developed a crazy, almost involuntary response to the 501 that goes through Port Kells to the King George Skytrain Station in Surrey. King George on a Friday night is humanity on parade. The swaggering, the poor, the shut down, the volatile, those out of this world, and the car-less, all coincide at that forlorn, cement junction. Perhaps it’s because I take Osho with me and read a few paragraphs, look up at the people around me, read again; Osho breaks down boundaries for me. Osho, with his mouthiness and his mandate that he not be followed but that we follow ourselves. That we go inward, not take up religions and bandwagons and become sheep, but go inward. Osho has been a trigger, and my own broken heart, and I have come to appreciate that 501.
Looking out at the no man’s land along 104th Street, it is so damn ugly and depressive to spirit that I’ve had to laugh or cry and just let go. “In Zen they have a certain phrase for it. They say it’s like whipping the cart. If your horses are not moving and you go on whipping the cart, it is not going to help. You are miserable, then anything you can dream, anything you can project, is going to bring more misery. So the first thing is not to dream, not to project. The first thing is to be here now. Whatsoever it is, just be here now – and a tremendous revelation is waiting for you.” That is Osho. That is riding the 501.
In 1974 I rode the bus from Cornerbrook to St. John’s, Newfoundland after an all night ferry ride from Nova Scotia. The train in Newfoundland, the Newfie Bullet, was no longer in service. I looked around at the other passengers and couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different about them. Then I saw it, it was something childlike. The adults were sitting cross-legged in their seats and facing each other as they engaged in animated conversation.
Before the Skytrain was built I took the Hastings Street bus to get to downtown Vancouver. It has earned its reputation. One rush hour, I was at the back, we were all packed in, and a man across from me on the long bench seat began asking each individual whether they had any nail clippers. To my horror, some fool cheerfully handed over a pair, whereupon he proceeded to take off his shoes and socks and cut his gruesome toenails. Nails were flying everywhere like missiles, hitting people, landing in laps, and all the polite Canadians just turned their heads and gagged. Not one of us yelled, “Give them to him on condition that he keep them and does his grooming elsewhere!”
There are days when you just close your eyes and will yourself home.
I went to Hawaii in April last year by myself. My friends and strangers all gave me advice on what to do and where to go and what to see. There were volcanoes, and tour busses and pineapple factories and certain shops and nightspots. I knew I would do none of the above. What I wanted to do was just sit on a local bus and stare out the window and be taken through other people’s neighbourhoods, and for the ride, taken out of my own head. The day of my plan started sunny and warm. I walked to Kailua and found a bus stop which would bring a bus that went north and all around the parameters of O’ahu before reaching Honolulu. Suddenly dark clouds rolled in and it rained hard and cold on all of us waiting at the stop. There were children and housewives and workers, no tourists. We were all quite chilled by the time the bus arrived half an hour late. Busses in Hawaii are air-conditioned so that was the only distraction, being somewhat under dressed and wet for the whole ride, which took more than four hours and cost me all of two dollars.
I sat in my window seat and watched the day move through its paces. Students got on and off. We passed the surfer beaches, the touristy store shacks, the Dole Pineapple factory, the university. A young man sat down beside me and we began to talk. I thought it was funny that we were the only redheads on the bus. He had a very long pony tail, and we looked related and so very white. Bruce was a drummer who worked construction and lived in a tent in the north part of the island. He had been in the U.S. military and “seen the world” and wanted no more part of that viewpoint. He said he had lived in Hawaii for three years and that it had taken almost that long for him to feel accepted. But once you are, he said, the hospitality of the Hawaiian people was unsurpassed. As we approached Honolulu he stood to get off and said something so sweet that I will never forget him. He asked me my name, took my hand, and said that today he had made a friend. And that he hoped before I left the island that I would experience Aloha. With a bow of his head he was gone.
Honolulu was desolate. There was a cold wind blowing and the connection for me to get back to the Lanikai area was at the back of a large grey, cement parkade. A well-dressed woman came over to me and said, “When you get old, don’t let anyone put you in a home.” I said that I wouldn’t, and she walked back over to where she had been waiting for her bus.
When I finally reached the town of Kailua I still had a few miles to go to the Lanikai neighbourhood where I was staying. I had rented a cottage in the backyard of an old hippie couple from Winnipeg, Andi and Klauss. By now I knew the shortcuts through Kailua, the schoolyards to cut through that would keep me off the main throughfares. The wind was fiercesome, the sky a midnight blue. The clack of the palm fronds sped me along. Past Buzz’s Steak House where there are celebrity sightings and up to the top of the Lanikai bluff that had a three point view of beach, and surf and sky. The wind was such a force I would have been gone if I’d had an umbrella. If I knew how to do it I would put here the snapshot I have of that bluff. But Tom’s in Fort Langley and I do not know how to get it out of my shoebox and up here onto this page. I’m counting on a thousand words being worth the picture.
These are the things I ponder.
Good Life
diane
your spirit is passed on to your children mamma, and for this i thank you