If, in all my miles and years of traveling, I could soundly say that I have learned anything at all, it is this: the easiest way is usually the most boring way. This is true of most things — but it is especially true of travel. Because in all my miles on the American road, I’ve found that the most interesting routes, roads, trails, and methods are basically all tedious, unorthodox, obscure, and time-consuming.
There are times when ‘boring’ is quite good, of course. As ‘interesting’ as it could be to travel to the hospital by way of a donkey cart when one has broken a leg — most people would far prefer the sane, simple, clear comforts of an automobile or an ambulance in such a case. But outside of the most dire emergencies and the most mundane sorts of tasks, it is always my policy to choose the least convenient, most ridiculous, circuitous route to travel from point A to point B.
For this proclivity of mine, I am always amply rewarded. In fact, the more inconvenient, difficult, and strange my route — the better.
When my wife and I began our journey southward to grandmother’s house for Easter Sunday dinner, we sought to do a thing that I have never heard of anyone doing before — we aimed to cross the northern quadrant of New York State using only local rural county transit buses. No driving automobiles, no Amtrak or Greyhound, no coach bus or taxi if we can help it; not even any real walking, cycling or hitchhiking. I’d searched out and found schedules for about a half-dozen obscure and mostly unknown rural bus routes, and strung them together into a bizarre and dirt-cheap long-distance traveling route.
This is much easier said than done. Each county’s transportation department seems to operate independent of the counties adjacent to it, and none of the schedules have been designed with intra-county transfers or long-haul transportation in mind. Moreover, these routes are not generally on Google Maps — in many cases, if they can be Googled at all, whatever digital footprint these bus schedules have is obscure, difficult to find, and often outdated. To find them, you must occasionally leaf through old, grainy PDF files of scanned schedules — some of which are unreadable, corrupted, or ‘dead links’. Very often, you simply have to call the office and see whether a route is still in operation or not; it may take numerous attempts to get them to answer the phone. Once you’ve done this, you must arrive at a stop at a certain time and begin planning which bus is next. Sometimes, to get to the next bus, you must walk miles and miles — or even stay overnight — all to cover a distance that, in a regular automobile, might take just a short while to travel!
For obvious reasons, no one does this. In fact, that it could be remotely feasible is not an idea that seems to have ever crossed the minds of the men and women who drive these rural transportation buses. On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation — a genre of public works that generally seems to go unseen, unnoticed, and often seems to be chronically underfunded. This is now and then true even in regions where the demand for such services is surprisingly substantial.
When I said that I’d write about it afterward, she said “maybe your article will get people out there to realize just how important these services really are. We need all the good publicity we can get.”
In a sense, rural public transit feels not only like an essential service for hinterlanders around the country, but like some last gasp or ember of a former, more "third world" America. To board these buses is to enter a world full of characters, where the clock runs a little slow, days are sleepy and long, and the map is totally imprecise.
The bus stops are often just tiny little shanties in the middle of nowhere; sometimes, they are only a sign nailed to a telephone pole and nothing more. The actual routes are cockamamie and often improvised — and the exact bus fare is occasionally vague. One bus we regularly use has a rider who seems to pay in car wash tokens; the driver said "yeah, by next month, I should have enough to get the bus washed!"
Sometimes, the check engine lights on the buses are blinking as we rattle down the backroads, but it doesn't stop the drivers from gunning those old buses up the mountain roads. The riders themselves vary from ex-cons fresh out of prison to Amish families to DUI guys, junkies, elderly farmers, developmentally disabled folks, impoverished families, and oddball eccentrics. Sometimes they bring things like pies to sell in town, 4-stroke engines, or even crates of live chickens. (The chickens are tolerated, by the way, not as livestock but as “emotional support animals” under ADA law!) You truly never know what you're going to see, who you're going to meet — and you never know just when you'll arrive at your destination.
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