The Bus Ride

Rexburg, Idaho has very little exciting to offer. The day I arrived I knew no one. My brother and sister-in law pulled my bags from their car and drove away. I was alone. When I entered the apartment there were five other girls that had moved in days earlier. I was the last to arrive and classes started the next day. I was officially attending Ricks Junior College with no idea what I wanted to study or even do with my life. I was eighteen and far from my parents home in Memphis, Tennessee. I don’t remember feeling afraid as much as I felt lost. The landscape was so peculiar. There was no green foliage to speak of but instead just dirty looking sagebrush and rock. The wind blew constantly across the wide open region and by mid- September I had already seen the first snowfall. The panorama improved with the shabby landscape blanketed in white. And with the snow came the sheets of ice. All over campus we would watch students wipe-out. The bigger the body the better the fall. Big muscular men were the most entertaining. We would rate the falls and laugh hysterically at the people trying to keep themselves upright after the ice had taken over their strides. While these were comical to watch, I never wanted to slip, tumble, scramble and fall myself.


School and I had always had a love-hate relationship. While I was content to be in school I felt aloof to it’s purpose. I had no vision of what I wanted to achieve. I played regularly and studied randomly and my average grades reflected my ho-hum attitude. By December I wanted to go home. I wasn’t home sick but I felt like I was wasting my time. As sad as I was to leave behind new found friends I was ready to go. When I announced to my parents that I was coming home to stay after only one semester they bought a greyhound bus ticket for me to travel back. A bus ride from Idaho to Tennessee is a very long ride.

I boarded early one morning, so early in fact it was still dark for several hours in the first part of the trip. Most everyone slept but when the morning sunlight came through the windows polite chit chat conversations began. By midday more serious ones about politics and religion were exchanged. I sat with one woman who was on her way to Denver to take care of her daughter after having twins. She was dressed up, pulled together looking and I wondered why she was on a greyhound bus. I already looked and felt unkept after my morning catnap.
When she exited in Denver a man entered the bus and sat across from me. He was probably in his late twenties. He struck up a conversation with me that started off harmless enough but then we began talking about more serious things; religion was one of the topics we covered. It’s easy to tell someone everything you believe when you have nothing invested in the relationship and you’ll never see them again. I don’t know where the conversation took the wrong turn but it did. He began pressing me for personal information, mumbled quietly to me about inappropriate things and spilled unnecessary private material about his sexual potency as a man. I was in over my head and incredibly immature but I felt a certain warning in the pit of my stomach to do everything I could to protect myself. I sometimes wonder what the adults around me heard him say and why they didn’t come to my rescue. He pressed me to get off the bus with him at one stop but I remained in my seat insisting I was tired and needed to sleep. It was my perfect escape to exit the conversation with him altogether. When I awoke the discussion picked back up quickly where it had ended, only now he wanted me to get off the bus with him at his final stop. It seemed as if he had been watching me for the moment I opened my eyes to start in without delay. I felt the uneasiness of my predicament. While I was not confident enough to be loud, I was firm in my refusal. I was relieved to see him finally leave and felt more guarded in conversations during the rest of the trip with the other passengers.

Late into the night, most everyone was trying to fall asleep. The running lights were turned off inside and people pulled out small pillows and wrapped themselves in blankets to settle in for the night. There was one problem. A very loud distraction came from the back of the bus; a young mother with a baby that screamed and cried incessantly. The baby was named Alicia. I can still remember the mother screaming her name over and over again in an effort to quiet her. The mother was full of anxiety as she chain smoked cigarettes and continued to scream her young daughter’s name.


“Alicia, Alicia, Alicia!”

It only made matters worse for the crying child and her mother. Both were overwrought, tired and anxious. I pulled off my blanket, stood up from my seat and walked back to where she sat. I leaned down to her and spoke, trying not to embarrass her and offered to take Alicia to allow her a chance to rest. She promptly handed me the baby, then her pacifier and blanket came almost hurling at me. I wrapped the young Alicia in her blanket and began pacing up and down the narrow aisle of the bus. At some points I stopped and rocked her and within a few minutes she was fast asleep and so was her exhausted mother. I waited to be sure she was in a deep sleep before I sat down again. When I finally got back to my place I eased into my seat carefully. I looked at this sleeping baby. There was something very peaceful for me with her nuzzled in my arms. I leaned my head back and rested. In the darkness and with the humming sound of the road I felt calm.

I discovered a lot during that bus ride. When I was clearly in trouble the people around me turned their head. Without their intervention, I had found a way, no matter how timid it was, to rescue myself. In complete reversal, I saw someone else's need and stood to make a difference. That bus ride was the best class I had attended all semester.