I'm standing at the counter inside the Texaco station at the north end of Centralia, Washington, trying to find out from the cashier how I can get some help at the Greyhound ticket counter at the rear of the store. She asks where I'm going, I tell her, "Olympia, or Tacoma," and she tells me she'll meet me back there in a minute. As I turn to head back there, the guy right behind me offers, "Hey, want a ride? I'm going that way." I politely decline, preferring a sleazy known to an unknown unknown, and head back to the Greyhound window.

I check the board for departure times, and the guy from the line approaches again, reassuring me that his wife is just outside and they live in Olympia and are heading there anyhow, and says that they wouldn't charge me anything. And then he says, "Are you sure you want to be taking Greyhound with what happened yesterday?" Considering current events, and the fact that I've been incommunicado for the past several days, his question gets my immediate attention.

Just then, the cashier/Greyhound agent shows up; I apologize to her and say I've just accepted a ride. She snarls back something snide, but we're out of there.

As the guy makes a quick phone call, his wife fills me in on the events of the previous day involving a Greyhound bus, a driver with a slashed throat, and six dead. I scan the front page of the newspaper in a nearby machine (to verify - call me thorough). My mind races. Given that the system has been down for the twenty-four hours just past, there is doubtlessly a backlog of passengers. And the buses are doubtlessly behind schedule, and there very well might not even be any empty seats on the bus when it did show up. Yet the agent would have sold me a ticket without telling me any of this. This is actually typical of the Grey Dog!

I've always looked upon Greyhound as a last resort in my Backpacking by Bus exploits: it is the preferred mode of travel for felons on the lam. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, traveled about by Greyhound as he sowed his bombs throughout the West (often WITH his bombs). There is a murder case still pending in a affluent suburb of Seattle in which two eighteen - year olds butchered the parents and teen - aged developmentally disabled sister of one of them in an alleged thrill-kill / life insurance scam. After they realized that the insurance scam wouldn't work, the two fled to Vancouver, B.C. On a Greyhound, of course.

A friend once commuted from Seattle to Western Washington University in Bellingham several times a week for an entire school year, and told me that it was not at all uncommon for the State Patrol to be waiting at one station or the other for someone on board the bus she was sitting in. Their standard procedure was to hold everyone on the bus, and for several uniformed officers to board and take whoever it was into custody, as everyone on the bus looked about them in fear.

This same friend was an Urban and Regional Planning major, and accepted an internship to complete her degree. While she was there she became privy to all sorts of sordid Grey Dog facts. She learned that women traveling alone were regularly abducted from Greyhound stations; the station in Seattle was particularly notorious for this.

In my own experience, when boarding a Greyhound anywhere other than at a route terminus, you are allowed to board at a scheduled stop after those passengers who want to get off for a smoke/snack break. As you board the bus and walk up the aisle, the remaining passengers all slide their CRAP over if there is a seat open next to them and say, "There's someone sitting here!", and "This seat is taken!" I end up sitting next to some very smelly person who REALLY wants me to sit next to him. But then when everyone reboards, I realize there are a lot of those "taken" seats that are still open. Lying sacks of shit.

So, I'm really fond of using local transit whenever possible, but in this case there existed a gap that could only be filled via Greyhound or Amtrak. And due to the planes being grounded, Amtrak was already running full and well behind schedule. Thus I voice my general hesitance to resort to the Grey Dog, even under normal circumstances, to my benefactors. I realize that the woman, who is driving, is flitting through I-5 traffic like a hummingbird, seemingly not existing in the same time frame as the rest of humanity. Her husband tells me that they're both recovering heroin addicts just out of detox. I suppress an instinctive urge to ask to be let out at the next exit. They really ARE nice folks...plenty of addicts of one kind or the other in my own family... she really doesn't drive any worse than my dad... They take me all the way to the transit center in downtown Olympia, enabling me to catch an earlier bus than I would otherwise have been able to catch, saving me more than three hours in road time. I bid them well, and urge them to stay clean.

FROM OUR FORTIFIED STORY VAULT:

Dead bodies in back yard, corpses in the freezer - just a day's work for The Biologist, as McBee's friend Undertakes an Undertaking. 6/01

Welcome to Kosmos - Visitng the ghost town of lost electricity. 4/01

Boniface, Plastic Joseph, and a Big Dead Dog: A Love Story 11/00

Half-time at the Anthro Bowl: demystifying male behavior. 6/00

Biodegradable Don't Mean Shit - 4/00