Journey Westward

In most tales of the well-trodden American journey west, vacationers are propelled there for gold and different riches, land and alternative, a way of freedom or religious transcendence, or just abandon and journey. But what when you’re seeking one thing extra amorphous? What if what you’re in search of isn’t a acquire of some kind however relatively what has been irretrievably misplaced?

In her memoir, Greyhound, U.Okay.-based Irish Canadian author Joanna Pocock is after simply that: It’s a want for a definite lack of arrival that pushes ahead her narrative. Pocock’s second ebook, Greyhound is explicitly in dialog with the canonized accounts of what she calls the “Great American Road Trip.” This literature, and a studying streak spurred by the journey restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, are two of the various causes she’s enterprise her personal journeys. But Pocock is trying one thing totally different from the acquainted narratives, and he or she achieves that goal with refined sophistication.

Her mission is twofold—or maybe it’s extra apt to say that there are two Pococks at play right here. Greyhound finds Pocock each in 2006 and in 2023: The memoir is an account of her touring the identical cross-country journey she took 17 years earlier than, when, experiencing two profound private losses, she set off through Greyhound bus from Detroit to Los Angeles. In 2023, the journey is, after all, marked by the inevitable transformations in panorama, tradition, know-how, and the forged of characters she encounters. But because the story—and the car that homes it—rolls alongside, transferring ahead (i.e., westward) throughout house however forwards and backwards via the 2 alternating moments in time, we discover Pocock’s motivation to retrace this journey shifting alongside the altering panorama.

The functions of her authentic journey are considerably easy: Pocock describes herself, in 2006, as “a ragged person running away from loss” after the dying of her beloved sister, coupled along with her personal third miscarriage. When she decides to retrace this explicit journey 17 years later, nonetheless, she’s on a unique type of “pilgrimage”: “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.” This self-reflection and want for change happened in the course of the pandemic, when she imagined herself in one other type of confinement: inside a Greyhound bus.

But the imaginative and prescient of America she’s introduced with, via the smeared bus window, is far grimmer than throughout her earlier journey. The solely solace left for her to search out is within the existence of the Greyhound itself—in the meantime, the infrastructure round it has totally collapsed. At all turns, Pocock finds drivers quitting on the job, hours-long delays, vacant stations and nonexistent bus stops, and the failing crimson tape holding the obsolescent community collectively (on her journey from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Amarillo, Texas, an eavesdropped dialog between “two Greyhound drivers talking shop” reveals that even the staff are annoyed by the shoddy system).

As the journey unfolds, and the stark actuality of America reveals itself, Pocock’s morale falters, however her dedication to an alternate manner of being begins to take form. And whereas she doesn’t go on her Great American Road Trip to display proof of any type of “machismo” or “individualism” (she accuses different writers of the style, akin to Steinbeck, of this), she appears to be amassing one other type of proof: that the Greyhound affords an excellent, a mannequin of neighborhood, ecological concern, and care.

Her lifelong, unabashed “mistrust of Big Oil and the car industry,” confirmed by the struggling and desolation she sees from her bus seat, transforms the memoir into each a manifesto and a eulogy for this mode of transport. Pocock’s eager about what the Greyhound can characterize in a time of accelerating digitization and, subsequently, isolation. This “relocation of human transactions and experiences to the digital sphere” seems as one, if not the central, supply of the disaster to which she bears witness. On a couple of event, a passenger is barred bus entry owing to a misplaced cellphone that holds their ticket; she realizes that “every payphone in every Greyhound station has now been ripped from the walls.” And the sheer scale of the despair she observes begins to beat her tenuous causes for embarking on this 2023 journey. “In retrospect,” she writes, “I was so shocked by the state of the people among whom I was travelling that any search I thought I was undertaking was subsumed by the existence of so much suffering around me.” In this manner, her personal grief in 2006 is eclipsed by the losses she sees in 2023 whereas coming throughout extra “people who seemed shocked into silent desperation than I had ever seen in my life.”

Pocock acknowledges that possibly a Greyhound by no means meant freedom for everybody, because it does for her: “I had realized that my journey of choice and escape was not the same journey that so many of these passengers were on.” But the place she discovered “camaraderie” on this shared expertise earlier than “reality…moved into the digital realm,” in 2023, she is appalled by its absence. And thus, the ebook’s closing, important plea—to acknowledge what the Greyhound, for all these causes, can uniquely supply—is bold and earnest. In this westward journey, Pocock seeks not fortune, success, or survival, however connection, in all senses of the phrase: for her personal sake but additionally, extra urgently, as a balm for America’s pervasive ills to which her bus journey grants her a front-row seat.•

GREYHOUND: A MEMOIR, BY JOANNA POCOCK

Maisie Hurwitz is a contract contributor to Alta Journal residing in Los Angeles. She is a current graduate of Wesleyan University, the place she obtained her bachelor’s diploma in English and inventive writing.