GREYHOUND

An Irish Canadian who lives in London travels America’s highways by bus and finds the experience wanting.

“Travelling on a Greyhound bus,” writes Pocock, “you can disappear.” Her first journey across the United States by Greyhound took place in 2006, when, recovering from a miscarriage, she disappeared into herself and the continent’s vastness. Her second voyage, in 2023, is a study in contrasts. Foremost is a decline, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of personal technology, in people interacting freely with one another in “the camaraderie of people who know that if they could, they would be elsewhere, living another kind of life, but who are making the most of this one, and perhaps even enjoying this brief moment of communion.” The clientele is still much the same, she notes: released prisoners on their way to lives outside, people who cannot drive because of DUIs, those too poor to own cars or fly, all strangers “connected by the simple need to get somewhere.” But where there were once bus stations with maps and schedules, there are now pick-up stops divined only by an app (one that placed her 14 miles away from her true destination in the death-dealing heat of Phoenix); where there are stations, they are crumbling, fetid, and often locked so that the homeless cannot find shelter inside. “A sentence kept surfacing in my mind, ‘Something in the US has broken,’” Pocock writes. “Everyone around me felt more desperate, more angry, more prone to violence.” Her notes on the sad condition of American society are invaluable and well taken; those on technology and the degradation of nature don’t always fit easily into the narrative and sometimes seem pro forma. Still, this rare account of a woman traveling alone, and in some of the most desperate corners of the American landscape, is well worth reading.

A pensive, clear-eyed vision of a collapsing world as seen through grimy, rain-streaked windows.