Shadow Steps

When my father was young he used to escape Brooklyn by going to Europe for the summer, taking his meager English teacher’s pay and using it all on a flight and two months of living abroad. He likes to tell us that back then nobody could e-mail you money and credit cards didn’t exist. I heard him recounting this once again to my college roommate who had come to stay the night at my house in Brooklyn the day before we would begin our own escape.

They were sitting at the kitchen counter, and I walked in on my dad going through the follow-up story, the one about sleeping in the pastures outside of Athens because he and his friends couldn’t get a hotel.

“Glory days?” I said.

“Yeah,” he laughed, “Glory days.”

My mother too had been excited that night, spreading maps over the dining room table, commenting on our route. When she was in her 20s she had driven to California with a friend. They came across a rowdy biker rally in Sturgis, North Dakota, and my favorite part of the story is the motel itself that was like a biker paradise: bikers at the pool, tattooed and lounging, with girlfriends, wives and kids. They were still there when she left to get on the road in the morning. You see, traveling is my one inheritance.

I forget who exactly had thought the idea up, but I remember, after a brief and excited discussion, pinning a printout U.S. map to the wall, with a thin pencil line charting a bus route from East Coast to West. Going cross-country by Grey-hound, I thought, would be something: distance I could feel. More pressingly, my free moments were ticking away. Summers were starting to disappear, and in the not so distant future I’d have to get a job that, unless I became a teacher like my parents, would involve a sprinkled dribble of vacation days. Not enough time to circle the country, like my mother had, or to traverse a continent across the sea, the act my father had repeated for so many summers.

So I left, and when I did, my mother said to take lots of pictures and my father said to write down the good things, so I did that too. The point was (they implied) to prevent the country from passing in a blur of bus station lines; the idea being that otherwise, I would soon forget.

But things stood out right away. On the first bus from New York we saw two soldiers waiting in front of us, bound for Charlotte, in camouflage fatigues and jackets with their names and little American flags. It was a night bus, and I remember being feverishly watchful: a woman speaking into her phone—“operator”—in the dark, giant silver factories outside Baltimore, the whitewashed obelisk memorial as we coasted into empty Washington.

In Nashville, Tennessee, I asked the Sudanese taxi driver while passing the football stadium how the Titans did that season. He said: “You know, you ask me hard question—it is because I only moved here last year.” Where was he before? Seattle, he said, fishing. Three month journeys, 25 thousand a trip. “But I’m from Sudan. Do you know where that is?” he asked.

Further south, pulling into New Orleans: once the lights appeared in the windows, the guys behind us shouted, “I’m back, been two years.” (“Five,” says the old man behind them.) Coming into the station, the one where they built cages and kept federal prisoners during Katrina, you can still see the wire outlines. That night, on Bourbon Street, women asking, “Looking for a good time?” The suited man outside one club: “Guys, I got one question.”

“What?” we asked.

“Titties!” he yelled.

On the rural roads the buses go through empty cow fields; one had a propeller plane in it, nothing else. Two women got on and sat behind me on the way to Baton Rogue, one with a boyfriend in jail, and asked us for money. “Got three dollars. Got a dollar? No? How ’bout a phone?” The man behind me riding through Texas, explaining the oil rigs and the horse corrals and the lines in the marshy grass that humans made for catching crawfish.

The river was dried up in San Antonio. We joked that maybe they turned it off on Tuesdays. Somehow it was better in dryness: the Alamo dusty and the cathedrals whitewashed and spare, the lights hanging over the riverbed, the mariachis on the cobblestones. Walking into the Catredal de San Fernando, a woman with many bags walked around me towards the altar, huffing and taking deep breaths.

At nighttime you pass cities briefly and only once in a while, because those rides are just getting from one place to another. No one talks on the night buses. As the buses got further south and west the drivers make their announcements in Spanish. “Cinco minutos aquí.” Sometimes we would pass a truck on a country road with the truck coming in our direction and the bus would vibrate a little with the shadow of impact.

The coda to my dad’s Athens story about sleeping in the pasture is that, as I remember it, he woke up with a wet face, a cow standing over him licking. The first time I heard this story we were having breakfast in Paris, a family trip over the summer, him reliving these 30 years. Rewalking the old haunts with his family, him envisioning the people he’d known there, their trivialities and revels.

The day after my mother stayed with the bikers, she stopped at an overlook to take pictures. The pull-off was nearly empty. The only person there was a biker by himself all in dusty black, a wild beard, parked and marveling at the scenery. This is something that she remembers with a laugh and has told us often.

In California on some hilltops you can see clear to New York. I asked an old Mexican woman with a shopping cart where the water was. She said Superior. I thought that meant better: better than home, yes, I said. Really it was the name of the street to the sea. Sitting on a beach in Summerland, California, I thought about seasons, remembering, oceans, glory.