26 Mar 04
In the carefree '60s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters toured America on a bus called 'Further'. It was a time of excess, of expression and of escape. People just tagged along for the ride, man. In an attempt to connect with the time, the Green Tortoise bus company charters trips from New York to San Francisco, taking in as much of the USA's startling scenery as possible. I planned to hitch a ride with them from Colorado to San Fran, the hippy capital of the world. Things were not off to an promising start, however.
I had been waiting seven hours in the terminal of Grand Junction airport for a 1954 former New Jersey Transit bus. My sole point of contact at the Green Tortoise hippy bus company was Brenda, who was single-handedly manning a toll-free phone line in one of San Francisco's roughest neighbourhoods. A baby tornado whistled by as my patience wore thinner.
Brenda had told me five hours earlier that her driver Brian was going to pick me up at the hot springs in Grand Junction, Colorado. I called the local taxi company, Zippy Taxis, to get directions. "No hot springs in the Junction," the controller said. I waited for Brenda's instructions. She waited for Brian's. No response: Brenda and I sat, 2000 miles apart, both waiting for a man named Brian and a bus named Guan.
Brian and Guan eventually arrived at 2:30 in the morning. I was the only person left at the airport. It had closed three hours earlier. Only a trigger-happy security guard, most likely name Stan, helped me while away the hours. A hiss of air brakes and the rattle of forty-year-old bus windows woke me from a snooze. Like a character from an old Dr. Who episode, Brian stood gazing through my windscreen. He was bald but sported a goatee, his six-foot frame swathed only in a singlet and baggy shorts.
"Jeremy?" he asked, somewhat obviously. I was in no mood, but we shook hands. By dawn I would find out that Brian was a soul-mate; we were the only two products of the hippy era on the bus. The other passengers were born in the late 70's and 80's - for them this was history, not nostalgia.
