America at Last – Part 10

Nashville – Memphis: 227 miles

Routine is comforting, but comfort ain’t everything. We were beginning to hit a balance between every day being different and getting into the groove – learning how to work the machine. Permanently weary and able to doze sitting up anywhere, we waited for the ticket window to open. The waiting room was busy with the usual teeming mix of life in transit. Pretty soon we had our tickets and a gate number and went off to grab a coffee and a snack. As we wandered back to a couple of empty seats, a tall, greying Greyhound employee came by on his way to manage boarders and told us to bring our cases and leave them by the gate. We were first in the queue.

We sat and watched the luggage from seats a few yards away, and he kept his eye on us until we boarded an hour and a half later. He ran the queue, checked tickets, turned people away and quietly ushered us through the gate. He told us where to drop our cases and watched us get checked by the driver onto the big white bus – a self-appointed guardian angel. Greyhound is moving many thousands of people and their baggage over vast and complicated journeys every day and getting it right most of the time. It depends upon a cast of thousands of cheerful, patient and helpful folks who probably don’t earn that much. Day in – day out they do the job in a manner that is busy and dedicated without any fuss or fluff.

We dropped into a seat about four rows back and watched boarding continue. Beside us another bus had just fuelled up from one of the great hanging hoses – it was the first refuelling I'd seen. The vastness of the country and the operation that daily crossed it like neural pathways across the cortex spun my head. How many miles were those buses doing between fuel stops? Between cleaners scurrying up aisles and between seats as drivers and passengers took their breaks. I'd seen drivers take buses through long, long journeys. I wondered how many hours they sat at the wheel.

Out on the road, we settled into dozing and looking out of the window. It was a short-ish hop of around four hours from Nashville to Memphis. Just a four hour drive between Country and Blues - the feckless parents of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Looking at it, nothing could have kept those styles apart. The radio waves around that part of the US were carrying Rock ‘n’ Roll before it was invented. We were on our way to stand right in the middle of it.

Nashville and its rhinestone conveyor was behind us, but had left some impressions. True, we hadn’t made it out of town to the Grand Ole Opry, but we had seen a taste in the bars around Broadway. We'd found a youthful hostel crammed with the curious and the melodic, been turned away from Tootsies Orchid Lounge and unnerved in the Bluegrass Bar. And along the way I had returned my banjo dream to its hook on the wall.

My head bumped gently against the bus window. As I opened one eye, I saw that I was feet away from a big, shiny black and red truck emblazoned with the Harley-Davidson brand. The cab looked like a Kenworth (what else?) and the whole rig was customised – chrome everything glistening in the sun. The sun! Doesn’t it just make everything seem better? We were bowling along the Interstate, doing maybe sixty and being passed all the time by trucks. Those things must have been doing at least seventy.

The Harley truck looked pretty new, but some were falling apart. I'd been watching them for a couple of days and suddenly realised what was missing: mudguards and safety rails. Even the nicest cab units had bare driving-wheel tyres, and the trailers – sheds, some of them – had nothing to stop spray and stones being thrown up, and nothing to stop a car driving right under. If you ran into a trailer, your family might be able to save some money on the length of the coffin.

If things did go wrong out on the black-top, there were no dividers between the carriage-ways. I recently saw an in-car video of a truck coming across a reservation at speed, pushing a car in front of it into oncoming traffic, and it wasn’t funny. Somewhere between Roanoke and Nashville we passed an eighteen-wheeler rolled-over between the two sides of the freeway. But this is the United States – not Europe. I was beginning to think in ways that I hadn’t previously done – seeing a lot of things differently under this big American sky.

I was chatting to a friend just the other day about the way that Britain enacts even unpopular European Union regulations into domestic law faster than almost any other state in the EU, and then moans incessantly about the new rules. Why? Well, I suggested that it suits our temperament in the world. It allows us to look down on the riff-raff and rabble that makes up everything that isn’t Britain (or perhaps England), and that fails to maintain our high standards. And, strangely, it turns out that we are an uptight little nation of souls. But it isn’t just the EU states that come under our withering gaze, of course. We like to uphold our standards everywhere.

Sometimes, something happens to force a change: the British Royal Family’s standoff-ish approach to the mourning of Princess Diana; the humiliation of British forces at Basra – having claimed to be world experts in counter-insurgency for so long. We witnessed the rag-tag, cowardly Americans put forces on the ground, take losses and do the job, while the Brits watched on TV from Basra Airbase. So I switched off my immune response to missing mudguards and the flouting of other assorted rules and regulations.

We rolled – unscathed – into Memphis bus station in mid-afternoon. The terminal was right in the centre of the city. It was perfectly positioned, as was the motel, which was only yards away on the road leading out of town. We rumbled our cases into the reception area, where we received smiles and the keys to the room, reached up a flight of concrete stairs outside. Our Memphis digs were pretty comfortable for the money and, after a briefing from Natasha on directions and highlights, we were ready to head downtown. By now it was raining.

The rain intensified and the afternoon turned to premature dusk. We stood under the yellow electric light of an old street-car that rattled us along for our first view of the great Mississippi river. Walking the last hundred yards, the flashing blue glow of parked police-cars suggested all wasn’t well. The police were preventing traffic going onto a road that skirted the river and was now underwater. I had to take a second look at the cars the police were driving. I’m not the authority I used to be on these things, but they looked like Dodge Charger muscle-cars. In my newly-relaxed mood, I allowed myself a smile.

A few other visitors were undaunted and wandered through the park, where water from the tributary that flows into the Mississippi was lapping under bushes by the path. You could see it rising. We wanted to get to the tourist information office by the river and pressed on, past families feeding the ducks, trying to keep our trainers out of the water. In one room of the circular building there stood a large bronze statue of Elvis. In another stood what I took to be B.B. King. A pleasantly enthusiastic lady gave us brochures and tips and we headed back out into the rain to find Memphis and the Blues.