Take the bus -- leave the driving to us!

Gabriel Campanerio, Seattle Times

Progress!  Yesterday, the demolition crew made short work of Seattle's downtown Greyhound bus depot at 8th and Stewart, clearing an entire block for construction of a new hotel.  The mission-styled depot, with Spanish tiled roof, had stared listlessly at the street, vacant and boarded up, for about a year, awaiting its obvious fate. 

Greyhound has left its downtown location and moved south to a new depot, near the football and baseball stadiums.

I can't say that I have a lot of nostalgic memories centered on the Seattle depot.  While in grad and law school, I did take the bus a number of times south to my home town, but the train service was better and more enjoyable.  The depot -- like Greyhound depots virtually everywhere in recent years (decades) -- was a bit scary.  It was filled with people looking for the cheapest way to travel, and with others who looked as though they had no destination -- in life or in travel -- and had just come in out of the cold. 

Although I won't really miss the Seattle depot, I do have nostalgic memories from undergraduate days of bussing by Greyhound between my home in Southwest Washington and San Francisco.  Again, I probably took the train more often, but the bus was cheaper, and in some ways more interesting.

Because my travel always fell during school breaks, the buses were filled with fellow students also going home for the holidays.  Their company made bus travel more sociable, and certainly more comfortable psychologically.  We stopped for breaks every two or three hours; I have vivid memories of waking up as we pulled into Redding or Medford in the middle of the night.  Medford at about 2 a.m. had a dreamlike quality as we staggered off the bus into a nearly empty station -- a few locals hanging around listlessly, as though waiting for a long-delayed Portland stagecoach to come through.  In fact, most stations had a café called a "Post House," a name that did call to mind earlier forms of horse-drawn transportation, but where you could now buy a less romantic burger and coke.

Maybe because the trip by bus took longer than that by train, it seemed to awaken stronger emotions -- especially when I was still a homesick freshman: a gradually intensifying sense of joy as the palm trees and the flat agricultural lands of the Sacramento valley were left behind and the highway crossed the forested Siskiyous into the green world of Oregon; a feeling of gloom returning the other direction, as the miles between myself and my family increased.

After leaving school, I still took the bus occasionally.  I recall, sometime in my twenties, sitting in the San Francisco bus depot, waiting for some friends I was visiting to pick me up.  I think that was the first time I realized how depressing a bus depot could really be -- not the dull architecture so much as the feelings of hopelessness I could read in the faces of the crowds sitting about me.  When one of my friends finally arrived, cheerful and full of greetings, I perhaps only imagined a sense of resentment in my gloomy fellow depot-mates -- as though a bright angel had descended into hell and assured me, in full view of the damned, that a mistake had been made and that his chariot awaited to carry me off to salvation.

I've been told that Greyhound service has become substantially more upscale in recent years -- actually enjoyable to ride.  I rarely see Greyhound buses anymore, but when I do see them, they appear sleek and comfortable.  I'm tempted to check out the new Seattle bus station, and see how it looks.

I'll be less interested in how modern the building appears than in watching the people waiting in the depot, in seeing whether their eyes still display the hopelessness and despair that I recall from that experience in San Francisco.