Dog tired

[racheleggert]

A handful of passengers among the last to 'Go Greyhound'

BY DAVID HAWLEY

Pioneer Press


The Greyhound is gliding along U.S. 169 on its morning run from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls, S.D., and Clezell Rainey is using the intercom to familiarize his four solitary passengers with the artistry of the Temptations.

"Papa was a rollin' stone," the lanky 61-year-old driver croons in a silky mutter, holding the microphone near his lips as he effortlessly steers one-handed down a straight stretch of highway that runs through the Minnesota River Valley.

"Wherever he laid his hat was his home. …"

This is one of the last trips for Greyhound's morning Minneapolis-Sioux Falls run, which stops in 11 small communities during a trip that takes six hours and five minutes — if it isn't delayed. The afternoon trip back from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis takes a different route, pausing to pick up passengers in 12 other towns during a scheduled six hours and 20 minutes.

On both routes, the buses pass another Greyhound going in the opposite direction. Each town is visited twice a day by Greyhound.

The 23 communities on these two routes are among 260 stops between Chicago and Seattle that Greyhound is dropping as part of the money-losing carrier's nationwide plan to cut costs. After Wednesday, these routes and some others in the state will be taken over by Minneapolis-based Jefferson Lines, though the schedules will be different and some of the smallest communities will probably lose their bus stops.

As it is, most of the stops are little more than pauses, usually at gas stations or convenience stores, where a honk of the horn and an answering wave from the attendant — no passengers here — sends the driver on his way.

Scattered among 47 seats, the four souls don't seem to mind Rainey's singing — but they don't acknowledge it, either.

Two of them are dozing, and another is seemingly comatose. The fourth — Shelly Nelson, on a short ride from Minneapolis to visit a sister and niece in Mankato — is staring out the window at vast fields of high summer corn, her wide-set eyes lost in a daydream.

She snaps briefly out of her reverie. "This is pleasant, but it lets me think too much," she says, flashing a defensive smile so big it's almost frightening.

"I'm boring, you know? So this is pleasant, but boring." She smiles again and turns back to gaze at the rolling landscape.

Near the back of the bus, the foot of a man slumped across two seats can be seen protruding into the aisle. He'll sleep all the way.

MINNESOTA BORN

Greyhound was founded in Hibbing, Minn., 90 years ago as a short-haul business for transporting workers to mines on the Iron Range. Now it's based in Dallas, and the local origin of the intercity bus company has become little more than a trivia question to most Minnesotans.

Even so, the latest retreat by Greyhound from the region that spawned it — 56 towns dropped in Minnesota and 43 in Wisconsin — marks the seemingly inexorable close of another chapter in the American saga of travel.

Ride the dog. Enjoy diesel therapy. See America up close — and slowly.

On average, according to Greyhound, the round-trip Sioux Falls-Minneapolis routes carry only about 200 passengers a week. The bus company's cost has been subsidized for years with government grants that were created in response to political pressure to maintain some sort of mass transportation to small towns.

Carrying just a handful of passengers on a midweek run is pretty typical, says Rainey, who has been driving this route for five years.

He loves it. It's usually relaxed, with a clientele dominated by senior citizens visiting nearby friends or relatives, immigrant laborers who work in small-town food processing plants and a few college students who attend school in St. Peter and Mankato.

"It would be interesting if we had a few more students, but riding the bus isn't cool anymore — isn't fast enough," Rainey says, snapping his fingers for emphasis. "Nowadays they double up in cars. Most of these kids have cars anyway. Wasn't that way when I went to college."

Rainey, who has a 21-year safety record in 25 years as a driver, confides that his bus serenade has a real purpose: He's preparing for a family reunion a year from October in Little Rock, Ark.

"We're going to have a talent contest," he says, smiling in anticipation. "Everybody's got to do something and the best wins a cash pot. I've been practicing my singing, but I've also found a guy who says he can teach me to play a couple bars on a guitar in only a couple weeks."

He chortles with conspiratorial glee. "I am going to surprise them all and win that pot."

 

[racheleggert]

STRANGERS ON A BUS

Fifty years ago, playwright William Inge imagined a bus like this one — carrying just four weary passengers as it travels across the Midwest before stopping at a rural way station that somehow represents grace for those suffering the heart-rending disillusionments of the American dream.

The play, "Bus Stop," is mostly remembered from its movie version, which starred Marilyn Monroe in her first serious dramatic role. Both movie and play seem clunky today, with overwrought, prototypical characters searching for love and willing to share all their secrets with perfect strangers.

But Inge, a rural Kansas native, probably rode the bus and recognized it as a peculiar thing — a rolling, moment-of-time capsule where humanity in all colors and stripes bumps together in close quarters. Given the right circumstances, it really can be a place where personal things are told to perfect strangers.

One of the four passengers on this trip, for example, is Albert Jones, who is heading back to Mankato after several days of recreational pursuits in Minneapolis. Some of the recreation appears to have been rough, because Jones' face is bruised and scraped and one of his eyes is nearly swelled shut.

Jones stands beside the bus during a brief stop at the Donut Connection in Shakopee, sucks hard on a cigarette, and talks about the particular bad timing of Greyhound's decision to abandon the route.

"The Yankees come here only once a year," he frets. "They're playing August 17, 18, 19 — just three games. And the Greyhound service cuts off in the middle of it. I don't know how I'll get back, but I hope I'll be riding Jefferson."

RUNNING ON EMPTY

Rainey says Shakopee's Donut Connection is often "a pretty good bus stop," but not today. He's not surprised when nobody gets on in Le Sueur — it's rare when that happens — and after the bus rolls through the college towns of St. Peter and Mankato and out onto the flat prairie, the odds dim of picking up more passengers.

That's just fine as far as Shavar Clark is concerned. Sitting midway back, he slips off his CD headset and gazes at the passing countryside with mildly curious eyes. He's a college wrestler from inner-city Chicago and he looks radiantly healthy, his skin gleaming like brushed ebony, made all the more luminous by the white do-rag that covers his head.

He rode the bus up to Minneapolis from Chicago, he said, because he's undergoing rehabilitation in the Twin Cities for a shoulder injury. The trip to Sioux Falls is to visit a friend, and Clark feels like he's coming down with a case of countryside agoraphobia. But he thinks he likes it.

"The trip from Chicago was slightly crowded, but not uncomfortable," he says, then gestures at all the empty seats. "But this — this is really nice. Feels weird. But I could get used to it."

ON TO SIOUX FALLS

The bus rolls on. Jones and Nelson got off in Mankato and now there are only two passengers, one still asleep. There's barely a pause in Madelia and then it's on to the 35-minute lunch stop in St. James — at a McDonald's.

The bus pauses for wave-offs at stops in Mountain Lake and Windom and moves on while Rainey ticks off the names of towns that have been dropped from Greyhound service: Lake Crystal, Heron Lake, Brewster.

Waiting at Worthington's sun-burnished Cenex station is a family of five returning home to Mexico — all the way by bus. Only a daughter, 18-year-old Viviana Cabrera, speaks English, though not much. But the family got along fine in Worthington because the community of nearly 10,000 is one of the most ethnically diverse in the state, thanks to jobs at the local pork-processing plant.

Worthington was served by 14 daily passenger trains some 50 years ago and then for several decades by a regional airport that ended commercial passenger service a few years ago. Now it has only one mode of intercity public transportation: A dusty bus stop on the north edge of town.

Another passenger getting on in Worthington is 61-year-old Jeanette Schnasa, a sturdy, ebullient local woman who is headed to Yankton, S.D., to visit her elderly parents. Schnasa announces to just about everyone that she lost her husband to cancer 17 months ago, and then cheerfully implies that she's looking around.

"My son says, 'You're too old to be shopping for another man.' But I say, if I find a good one, I'm gonna keep him." She jiggles with laughter.

At Worthington, the bus turns west on Interstate 90, stopping once in Luverne — no passengers — before growling into Sioux Falls and heading for the downtown bus station.

It's a step into a grimy, poetic past.

BUS STATION AS ICON

Greyhound claims to have spent tens of millions of dollars in recent years to upgrade the condition of its stations. But apparently, little of that money landed in Sioux Falls.

Maybe that's a good thing, if you're in a nostalgic frame of mind. Sioux Falls has an iconic bus station with massive, double-sided wooden benches that look like they were salvaged from an old train depot. It's a compellingly weary-looking place, with a peeling plaster ceiling and a tiled floor where a million shoes have worn light-colored paths through the grime.

New Greyhound promotional posters — "See America From Sea to Shining Sea" — have been put up on the walls, though mounted under blurred, well-scratched plastic covers. As a result, they look as old as the station.

Passengers are in short supply. An intoxicated man dozes on the bench. When he tries to get on the afternoon bus to the Twin Cites, driver Roger McLaren will gently and firmly ease him off, telling him he has two hours to sober up before another eastbound bus departs.

The ride back to Minneapolis, which plows through the afternoon and into the evening, will be as variable and remarkably unremarkable as the ride down. McLaren's route takes a two-lane northern route, winding through the towering forest of electricity-generating wind turbines on the Buffalo Ridge, past the small lakes that dot south-central Minnesota, stopping or pausing at small towns along the way.

'I'M A ROMANTIC'

Back in Sioux Falls, ticket agent Bill Schmeling stands behind a counter and looks around the nearly deserted waiting area as if contemplating a drama that was recently staged there.

"Some people remember Greyhound as a reasonable way for middle-class mom-and-pop America to get around the country — and for them, it has really changed," Schmeling says. "Now we serve a group of niche markets that are unrelated to each other."

He checks off a roster of today's typical bus users:

"Little old grandmothers who don't want to drive. College students in some areas who use us to get back and forth. Illegals because we don't make a big deal about identification. Down-and-outers who move from place to place and have always used the bus because they wouldn't know how to book a reservation on an airline. And a few people — there are some — who find something interesting about riding the bus.

"I'm a romantic," Schmeling continues as he gestures at the waiting area. "Somebody ought to write a good story or a novel about what goes on at a Greyhound station. It hasn't been done since 'Bus Stop.'

"On some days, I watch people sitting here, interacting with each other, telling their stories. I see them helping the little old lady struggling with her baggage. I see them caring about each other, listening to each other.

"It happens — it really does happen — and I never get tired of being here to see it."


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David Hawley can be reached at dhawley@pioneerpress.com or 612-338-6516.