Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, poet Joseph Massey—the unofficial poet laureate of Trump’s America—shares a poem that consoled him on an endless Greyhound bus from California to Austin.
New Mexico’s desert landscape materialized in the Greyhound bus window. The summer sun was beginning to set; the plateaus glowed red and orange. This alien landscape, stark in its chiseled formations and unearthly aura, startled me out of my grogginess after two days of travel.
I caught the bus from a station the size of a public bathroom in Arcata, California—a foggy town tucked along the coast of Northern California’s “Redwood Curtain”—where I lived throughout my 20s. Austin, Texas, was the destination. One of my publishers had invited me to participate in a poetry reading he organized during a writers conference. He bought the bus ticket and offered me his couch in his apartment in the city.
My life in Arcata was a slog of poverty. I lived in a cottage—that’s what the landlord called it—but it was really a woodshed haphazardly converted into a semi-livable space. The shack, as I called it, was slanted. I’m sure an earthquake, at some point, damaged the cinder block foundation and it was left unrepaired. If I dropped a pen on the floor, it would roll to the other side of the room. The shack wasn’t insulated and because of the high humidity—the ocean was visible from the hill I lived on and heavy blankets of fog rolled in every evening—I patrolled the shack with a spray bottle full of bleach to fight back the black mold. I was eager to get out of town for a few weeks and stay in a place with functional plumbing, breathable, unbleached air, and a stable foundation.
That wasn’t my first long trip on Greyhound. At the age of 19, I traveled from Delaware to San Francisco to visit a poet I had been corresponding with. He wasn’t home when I got there, so I bummed around the city for two days and took the bus all the way back to Delaware. As dreary and miserable as Greyhound buses, stations, and passengers—and some drivers—could be, I loved seeing America pass by the windows. I thought of Jack Kerouac and other literary heroes who wrote from a depth of bittersweet affection for America as they traversed its landscapes.
