In 2023, author Joanna Pocock boarded a Greyhound bus, retracing a trip that she had made 17 years before. Although the landscape has changed, the phantoms remain, like the ripped-out public telephone that leaves the “prints of the old one, the wires, the holes in the wall”. Greyhound is a travelogue and a ghost story, a map of the US overlaid with the spectre of its past.
Pocock’s country is saturated with Edward Hopper colours and Jack Kerouac, as well as legacies of lynchings and factory lines. She details how grim the current state of public transportation is, with bus-stops moved to locations impossible to reach by foot, dependent on apps that exclude “those who aren’t ‘in the system’”. A passionate environmentalist (“Planting seeds is in fact one of the most rebellious acts of resistance out there,” she declares), she describes strangled birds, oil spills and the stench of faecal matter from cattle pens.
Finally, there’s technology, with cellphones eradicating casual conversations with strangers. This means Pocock herself talks to hardly anyone. Although terrific in conveying the often-surreal dialogue around her, she rarely participates, sitting in Ohio absorbed in the details of a toxic waste incident 200 miles away. Ironically, Greyhound is packed with rabbit-holes of research, a signifier of the modern world the author deplores.
Among the road-trip chroniclers Pocock mentions are expat journalist Irma Kurtz and French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who, like the Canadian-born, London-based author, were once female outsiders aboard a Greyhound bus. However, they seem more fun than Pocock, a frugal, cautious traveller beset by middle-class, white-woman guilt. “I have had – in material terms – a relatively comfortable life,” she explains, “But how important is comfort when it relies on extraction and exploitation for its existence?” When Kurtz and de Beauvoir are enraged by injustice, they engage with it, buying rounds in bars where they probably shouldn’t venture. Pocock, on the other hand, is so obsessed by the plastic packaging on her bagel, she isn’t curious about her waitress.
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Disillusionment is a hallmark of the great American roadtrip story, but it must be accompanied by joy, adventure, and above all, individuals. Unfortunately, Pocock’s journey, as she writes, “was subsumed by the existence of so much suffering around me”. In the end, although she so beautifully conveys the bleakness that is our world, there is not enough humanity in Greyhound to merit her sorrow.
