Babylon By Bus is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, March 10, 2004. It is part of Memories.
The beginnings of an article for Modern Gypsy magazine.
We were gypsies, our habits and customs out of step with the outside world. We reckoned distance by time; three hours to New York, fifteen to Florida. Our destinations were decided by the seasons and, like nomadic hunter-gatherers, we ranged south in the winter and north in the summer. The roads we followed had numbers instead of names: 95, 75, 10 and 5 were our favorites. I learned to read by interpreting the signs presented for roadside augury: gas, food, lodging.
The caravan in which we lived was an early seventies GMC Vandura, nominally blue, but patched with rust colored primer and crowned with a white fiberglass top. The interior was outfitted with a small propane stove, a dormitory refrigerator, a miniature sink, a bed for my parents, and a stretch of indoor-outdoor carpeting that I shared with the family dog, a Doberman called Ginger.
There wasn’t room for a chemical toilet in the van. We kept a one gallon plastic milk jug by the door, always half full of urine, and stopped whenever any of us needed to defecate. The jug was easy for a man to use — one needed only to insert the tip of one’s penis into the hole at the top of the jug — but my mother had to squat over the jug while the truck bounced along the highway, precariously trying to direct a stream of urine into the bottle, rather than down the side of the jug and onto the floor.
Our seasonal wanderings were not entirely recreational. We had neither air conditioning nor heat that worked with the engine off, thus our ability to tolerate climatic extremes was limited. We did make use of an electric heater in the mountains of Colorado, but it was unpleasant. The heater would cook the side of one’s body left facing it while the other side slowly froze, and the harsh electric heat would rob the entire van of moisture, leaving us to awaken, our chapped noses clogged with blood.
We traveled tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of miles together in that thirteen foot by six foot metal box. We fished off the Florida coast, baiting our hooks with live shrimp and catching the biggest fish I’d ever seen; spent a summer in Seattle steering a borrowed boat along the Puget Sound; rode snowmobiles in Maine; dodged tornados in Texas. It was my the first place that felt like home to me because it remained fixed while we traveled, and I cried when we left it for a twenty seven foot motor home outfitted with all the modern conveniences. My parents had not yet come undone, but I knew through some childish intuition that an era was ending and that things would never be the same for us.