A Bottle Episode on the Way to New Orleans

The cessation of the bus’s forward momentum woke me up about an hour into the trip from Atlanta to New Orleans. We were pulled over to the side of the highway and the bus was making a variety of grumbling noises as the driver tried and retried the ignition and did whatever else a bus driver does when his vehicle breaks down on the highway. After the whole gamut of groans had been run through the driver got off the bus to peer underneath it. I fell in and out of sleep while the driver continued in his struggles and the next thing I knew we were being told that we were going to drive back to Atlanta to switch over to a working bus. I managed to wonder how we were going to get back to Atlanta if the bus wasn’t working before I fell back asleep. When I woke back up we were back by the side of the highway and about half the passengers had disembarked and were standing around in the dark smoking and talking. I guessed we never made it back to Atlanta after all and fell back asleep.

A little while later a cursing man went running down the aisle and outside. In my half-awake state it made perfect sense that there could be a reason this man was filled with so much urgency even though there was no where he could go, and wouldn’t be for a long time.

This was the sort of event that fascinated me when I first started writing about people instead of animals. The number of unfinished stories on my hard drive about a group of people who get stuck in the metro, or in a movie theater, or at a party, and what follows this trapping–the alliances that are formed and the personalities that start to crack under the pressure– are numerous. I’ve always been a sucker for bottle episodes.

I was living the sort of story I tried to write multiple times as a teenager, so I tried to convince myself to get off the bus and go watch the drama that was happening outside, but the bus was warm and dark and sleep was just so inviting.

I dreamed about the story I was sleeping through. The same man who had gone tearing through the bus with such panic turned out to be some kind of trouble maker. I’m not sure whether he was picking fights, or stealing things. I think he may have been inciting mutiny. A group of passengers banded together to defend the driver and threw the rabble-rouser in a holding cell at the back of the bus. When I woke up again I wasn’t sure what had happened and what I’d dreamed. The whole thing was starting to feel like an episode of the Twilight Zone or an issue of Sandman.

Eventually the second bus came to our rescue, two hours after we’d first pulled off the highway. I was surprised at the number of people who boarded this second bus without taking their luggage along with them, leaving the drivers and a group of helpful passengers to transfer all the bags. It was like this was a form of retribution they could take for being delayed by two hours, and despite being petty and minor, they’d take whatever they could to exercise a tiny bit of agency. Even after sleeping through the story I was still assigning motivations to the characters.

We stopped in Montgomery, Alabama and then in Mobile, Alabama. There, one of the passengers missed his connection because he hadn’t heard it announced. Once again a cursing and urgent man went running down the aisle of the bus even though there was nowhere to go. The passengers muttered around me, “Did you hear it announced?” “I didn’t hear anything, did you?” They were starting to side with the rabble-rouser in my dream, even if he was still locked in the holding cell. Any faith in authority was gone by this point and the passengers had banded together in response. There was a similar sort of camaraderie being formed as there was on the very first bus trip I took on this adventure, when the bus was two hours late to pick us up.

We switched drivers in Mobile too, so the man who had been our driver became one of us. As he took a seat toward the back of the bus people teased him, asking if he wasn’t driving any more because he’d broken a bus. (He would’ve driven us all the way to New Orleans, but after the two hour delay he’d gone over whatever limit is set for the amount of time a driver can be active without getting “fatigued.” He still needed to get to New Orleans though, so he took a seat. It was lucky he did, as will be revealed later.) Apparently even though he’d recently been in a position of power the passengers were happy to welcome him into their disenfranchised ranks.

There was a series of traffic snarls once we got close to New Orleans, due partly to the exceedingly heavy fog and partly to all the construction that’s occurring downtown in preparation for the Super Bowl. By this time the passengers didn’t have enough energy left to get antsy as the two hour delay was increased minute by minute as we crawled along I-10.

When I woke up thoroughly and completely the people around me were discussing fathers. One of the passengers was moving to New Orleans from Connecticut so he could make a better living and have an easier time paying child support. The mother of his child didn’t want him involved in the kid’s life. The woman sitting across from me had a similar story to tell about one of her husband’s kids and the kid’s mother. Soon it seemed like half the bus was agreeing how important fathers were to a child, and giving the man moving here legal advice about how he could stay involved in his son’s life. This seemed like a particularly relevant conversation to be over hearing, especially after the day I’d spent in Charlotte. I thought about speaking up and insisting that I was well-adjusted and happy but I watched the condensation roll down the bus’s window instead. I’d slept through the right of passage that made us a cohesive group. I couldn’t speak up now.

The construction downtown meant the bus couldn’t take the exit it usually did and moments after we finally got off the highway, and the end looked like it was in sight, the driver came over the loud speaker and asked if anyone knew how to get to the bus station from where we were. There was silence for a moment and I couldn’t find the situation anything but hilarious. There had been one too many obstacles to the bus achieving its goal to really take any of it seriously anymore. Then our previous driver stood up and walked toward the front of the bus to give directions.

So, eventually, after thirteen hours, the bus arrived at New Orleans, and we were all released from the bottle.