Constant Rider Omnibus: Stories From the Public Transportation Front

By Kate Lopresti

Constant Rider's Kate Lopresti describes her zine as, "Comedy, adventure, melodrama, the occasional horror," saying, "I never have writer's block when writing about the bus." Here, collected in book form, are Constant Rider issues 1-7, Kate's personal history as a patron of public transport. Kate stuffs everything she's got into these stories—anecdotes and accounts, from humor to hard times. Says Kate, "When I tell people about an adventure I had on the bus, they usually tell me a story of their own. People who don't ride the bus have nothing to say." Now in its second edition with 64 additional pages, Kate gives us observations, advice, reviews, reading lists, drunken passengers, celebrity sightings, overheard dialogue, and a whole lot of the funny. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781621066972

Book preview

volunteers.

THE

CONSTANT RIDER

STORIES FROM THE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION FRONT VOLUME 1, NO. 1 SEPTEMBER 2000

Train travel. Sounds delicious don’t it? The bustling Union Stations, efficient red caps and breathtaking scenery available only when traveling by rail. I myself was quite taken with the idea. So much that when I made plans to go home for Christmas in 1999, I decided to travel from Portland, Oregon, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by train. To spice things up a bit, I bought a North American rail pass to travel east through Canada and then back west through the northern states. The following is a play-by-play of what it means to take an 8-hour plane ride, bring it down 30,000 feet and stretch it out over seven days.

The author, with a six-pack of Canadian Lager, in front the government-run Beer Store in Toronto.

Eastbound

Trip: Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia

Train: The Cascades

Oh, the Cascades. How beautiful, how contemporary, how unlike any other train line I would ride for the rest of the trip. I’m assuming Amtrak was tired of being continually compared to the trains in Europe when they sprung the big bucks for the Talgo. Made in Spain, the Talgo is once nice train. This train was modern, clean, and moved smoothly enough that I could easily write and address all my Christmas cards during the trip. Every few seats there was a television playing an edited-for-a-general-television-viewing-audience movie. Occasionally the movie was interrupted, not with commercials, but with a little ticker tape on the screen telling us what station we approached or what notable landmarks we passed (for example, Crossing Shookumchuck River.). Just when I thought I could get used to life on the train, we pulled into the Seattle station where my connecting train to Canada was actually a bus. The service from Seattle to Vancouver B.C. is, for some reason, by coach. Which put me in a bad mood. Train travel was romantic. Bus travel was… rugged.

A group of us waited outside the station until a white coach with a big red maple leaf pulled into the parking lot. A short driver with curly hair and a bushy moustache jumped out and began to unload luggage from beneath the bus. After the arrivals had gotten off, we lunged at him with our own bags and tickets and questions. Give me twenty-minutes! he screamed in a thick Italian accent. Twenty minutes! I gotta take a break! Most of us shrugged, grabbed our bags and went back to waiting on the benches under the station’s awning. Except for one woman. She stood resolutely at the bus’s front door, holding an umbrella over her head and her luggage at her side while the driver sat on the bus eating a sandwich, watching her.

When he did let us on, he was gracious and quick about getting us seated and passing out declaration forms. After he had collected tickets he walked to the front of the bus and got on the microphone. Thank you for riding with us today. We are happy to serve you. I just gave everyone forms for the customs. You have two hours to fill this form out. They want to know if you have any fruit. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know.

Panic. Determined to beat the system I had packed food, a lot of it, in my bags, including fruit. I had pears galore, but I didn’t want any trouble. One time, when my friends and I had driven up to Thunder Bay, Ontario to take advantage of the drinking age (19!), customs officials made us get out of the car and answer questions. What we were doing, where were we going, did any of us have any distinguishable scars. I don’t know what any of that was about, but it did temper my opinion of boarder patrols. I didn’t want to get busted for fruit. I just wanted to pass through customs unnoticed and legal. So I declared nothing and started chomping. The first pear was all right, it was a ripe Bartlett, but the second was a tough and tasteless Anjou and things didn’t get any better from there. I started to feel sick and my hands and face were sticky from the juice. When we got to the duty free shop, before crossing the border, I still had 1 and 1/2 pears left. Convincing myself that scent dogs would not be sniffing the garbage cans for illicit fruit (this took about five minutes to do), I threw all pear remnants into a plastic bag and schlepped it back to the trash can, trying to be casual about my contraband.

As we approached the border crossing, the driver explained procedures. After he unloaded our luggage, we were to take our bags to a custom official and answer any questions he might have for us. He called the border crossing patrol trouble makers and told us ribald stories about why or why not they would delay our trip, We’ll find out who was sleeping where last night, he said. Sometimes she sleeps in the bed and he sleeps on the couch. That’s just the way it is and when he gets to work he decides it’s going to take us two hours to cross the border. Other times it’s not so long. No one was really offended by these bold remarks. Not enough to say anything anyway. Maybe it was because we didn’t like the border patrol that much either. He went on to tell us that one time, a bus driver friend of his, tired of waiting for his passengers, asked the officials what was taking so long. The border patrol threw him in jail for an hour. That taught him to ask questions.

Our experience was less dramatic. Everyone passed through customs, no sweat. The driver was happy to have us back on the bus and in his country. Whatever is in your bags or in your pockets is nobody’s business but yours now.

He pointed out spots along the way to Vancouver and told us places to go if we had time. "This is Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. You’ve got to be a rich mon to live in Richmond. This bridge is the Knight Street Bridge. I like to call it Nightmare Bridge, because look at this traffic. It’s a nightmare. If you get a chance, go to Vancouver’s wax museum. They have a lady Diana and you would not even believe it. She is so real. And I know because I saw the Princess when she came for the 1986 World’s Fair."

Trip: Vancouver, British Columbia to Toronto, Ontario

Train: The Canadian

Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station was packed with Christmas travelers. Everyone was waiting to board the eastbound Canadian. Departure had been scheduled for 9 p.m., but because of an accident earlier in the day, we were delayed by three hours. That morning, when the westbound Canadian was coming into town, a car driver tried to beat the train at a railroad crossing and missed. The accident damaged the engine enough that it couldn’t make its return route and VIA Rail, Canada’s rail system, had to find a new engine for our train.

Everyone was tired of waiting. A lot of college kids slept on their overstuffed backpacks, one couple walked and re-walked their Scottish terrier before putting her back in her kennel over and over again, a three-year old ran screaming around the station without a shirt. When we finally boarded, I didn’t even notice the interior of the car or the people I was sitting beside. I found two seats together and crashed with a miniature pillow and a mite-infested blanket courtesy of VIA.

Day 1

Kamloops North, British Columbia to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

The next day was much better; I woke up to the beautiful Canadian Rockies, mountains covered with snow and dotted with elk. I decided to get a cup of coffee and check things out. The train’s interior was five shades of aquamarine and the doors between cars had to be pushed open, unlike Amtrak trains’ fancy electric doors. It was older, but in an enduring, quaint, but not overtly retro sort of way. It reminded me of the heyday for trains. It had probably been running weekly across the country since then.

One thing that surprised me riding VIA was that the entire service was bilingual. Let me tell you friends, French is beautiful, even when someone tells you This area is restricted to first class passengers only!

The observation car had two floors. The bottom level was for the body who smoked. And there were a lot of bodies who did. There was also a little kitchen where you could get coffee, smokes and free hot water, if you had been smart enough to bring your own soup cups. Upstairs, by way of a half-spiral staircase was the ‘skydome’. This part of the car had the shape and feel of a school bus: two rows of 8 seats, everyone facing forward. If you sat in an aisle seat, most of your observing was done through your peripheral vision, straight ahead you only saw people playing cards. Some folks were already sitting in the car that morning, cameras at the ready to snap any passing elk.

Because there was so little room, singles had to share. I met most of the travelers I would get to know on the train in this car: a nice young fellow from Prince Rupert, British Columbia who was knitting himself a wool hat; an Australian traveling through Canada on his way to his daughter’s wedding in Toronto; a twenty-one year old who worked in the Alberta oil fields and was on his way home to Moncton, New Brunswick for Christmas.

This kid, Patrick, chatted with me at great length about the Chris Hains hoax. When the press let loose that the alternative rocker was actually Garth Brooks, Patrick felt affronted that he had been taken so easily by the hype, but, at the same time, he was somewhat relieved. Seems Patrick knew a lot about music and that such a hit-maker never appeared on his radar had him worried, Yeah, I thought something was up. You know, I’ve been listening to music for awhile and I’d never heard of him. And I thought I knew everybody. He then went on to explain the details of the imaginary Gains’ life, complete with parents in auto accidents and bandmates who overdosed. Whoa, Patrick. Thanks. I think it’s time for me to get back to my seat. Before I could leave, Patrick gave me two important pieces of information, 1) if I like rockabilly, which admittedly I do, I should check out the amazing electric violinist from New Foundland, Andrew McKenzie and 2) he never would have guessed my real age because I look like I’m 25. God bless you, Patrick, and Merry Christmas to us all!

Seems Canucks have a great channel for all this music information called Much Music or, as my friend from Moncton liked to call it, Our version of MTV.

By late afternoon we had reached Jasper, Alberta. Here we were allowed to get out of the train and walk for a bit. But only