Why buses are better than planes, part one. Flying to El Paso, my plane (ironically, an Airbus) began emitting strange high-frequency blips and unexplainable static from various locations above the passengers' heads. After an air-mile or two, many of us wondered aloud what the unsettling sounds might be. Now, I admit this could happen likewise on a bus, but onboard a bus, such an experience would not conjure images of plunging fiery death. (Of course, such logic applies to the inherent difference between a bus ride's bumpiness and a plane ride's turbulence as well.) Why buses are better than planes, part two. Buses thread directly through the landscape, bringing the mountains, plains, and valleys of this land our land right to us. Planes rise haughtily above it all, vast distances, promoting detached indifference.

Why buses are better than planes, part three. You can see the guy (or gal) who's taking you places onboard a bus. He (or she) is not some disaffected, disembodied voice.

Why buses are better than planes, part four. Can you claim that you've visited a state if all you've done is flown over it? If I'd never been to New Mexico, and then I bused through it, I would definitely be able to count New Mexico among the states I'd been to, even if I never got off the bus. But does a state's airspace count as that state? I think not.

El Paso and San Diego, on paper at least, are rather similar. Both border Mexico and have foreign sister cities to the south. Both share the varied and abutting topographies of mountains and deserts. Like S.D., E.P. is a military town, with Fort Bliss, an Army base, occupying the northeast. Both cities have zoos and trolley systems and nearby wineries and owe their early expansion to the original railway systems of the 19th-century American Southwest. Spanish explorers arrived at both of these places in the 1500s. And because my plan for this article, explicitly stated, was to write a portrayal of what it's like to take a long ride on a bus, I had needed to find a good place to fly to and to bus back from. El Paso to San Diego seemed an excellent expedition.

Preparing for my El Paso sojourn and 806-mile bus trip home -- purchasing tickets, doing research, scribbling notes -- I'd come across an opportune news article in the sports pages proclaiming that El Paso was in fact the Sweatiest City in the United States. Some scientist had determined that the combination of high temperatures (93 degrees average in summer) and high humidity (70 percent average) in El Paso caused the residents to produce over a liter of sweat apiece every 60 minutes. The article went on to note how the people of El Paso could fill a swimming pool with sweat in just four hours.

I'd inhaled sincerely, thought a long moment, removed the now-superfluous-seeming deodorant from my list of Things to Pack, and scribbled instead a little note, a reminder. "Breathe around El Pasoans less deeply." When in El Paso...

Flying into El Paso, you notice the typical Southwestern terrain spreading beneath you: a lot of rocky brown (and rather beautiful) nothing, and then, suddenly, a city plopped there.

After I landed, I experienced one of the dualities of El Paso, Texas, desert city: mellow, easy, air-conditioned indoors, and then, the moment you step outside, your lungs get crushed right out of you. Breathing 100 hot, wet degrees.

Most of the other dualities of El Paso straddle the fact that it's a border town. And not just a border town, but a double border town. South El Paso touches the Mexican state of Chihuahua, and west El Paso adjoins the American state of New Mexico. El Paso also borders a bygone time. There is no edge of El Paso that doesn't touch something very different from El Paso, a diagnosis that might account for either maddening schizophrenia or a certain charm. Whatever El Paso is, in its heart, it is also Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas, with a dose of old western thrown in.

Whatever El Paso is, I was there for all of 20 hours, 8 of which I slept. Anything I tell you about the heart of El Paso is part fancy, part hearsay, and part inference. You may take my words with a spoonful of salsa, if you wish. I can, however, list a few of the peculiarities I noticed.

Most of El Paso's city buses have no advertisements on them, which is surprising and refreshing in this age of the sellout. One sign city buses do sport, however, next to the image of the cigarette with a line through it, is a picture of a handgun with a line through it.

El Paso boasts the world's largest outlet for boots.

Walking around, I counted at least ten images of a steer's horned head.

Downtown, I visited a shooter's supply store.

From the upper windows of my hotel, anyone with half-good eyes could see the wrinkling geometry of two giant flags, unfurled among the pavement and the concrete, not far away: one starred for the state of Texas, the other colored for the country of Mexico.

Gas in El Paso started around $1.89.

After I checked into my downtown hotel, I set out to do what I knew I had to do while I was in El Paso. I had to have a drink at the mythical Rosa's Cantina.

Because when it came to El Paso, there was only one thing I had known for a long time. That old song. "Out in the West Texas town of El Paso / I fell in love with a Mexican girl. / Nighttime would find me in Rosa's Cantina..."

The story runs that the real cantina inspired Marty Robbins to write his tale of love fought for and love lost on the old Western frontier. So I found a taxi driver, and I asked him to take me over to Rosa's.

Past the abandoned steel mills and brown rocky hills, a $12 cab ride outside of El Paso proper, Rosa's Cantina shared a dead strip of hot, paved road with a Laundromat, a Mexican restaurant, and a liquor store. Across the street, two railroad tracks and a stone wall were all that separated Rosa's from the brown and muddy Rio Grande and the undeveloped ruggedness of New Mexico beyond.

Rosa's Cantina itself looked hopelessly dilapidated, a crumbling stone façade with one no-frills white-and-red sign above the door. Coming inside out of the heat and sun, I couldn't see much at first in Rosa's, and all I could hear was the thrumming rattle of an old air conditioner. There was a TV on in the back of the room and some lights in the ceiling turned on really low, by which I could sketch out the red-felt pool table, the wraparound bar, and the 20 or so tables with red-and-white checkered plastic cloths.

The paneled walls were lined, under protective chicken wire, with images of the Mexican-flavored Old West (stagecoaches, bullfights, Indians, and the like), and also by not-protected beer advertisements and sports imagery. Among the decorative touches hung the likenesses of three celebrities: Marty Robbins, John Wayne, and Secretariat. By the door, a "Felony Notice" warned against the possession of licensed or unlicensed weapons.

I ordered a can of Coke ($1), no glass, and asked to see the menu. It was three in the afternoon when I arrived, and besides the bartender (whose name, of course, was Rosie), I was the only one there. Rosa's served lunch from 11:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. The fare -- a price-fixed meal of Mexican and American delights ranging from tostadas and tacos to meat loaf -- was offered for $4.75. And they didn't sell hard liquor at Rosa's, just soda, wine, and beer. American beers cost $1.75 and imports were $2.25. By imports, they meant Tecate and Negra Modelo.

There was a jukebox at Rosa's Cantina, and aside from Marty Robbins, there was some Johnny Paycheck, Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Strait, Willie Nelson, and ZZ Top among the dozens of Latin discs. There were also offerings by the Doors, Pink Floyd, and Fats Domino. I could almost picture what it would be like to party in Rosa's Cantina, late into the Texas night.

But I couldn't figure out how Marty Robbins had ever gathered the idea for a song from this quaint place. True, the hill in the song behind Rosa's, where the hero makes his daring escape, had been redesigned as a monstrous overpass for Interstate 10. But Rosie told me everything else was the same, and it wasn't much. I guess one feller's dive bar is another's inspiration.

In the spirit of comparison, I decided a few hours before dusk to test the ease of an El Paso border crossing. Six times since I've lived in San Diego, I've been through San Ysidro -- three times into Tijuana and three times coming back -- and it has never taken me less than a damn long time to return. But over in El Paso, the man at the airport, the cabdrivers, the woman at the hotel, all of them told me that Ciudad Juárez was El Paso's sister city, a claim I've seldom heard echoed regarding San Diego and Tijuana. Surely, then, passage between the two had to be considerably more trouble free.

So I left my hotel walking downtown through what was becoming a bearable heat. Mostly Hispanic families lined the streets, families out shopping for mangoes and knockoff Louis Vuittons, folks commuting homeward from work. The shopkeepers were taking in wares and preparing to pull down grates as all of downtown El Paso started closing up.

In a few minutes, I got to the Santa Fe Street bridge on the bottom center edge of downtown (think the distance from Horton Plaza to the convention center). On our side of the bridge, a tiny Mexican-looking woman, who doled change to those who needed it, operated an old-fashioned turnstile. I sidled to the back of a modest line of mostly Mexicans, all ages. We had to pay the little lady 35 cents, for which we were given a blue generic ticket, which then had to be passed to a Mexican-looking man who stood ten feet away and collected tickets. That was it. Like at a carnival. Just a two-minute line, a turnstile, and a bridge between Mexico and me.

As I started up the low-walled sidewalk, over the vaulting, concrete, six-laned expanse of Santa Fe Street bridge, my cell phone read 4:42. Below, railroad tracks and boxcars and the concrete-lined winding of the choked and polluted Rio Grande. I descended the far curve of the bridge, stepped onto foreign land, and noted the time: 4:50. Only eight minutes to cross. About the same as at San Ysidro.

In Mexico, I pirouetted on the charming old cobbled road, a road that was as good as the day it was laid, and as I did, I tried to take a look around. But I was accosted on every side. Children selling T-shirts; adults hocking knickknacks; a woman holding up a money can, her other hand lifting a pant leg to show me hideous bruises and scars; hustling drivers of nearby roadside cabs. The buildings, mostly bars and motels, right there at the crossing to the richest country in the world, were terribly run-down. It was a sad mayhem.

Across the two lanes of what had become Juárez Street was another turnstile revolving back toward the United States, a turnstile with no line at all. Of course, in light of the competitive American spirit, the cost for U.S. entry was less than the cost to get to Mexico, just 25 cents. However, the money-taker was no old lady; a badged man in a uniform collected my quarter.

I walked the bridge again, mostly alone this time, and experienced that old U.S. hospitality: a building devoted to my safe reentry. A building housing customs offices, customs officials, the obligatory turnstiles, and conveyor belts leading through X-ray machines. One of the officers near the conveyor belts quietly demanded identification and asked a few questions. Late afternoon, midweek, summer month, and the line to get into the United States of America consisted of a single suitcase-bearing Mexican woman in front of me. The moments I waited, I noticed dust and faint music descending through the high-windowed room.

Eight more minutes. Home in the time it had taken me to go.

They were mopping the El Paso bus station floors when I arrived at 9:00 a.m. The moment the greenish tiles dried, they looked dirty again. None of the screens for departures or arrivals worked at all. Announcements blared over the speakers in a monotone, crackling, too loud and garbled to understand. The building itself was small, perhaps 2000 square feet, and its space was partitioned into a ticket desk and departure area. There were 100 or so people there, a cross section of American humanity angled in the various postures of waiting. The customer-service office, such as it was, sat empty. I wondered where my bus would be arriving, and when. The three bus officials I found and questioned were either brusque or obviously, visibly bored. Not one of them was the least bit helpful. Eventually, a fourth person with a badge informed me that my bus would leave from Gate 5 (out of 6), but it needed maintenance, and so it would arrive 30 minutes late. "Great," I thought sarcastically. "Great way to start."

To me, a bus seems unwieldy, much like its alternate name, motorcoach: awkward, strange, not of its place. A bus's high face, wide and flattened like a sperm whale's, overhangs the pavement implacably. When buses turn, they give impressions of straight angles wedging through curves. Buses stink. Two words I associate with a bus are "nauseating exhaust." I do like the sound of a bus. That deep, agreeable, rumbling purr, the sure easy hum: it almost offsets a bus's random associations. "The back end of a bus" is a colorful phrase that signifies extreme ugliness. "You missed the bus" means you lost an opportunity or you're not in on everyone else's joke.

(Please note, for the record, that the word busing has only one s. Buses, the plural of bus, has one s also. A buss, with two s's, is actually an outmoded word for kiss, which raises the question why so many highway-side fast-food businesses might welcome the presence of kisses and trucks.)

The current state of the bus industry in this country is troubled. There are quite a few regional and charter bus lines, but only Greyhound is trying to make money by serving the whole country with noncharter operations. Greyhound boasts that it provides service to 2500 destinations in the United States and 1100 in Canada.

Yet its chief executive, Stephen E. Gorman, cites multiple problems: tough competition (from airlines and those who prefer personal auto travel), high operational costs, driver-recruitment issues, and shrinking ridership. In Bus Ride magazine, Gorman is quoted as saying, "Beginning in the summer of 2001, Greyhound passenger levels declined along with revenues. With the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, this revenue and passenger decline accelerated and created an additional burden for the company in the form of unprecedented cost increases for insurance and security. In 2003, Greyhound faced the crisis and took short-term actions in order to provide time for development of a long-term solution." Greyhound tried to stabilize its business by increasing prices on longer trips, canceling an order for 200 buses, and cutting about 20 percent of its management and supervisory employees. The changes will also bring about 150 layoffs and the elimination of nearly 100 buses from the company's fleet.

The numbers reveal that Greyhound, which has been in operation for 90 years, hasn't been a profitable company in over two decades. Last year, Greyhound hired Gorman, whose résumé includes stints as executive vice president of Northwest Airlines and Krispy Kreme, with the expressed directive to turn things around.

My contact at Greyhound, a spokesperson named Kim Plaskett, told me that the plan is to invest money back into the company but that this would involve capital that Greyhound doesn't have. "We have to start somewhere," she said. "Profit is the first goal. And transforming the network to focus on shorter routes is the crux of that."

From what I saw and heard, though, the real problem with the bus industry is the people they hire and the training those people receive. Yes, the buses are often delayed and the stations are ramshackle and filthy, but that wouldn't be so bad if courteous, well-rested, knowledgeable, and available customer-service representatives staffed the stations and the buses.

Small rays of fortune shone upon me not only when my bus was ready for departure a mere 20 minutes late but when I climbed the steps and turned to my left and realized! Yes. I would get my own seat. (I think the most critical contingency when it comes to long trips on public transportation is whether you have to share your immediate personal space with a stranger. The power to put my elbow anywhere on the armrest and the capacity to stretch my legs sideways, lounging across an aisle seat and window seat: these things become paramount.)

The passengers on a bus enter into a kind of unspoken covenant. You might say they watch each other's backs. If it's time to leave, the passengers on a bus will pipe up with "We're not all here." And "There's someone missing...that woman with the green pullover." When I swatted a renegade migrating mosquito at 70 mph out somewhere in Arizona, I felt as if I were saving those onboard from an epidemic, at least from needless blood loss.

My companions on Greyhound Bus 2355 included a family from Tennessee, a mother and her son, a lesbian couple who slept on each other's shoulders mostly, and close to 20 lone travelers who read, talked, slept, and listened to music through their headphones. Of the 55 seats on the bus, only 26 were taken. Most of the folks onboard were headed to Tucson, Los Angeles, or Sacramento. No one was from El Paso.

Among the fares, one grizzled, unshaven, bespectacled, 50-year-old black man in a gray sweatshirt, "Jack" (not his real name), had been on the bus since Fort Worth, already a 12-hour ride. Jack was renting an apartment in downtown San Diego, but he was also buying a house in Fort Worth, where his wife was a nurse. Once a Marine, Jack was now a supervisor at an insulation company in San Diego. His two kids were grown.

The reason Jack bought a house in Fort Worth, a 2400-square-foot home for which he paid $100,000, was to own property, build equity, and have a tax write-off. For the next ten years, Jack planned to commute between San Diego and Texas. Military couples get used to such long-distance arrangements, seeing each other once or twice a month. Jack said that he usually flew, but he was taking the bus this time to relax his mind and meditate. He said he took the bus about twice a year, usually to Las Vegas. "I prefer the bus to a car because if you're tired and you're driving, you have to pay attention."

Jack's plan for the ride, besides sleeping, was to listen to the radio on his headphones, but he couldn't get reception. Besides the headphones, Jack had brought only the clothes on his back for the 26-hour trip. "I like to get away from the hustle and the bustle and just relax, get away from the everyday. You know, you see so much. 'Hey, buddy, you got a dollar? You got a quarter?' You know, you see that type of ordeal, and that's a normal, everyday life. But sometimes you just need to get away from all that, to rest and let it go, to relax."

Later, Jack told me, "I'm on vacation now; I've got time. If I wanted to get home earlier, I'd take a plane. But now I've got a longer time frame. I need to get home but at the same time get away from it all. The bus is perfect for that." When I asked Jack about what I perceived as a lack of supplies, he told me that he didn't bring snacks or food on the trip because the bus was going to stop at "just about every fast-food place between here and San Diego." He wondered if Greyhound and McDonald's didn't have "some kind of a hookup or something."

Across the aisle and two seats up, a dark-haired woman named Bernie Sharp, 37, curled and cuddled with her girlfriend, Veronica. The two had been together for four years and lived in San Diego's North County. Sharp told me she was a maintenance engineer for a Motel 6 in Oceanside. I asked her about her heritage (American Indian?), but she told me she wasn't sure because she was adopted.

She and Veronica were two of the eight folks who got on the bus when I did. They were driving a friend to Houston, but they got tired and took a break in El Paso. Then the woman they were driving decided to drive the rest of the way alone, so Bernie and Veronica headed home on the bus. Sharp's family owned a 4000-acre ranch in Tonopah, Nevada. She rode the bus from Oceanside to Nevada often because it was inexpensive and convenient. Her most exciting bus story involved her grandmother's .25 handgun. She had to throw the heirloom in the trash on the way back from Nevada because she was afraid her bus was going to be searched. This was in the days immediately following September 11.

Sharp also took a city bus to and from work. She'd done this ever since her old car had broken down. "I like the scenery on the bus. Especially here, now, in Texas: all the old buildings and the history. I like the mountains and the plains. I like scenery. I also hate driving through traffic and worrying about the hassles of driving and traffic. It's good to get rid of that stress, but I do like to have my own car because then I have more control and more convenience. I'd like to be able to stop whenever I want to." For a long trip, Sharp brings lots of water and snacks. She and Veronica were curled up under their big black blanket most of the time.

There were a couple of colorful characters on the bus with us. Kenny Rogers, 39, lived in Los Angeles, had five kids and a sixth on the way, and when I met him he was finishing a modern odyssey: 6000 miles in 6 weeks, all on Greyhound buses. Los Angeles to Miami (82H hours), then Miami to Chattanooga (18H hours), and now Chattanooga to L.A. (58 hours). Ten states and 48 stops; 14 hours of layovers.

By now, I thought, Kenny Rogers (and yes, that was his real name) had to be half crazy and half bus expert. Even before I approached Rogers to talk to him, I'd heard him talking. For hours he'd been the loudest voice on the bus. He was one of those people who, when he wasn't "using" his sunglasses, he was still wearing them, on his forehead, an inch or two above his eyes. The whole time I listened to him talk, I wondered what was keeping his glasses up. "The bus is a great place to meet people and gain personal experience," Rogers said. "It's either relaxing and enjoyable or just plain boring. But I think seeing things and meeting people is what life's all about, and there isn't a much better place to see lots of things and meet lots of people than on the bus."

Rogers paid $443 to be driven across the country twice. He estimated that he'd talked to 25 to 30 drivers in that span. Rogers's favorite subject of conversation (judging by what I'd overheard for quite some time) seemed to be politics. I'd call Rogers the kind of person who watches a lot of news and pays attention to the issues around him. And then he formulates his own opinions, which he tells to anyone whether or not they're listening.

When it came to bus politics, Rogers was full of ideas. "I think they need more ghostriders in the bus system. A ghostrider is someone who works for the company but rides undercover and writes reports on drivers and stations." Rogers thought Greyhound needed more ghostriders because the customer service was terrible. "And yet they seem surprised that they're losing passengers," he said. "My experience this time was bad enough that I'll shop around for a better bus line next time."

Twice on our trip from El Paso to San Diego, I overheard Rogers asking for official forms to file a customer complaint. One time, it wasn't even bus related. "Can I see your manager?" he asked loudly in a New Mexico McDonald's. Then he glared at the petulant girl behind the counter and told her, "You shouldn't talk to people that way." And Rogers also made a bit of a scene at the bus station in Tucson, Arizona, after a bus employee had been "short and unhelpful and inconsiderate" with him. "Did you hear me trying to file that complaint in Tucson?" he asked me. "I needed a pen with the form they gave me, and they handed me one that didn't even work!" He laughed. "That says it all." I couldn't figure out whether Rogers was annoying or entertaining. In the end, his enthusiastic good humor and quick intelligence did seem to save him, somewhat.

Sitting behind Rogers for a good part of the trip was a fortysomething woman who didn't want to give me her name. "Jane" was traveling from Lexington, Kentucky, to Los Angeles. She was a day behind schedule because of a bus breakdown, and she told me a shocking tale about "disgustingly rude" and bitter bus-line employees. "Did you see that nice old lady who was sitting up front before?" Jane asked me. (I had seen the woman she was talking about. She was probably 80 years old and seemed sweet.) "Well, she had her luggage specially tagged because it had medication in it or something that she really needed. And you know what?" She paused for effect. "They lost it! She transferred with me in Dallas and they put her important luggage on the wrong bus."

Jane herself had undergone one three-hour delay and one four-hour delay and witnessed a dramatic drug bust in the Dallas bus station. She'd also watched her bus drive away without her because Greyhound had decided to reschedule her route. "That was harrowing because they didn't explain anything to us. No one was there to give us any information. We didn't know that another bus was on the way for us (albeit four hours later), and everyone I asked just brushed me off and made me feel stupid."

I started to feel extraordinarily lucky about losing only 20 minutes in El Paso. Jane likened a bus to a rolling insane asylum. "And a long bus trip makes you look like a hobo or a bag person," she said. "I mean, I don't usually look like this, okay?" She laughed half-cynically. "This was my first long bus trip," she said. "And I hated it. I'll never do it again."

For the first half of my voyage from El Paso, our busman was one John Faries. ("Busman," by the way, is the title of one who drives a bus.) Kenny Rogers would later tell me that of the nearly 30 drivers he'd seen on his trip, Faries by far was best.

Faries, who was 60, chatted amiably with the folks seated behind him. He listened and commented and pointed out sights along the way. Faries also issued a tongue-in-cheek policy against yawning, due to the fact that it's highly contagious. But for the most part, Faries told busman stories.

"Once there was this car, swerving all over its lane, trying to pass me, then not trying to pass, swerving, then coming up to pass me again, and the whole time I wondered if it was going to hit me or veer off the road." Faries's gravelly voice had a smile built into it. "And then finally it pulls alongside, and there's this lady, okay, and she's talking on her cell phone with her left hand, taking notes with her right hand, and steering with her left elbow! Can you picture that? And I'm thinking I should blow the air horn at her, but I decided not to because then she might panic and go driving off into a ditch or something. She was nuts! Just nuts! I've seen it all, though; didn't surprise me in the least."

Faries was fantastically jowled, bald on top, gray on the sides, and pretty thin for an older bus driver. Apparently he'd landed himself a "much younger" wife. "She takes great care of an old feller like me," he said. Faries's stories helped the time ease past. "Once a guy came speeding up behind me, flashing his lights, and then he raced on by," Faries told the first few rows of us. "Gave me the international symbol of goodwill with his finger and went zooming away. And then, about ten miles up the road, there he sat, alongside the white line with red-and-blue lights flashing behind him." Faries's grainy laugh sawed air. Ha-ha-ha-ha. "Served him right!"

Vast stretches of I-10 are desolate. Extending from the road on either side, away to distant mountains, the cactus and green gorse of Texas and New Mexico stubble whitish and yellowish sand. The rolling flats slide past, dotted with cloud shadows, until rugged purple mountains crowd vivid skies. There's not much out there, out in the heat. Billboards, mobile homes, run-down shacks, railroad tracks, power lines, and decrepit fences are the solitary human influences in some empty spots.

First stop after El Paso: Deming, New Mexico, where, according to one passenger, "There ain't no grass unless you raise it." The bus terminal was a tiny building, almost the size and shape of the bus itself. No one got on; the old lady with none of her luggage got off. Said Faries, "I think the rattlesnakes eat vacationers here. Perfect-sized town, though. Not too big, not too small." The two state parks near Deming were called Rock Hound and City of Rocks. Gives you an impression of what the landscape looked like.

When it comes to traveling, I'm high maintenance. I treat long trips like camping excursions. Have to pack supplies. For this journey I brought a pullover, a newspaper, notebook, tape recorder, pens, water, snacks, and two books. Most of my fellow busgoers had pillows, headphones, handheld video games, and sunglasses in their bus-traveling kits.

Random sampling of bus-seen curious highway road signs:

Dust Storms May Exist

Parking, Inspection, Leaky Loads

Zero Visibility

Possible

Safety Corridor

Bump

Dip

Rough Pavement

Road Forks

Second stop, Lordsburg, New Mexico, for a 15-minute layover. But we didn't go to the Shakespeare Ghost Town or Gila Cliff Dwellings; we went to McDonald's. Lordsburg was barely big enough for a McDonald's. You'd imagine three-fourths of their business or more was from buses. Three buses besides ours pulled in during the 15 minutes we were there. Gas cost $1.93.

At 1:35, near the Arizona border, it started to rain. Hard. Fat drops popped and sizzled on the windshield. It's one of my favorite natural sights, rain advancing across great Western distances. Vertical wispy cloud lines, blackish gray, descending in curtains or sheets out of dark thunderheads. They really do look like curtains or sheets.

Something about the uniformity of the scenery, the rhythm of the road, the tilting seats, sheer boredom, and air conditioning blowing on your ankles -- bus rides promote naps. I stole four snoozes in 14 hours. By my calculations, at any given moment, the 26 of us (or 27, including the constantly conscious Faries) were about 30 percent alert. It's a lucky wonder that no one was a snorer. (Or else the bus-hum drowned such frequencies.)

We passed into Arizona at 2:10 MST.

In Tucson, we stopped for 45 minutes and changed pilots. Our trip was ultimately a tale of two busmen. After affable, talkative Faries, then we got Ted. Just Ted.

Ted wouldn't give me his last name, wouldn't talk to me or the nice old ladies in the front row, wouldn't entertain the idea of an interview, and exhorted the lot of us to "turn your stereos down." (No one on the bus had a stereo, as far as I knew.)

When I introduced myself, Ted told me that he was "in no mood." I'd say Ted was one of the most impatient people in whose hands I have ever knowingly placed my life. "I don't have to talk to you" was Ted's immediate response when I told him that I was a journalist. "I don't have to say a word. Not unless you have written authorization. I don't have to talk to you at all." From Tucson to San Diego, I kept expecting Ted to honk at other drivers and flip his own international symbol of goodwill.

The bus station in Tucson was on the fringes of the outskirts. Inside, it crept with roaches and stank of dirt. Tucson itself is basically a sprawling arrangement of suburbs, huddled among jagged hills. Its downtown was a tiny cluster of buildings, only three of which were higher than eight stories. It was dry and hot, even after rain, which anyway just evaporated. The cost of gas there was $1.91.

A bus quandary: Why do they carpet the walls of buses? What good is a carpeted wall?

By now we were halfway home, outside Phoenix somewhere, and sure enough old Ted had had two arguments: one with the bus door, which popped open inexplicably at 70 mph, and one with the driver of a VW bus who swerved in front of us. We fellow passengers (all grown quiet, like good schoolchildren) had taken to stealing amused looks at each other after Ted's antics. Deep down, we knew that we were hurtling along in a ten-ton piece of metal with Ted at the helm, so we figured we shouldn't piss Ted off.

I could see in the mirror -- the one Ted used to keep an eye on us -- that Ted had a mustache. Just a mustache. He was the only one on the bus with just a mustache. I thought he might be the only person I'd seen in recent memory who sported a mustache solo. I'm not sure if it's as passé as I think it is nowadays to cultivate unaccompanied upper-lip hair, but I was bored, and my mind was drifting, and I was trying to lambaste Ted for his horrible attitude. The whole bus exuded a different atmosphere now that Faries had surrendered the wheel to this surly, mustachioed tyrant.

Next stop, Gila Bend, much more of a bend in the road than an actual town. There was a sign along the highway that said, "Welcome to Gila Bend. Home of 1,700 friendly people and 5 old crabs." Gas cost $1.96.

We stopped at what appeared to be (surely some kind of highway-side illusion) the only three eating options in town: McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Love's Mini-Mart. In the gigantic parking lot, good old Ted approached me and apologized for his earlier demeanor. "I'm sorry I reacted that way to you," he said. "You just caught me at a bad time." Of course, by now I'd been writing about Ted behind his back, literally and figuratively, so I was going to have to feel bad if he turned out to be a nice guy. "I'm always kind of on edge about journalists on the bus," he said. "They're usually very critical about Greyhound." (With good reason, based on what I'd seen and the stories I'd heard.)

I nodded and chatted and forced a few smiles. (Note: it's easy to force a smile in sunny 100-degree heat because your face is already scrunched up.) And finally, I shook Ted's hand and said, "No hard feelings." But I wasn't about to erase what I'd written.

On the road again, Ted warmed up some. He talked for a while with the lady in the first row, too quiet over the bus's hum for me to hear. And happily, everyone else followed Ted's lead, as a buzz of conversations sprung up. "I love the smell of cut alfalfa." "Only five hours to go." "Those are F-16s." "Smarty Jones was just amazing." "Why are you wearing a sweater?" "I can't wait to wake up in my own bed." "Mommy, what's a Yuma?"

Sunset -- especially in the Arizona desert, over distant mountains -- is a beautiful sight. Quiet, solemn, plaintive purple light. I've wished again and again that our sky could be that color all day, instead of its usual loud blue. Twilight seems grown-up and protective, without the overeager crudeness of the feisty, youthful, well-meaning sun.

Last stop, Yuma, Arizona. Gas $1.92. Sunset over the mountains, heat lying down for the day. Pink clouds, purple sky, sleepy town. The whole of Yuma looked prefab, jerry-built, thrown up hastily around hot noons. We stayed in Yuma for ten minutes, long enough for me to stretch my legs and brush my teeth. One thing I noticed about water taps in the desert: they have different temperatures from water taps everywhere else -- Hot, and Fantastically Hot. After two days -- one in El Paso and one on the bus -- I was getting somewhat used to it, but generally I hate brushing my teeth with anything but cool water.

And now, as the colors fell away from the sky, it was time for the stretch run, three hours on mostly California highways home. Three hours blissfully (or boringly) uneventful, marked only by the clogging and unclogging of my altitude-addled ears. I read a little to the sound of the motor-hum under an overhead light. Noticed that our windshield had spackled itself with thick blips of bug guts. I felt patient, in a way that makes me want to say that I felt patient for the first time in my life.

A metaphor found me then, as I perceived that night-darkness is darker from inside a bus. You don't get the continuity of seeing a sign or lights approaching before they slide too quickly by. It's just darkness and blur, darkness and blur. And that rushing suddenness -- and my patience as I let it go by me through the big window -- that experience, felt like an image for my life. I didn't even catch the exact moment when we passed into my hometown's long-awaited city limits.

If your first impression of San Diego were the bus station, you might be inclined to leave off with your merry way and stay a while. Located at First and Broadway, in the heart of downtown, the terminal is by far the cleanest and best lighted I've seen. Music piped in, friendly security guards, food facilities, new chairs and displays, and right outside, numerous cabs and busy roads and flourishing businesses. Ah, yes. San Diego. Gas $2.29.

Finally, 11:15 p.m., woozy and stiff, I was mostly home.