Vital Land Link : Buses Run Where Only a Crow Flies

I left my home in Norfolk,

Virginia--California on my mind.

I straddled that Greyhound and rode it into Raleigh and on across Caroline . . .

The Promised Land, by Chuck Berry, 1964

The Greyhound from Seattle pulls into Billings at 12:35 every night for a brief pause on its eastward journey across America’s Empty Quarter, destination Chicago, two days and a lifetime of highway miles beyond.

Montana’s largest city (population 66,000) is quiet as the prairie at this hour, except for Cattin’s Cafe (“We gladly accept local checks”), its lights ablaze a block away, and some of the passengers straggle off the bus and cross deserted First Avenue in search of coffee there. Others settle onto the terminal’s wooden benches to await the arrival of connecting buses that will take them to Thermopolis and Shoshoni, Roundup and Great Falls, Casper and Cheyenne.

No Ordinary Thing

To those whose souls are captive to the restless energy of the open road, the long-haul buses that crisscross the nation are no ordinary thing. They speak of small towns wrapped in darkness, of the loneliness of passing as a stranger through the night, of a great love left behind in the dusty-hamlet shadows of another era as a bus moves slowly away at dusk, on its destination sign the name of some far-off place.

At 1:35 a.m., Francis Sullivan, who wears a 17-year patch for safe driving, reboards his 20 passengers and heads the 43-seat Greyhound out of Billings and onto Interstate 94, toward Huntley, Worden, Custer, Hysham and the other little ranching towns scattered across the plains of Montana and North Dakota.

Spare Tractor Parts

In the freight compartment under the belly of the bus are bundles of the morning newspaper, the Billings Gazette, a shipment of blood and medical supplies for several country hospitals and spare parts for a rancher’s broken tractor in Medora, where cattle rustlers once were hanged from a tree that still stands in the town of 94 inhabitants.

The man who got on in Big Timber, bound for Cleveland, folds his jacket into a pillow and says: “I could’ve flown and it might’ve been cheaper, but I hate flying.” Across the aisle, in the front seat with the best view of the highway, is a retired couple with time to spare and things to see. Behind them is a nurse who flew to Billings from Las Vegas and is trying to get back to Glendive in time for her morning shift, a cowboy traveling to Bismarck with a connection on to Minot “to do some fishin’ and drinkin’--and not necessarily in that order--with my brother,” and a man of about 40 who boarded without a suitcase, says he hasn’t eaten in five days and has no other apparent possession in life except a bus ticket to Chicago.

“There’s work there, I heard,” he said.

While urban Americans by the millions have turned away from intercity buses in the past decade, lured by cheap air fares and the demands of time, out here in the open spaces of the West, a land hostage to the tyranny of distance and the sparsity of people, the Greyhound line is still the heart line , much as the stagecoach was a century ago, in the days before the railroad.

Without backtracking through Denver or Minneapolis, you cannot fly from Billings to Fargo, N.D. (population 61,000), the largest cities in neighboring states. Nor can you fly between the capitals of Helena, Mont., and Bismarck, N.D., without making a double connection. Just one passenger train, the Empire Builder, rolls across the two states once a day in each direction on the far-northern High Line that links Chicago and Seattle.

So, out here, if you want to travel, if you need machine parts, medicine or document delivery in a hurry, you have two choices: your car or the bus.

Only Link to Cities

“The bus is our link--our only public link--to the bigger cities,” said Margaret Schmierer, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Glendive, in the sagebrush flatlands of eastern Montana. “We’ve lost the passenger trains, and if we lost the bus, too, we’d be hurt. Especially on holidays, you’ll see people from all over northeastern Montana here waiting for the Greyhound, going east or west.”

But most Americans share neither a dependency on nor a romance with the nation’s intercity bus system that serves 15,000 U.S. communities (compared to 625 cities served by scheduled airlines and 525 by Amtrak, the federally subsidized passenger rail service).

Buses command a declining share of the long-distance transportation market, and since the industry was deregulated five years ago, the companies have dropped unprofitable routes, ending service to 776 communities--and the 1 million Americans who live in them. Earlier this year, Greyhound’s chief competitor, Trailways, pulled out of Montana and Wyoming entirely. Greyhound, which introduced transcontinental bus runs in 1929, has seen its annual passenger count cut in half, to about 30 million, in the past decade.

“With lower airline fares (resulting from airline deregulation in 1978) and more families owning two cars than ever before, the bus becomes the choice of last resort,” said Michael Redish, a transportation analyst with the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington, D.C. “For trips under 200 miles, people drive. Over 200 miles, if they have access to an airport, they fly. So that raises the question: What role do buses fit?”

Image to Overcome

The answer may rest in the bus industry’s ability to overcome its shoddy image as an antiquated, uncomfortable and not-so-cheap form of travel. Many big-city terminals are in decaying, spooky parts of town; buses typically offer their customers only 70% of the space that an airline passenger has and about 30% of what a train passenger gets; and, although Greyhound’s cheapest advance-purchase fare on the Los Angeles-New York run may be a bargain at $59, the journey takes 80 hours by bus, five hours by plane. Sometimes, discounted air fares are even cheaper than the bus. (Southwest Airlines offered a $39 San Francisco-San Diego trip in 1983; Greyhound’s fare was $47.)

Last December, just about the time Wall Street analysts were wondering if the Greyhound was an endangered species, the diversified, Phoenix-based Greyhound Corp. announced it was getting out of the bus business after 72 years. It sold the lines to an investor group headed by Dallas entrepreneur Fred G. Currey for $350 million.

The corporation--whose business interests range from operating two cruise ships to manufacturing Brillo pads and Dial soap--kept the original name, and Currey’s privately held company received, among other assets, the 3,100 buses and the famous sprinting-dog trademark.

New Greyhound Campaign

Currey, president of the new Greyhound Lines, is now trying to convince America to get back on the bus and “leave the driving to us.” In almost every city he visits, he heads directly from the airport to the bus terminal, where he often pops aboard a Greyhound unannounced and rides the $200,000 vehicle to the next city, talking with passengers and drivers along the way. He has startled baggage-handlers on many docks by taking off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and pitching in to help them load and unload freight.

“If you tell me bus transportation is dead, I’ll tell you you’re wrong,” Currey said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “Our market is alive and well. It’s a just a matter of focusing on what the travelers’ needs are and structuring the company accordingly.

“Under regulation, the industry didn’t respond to changes in the market place. It was trying to ape the rail industry, even though we have the flexibility of going anywhere the highway goes,” he said.

“Populations shifted from rural to urban areas and sub-cities grew around the cities, and industry people still talked about nonstop runs from Los Angeles to San Francisco. But hell, our passengers didn’t live there anymore. They lived in Glendale and Santa Ana and the San Fernando Valley, and we weren’t picking them up.”

Shuttle System Planned

Borrowing from the airlines’ hub concept, Currey envisions a network of 12- and 14-seat vans feeding passengers from small towns into Greyhound’s points of through service. He does not see the Greyhound so mesmerized with the interstate highway system that it would again run hourly nonstop trips from New York to Boston,speeding right past Hartford, Conn., a city of 200,000.

He sees the bus dealing not with a national market, but with scores of regional ones, each with its own characteristics: Greyhound’s three-hour New York City-Atlantic City run (the company’s busiest) attracts, for instance, 13 million passengers a year whose needs and socio-economic makeup are distinctly different from those of travelers between Richmond and Atlanta or Billings and Fargo.

It is early morning now in North Dakota, a night’s ride out of Billings, and the new driver on the Seattle-Chicago run, Monte Schneider, is rolling east through the Badlands.

The sun has come up like a ball of orange coals over a distant butte, and the little one-street towns slip by as a blurred portrait of America--bib overalls drying on a backyard line, a weathered American Legion hall, a sod lookout used by Gen. George A. Custer, Jerry’s Bar & Groceries with its Copenhagen Snuff poster, combines and tractors for sale in an open lot next to city hall, Dairy Queens, crumbling drive-in movie screens, barber shops bearing the first names of their proprietors.

Towns Dying Out

“The towns out here are slowing dying off,” said Schneider, who was born and raised in Hebron, N.D. (through which the bus will pass at 9:23 a.m.). His retired parents still live there on their 1,200-acre ranch, but the land is leased out now.

“Towns like Antelope and Eagles Nest are gone, and now you’re talking about places like Hebron, Richardton and Glen Ullin losing the young, too, because there’s no jobs. Maybe it’s a cycle. Maybe they’ll come back sooner or later, when they find out you can only take so much of the big city.

“I’ll tell you, though, it kind of makes me feel good to come through Hebron and these towns with medicine and whatever else they need. I feel like I’m paying back my debt to the people, for educating me, for giving me the chance not to have to work at the brick plant. It gives me a chance to say thank you.”

Late that afternoon, precisely at the scheduled time of 4:35 p.m., Schneider pulls into the docks at the Fargo terminal, just as Greg Miller is arriving from Winnepeg with a load of connecting eastbound passengers. A bachelor who has been driving for Greyhound for eight years and earns about $24,000 a year, Schneider calls the dispatcher in Minneapolis on an 800 number, then heads for a cafe across the street for soup and coffee, his day’s work done.

He lingers there longer than expected, and by the time he returns to the terminal to complete his paper work, the dock is empty.

Long Run to Chicago

The bus has been serviced and has taken on 180 gallons of diesel fuel and the new driver, Harold Evenson, is somewhere out on the interstate, his Greyhound rumbling through the afternoon shadows for Moorhead, Dilwork, Glyndon, Hawley, Lake Park, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Perham, New York Mills, Wadena, Verndale, Aldrich, Staples, Motley, Brainerd, Little Falls, Royalton, Rice, Barnesville, Fergus Falls, Alexandria, Osakis, West Union, Sauk Centre, Melrose, Freeport, Albany, Avon, St. Joseph, St. Cloud, Clear Lake, Becher, Big Lake, Elk River, Anoka, Osseo, Minneapolis, Midway, St. Paul, Baldwin Junction, Menomonie, Eau Claire, Black River Falls, Tomah, Camp Douglas, New Lisbon, Mauston, Wisconsin Dells, Portage, Lake Delton, Baraboo, Sauk City, Middleton, Madison, Goerke’s Corner, Milwaukee, Northbrook and Chicago, with connections on to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and Boston.