The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  We made a quick stop in Vail, Colorado, where I’d lived for eight months when I was eighteen as a ski bum, and I clambered out of the bus to stand in the snow for a moment to remember. Suddenly the doors swung shut with a sigh of air and the bus started forward. I rushed and banged on the door. The bus halted and the doors swung open and the driver barked, “I didn’t tell you you could get out!”

  We stopped an hour later so he could put chains on the rear wheels for the trip over Vail Pass. I got out again, and a second later he jumped in and started forward again. I ran up to the doors and he barked again. “Ain’t leaving, dammit, just moving forward a bit. What’s your problem?”

  In 50,000 miles no one had spoken to me like that. I lost it. “Why are you being such an asshole?” I said.

  “Stay away from me!” he yelled. “I don’t like you!”

  . . .

  WE PAUSED IN KANSAS CITY at 9:00 p.m., a light snow falling, and perky Suze Orman lectured us about cutting expenses to amass six months’ savings in a down economy, from the wall-mounted flat-screen TV. “I know how to cut expenses!” said a man next to me, with a few days’ growth on his cheeks, wearing work boots and a denim jacket. “I have a great idea. I’ll say to my four kids, we’re going to alternate eating. Your mom and two of you will eat on Mondays, and then me and the other two will eat on Tuesdays.” He was a truckdriver who’d just gotten laid off when he’d rolled into the depot in Kansas City that day, and he was headed home to Florida on the bus. “Retirement? A 401k? I’ve got two plans: the good one and the bad one. The good one is to win the lottery. The bad one is to work until the day I die.”

  The miles and hours passed in a blur. By now I was used to the physical discomfort; it seemed like nothing, though the constant diet of Big Macs and fries was getting old, and my country felt so sad—there wasn’t any other word for it. “I just have to get down to Tennessee and to court, and then I’ll come back,” said a fat man in white socks and shorts, though it was seventeen degrees outside and 3:00 a.m., in the St. Louis station. “Hoping I might get a job around Indianapolis or something.”

  “What’s the court case about?” I asked.

  “Wrong place and the wrong time, that’s all,” he said, picking his teeth, as the television overhead blared, “What if I told you there was a way to make money on your own terms? It’s been right under your nose your whole life; the question is, are you ready for it? To take advantage of the enormous profits of the stock market, no matter where it’s going!” I couldn’t believe it; the stock market had fallen by 60 percent, had collapsed, and here was the same old song, and I wondered if anyone was buying. Not the guy next to me, at least. “Might as well just go to Vegas,” he said. “All one big fucking gamble.”

  I loved the idea of being surrounded by otherness, but this was an otherness that I wanted to push away, not delve into, not subsume myself in. I imagined Moolchand or Moussa as bottomless pools leading me to India or Mali themselves. But my fellow Greyhound travelers felt like dead ends. I didn’t want to feel that way about America; I’d been imagining coming home and seeing it in a new light, shiny and clean and easy and modern, and familiar and welcoming, and I hadn’t noticed any of this on the China bus to New York or the Greyhound to Toronto so many months before.

  We were waiting in line to get back on the bus, and I had to run to the bathroom. I asked a man who’d been on since L.A. if he could watch my bags. His wire-framed glasses were crooked; he hadn’t shaved in a while, and he carried a garbage bag. But he just looked at me. Stared. “No,” he said softly. “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

  We boarded and headed toward Pittsburgh. A woman sat next to me and started texting with people in a sex chat room over her cell phone. “I got 8 inches!” “Please can someone help me, I want to so bad,” wrote “lookin4luvlesbo,” as we hurtled down the great American road.

  Another voice from across the aisle. “The baby died! No he totally dead, you know, and that’s what I’m sayin. Sounds like bullshit to me. She don’t got no job and can’t do nothing but sit and cop an attitude. She told me the baby died but there’s no way that baby was six pounds and there’s gonna be no body, no funeral, nothing. We gotta go down there and figure out what happened to the baby. It’s the ugliest thing I ever seen.”

  WE PULLED OUT OF PITTSBURGH at midnight and I was headed home. I couldn’t quite fathom it; I was so close, yet I also felt still very much out there, riding that unbroken chain, and I felt closer to New Delhi and Kabul in a way than I did to Washington. Get off the bus, find a hotel, plan my next leg. No. Not anymore. This was it, my last night on the road. I had a feeling that my life had changed. That I had, slowly but surely, inexorably, reached not an end but a starting point. A beginning.

  Escaping into the farthest corners of the world had always felt good to me. Part of it was just adventure, the excitement of plunging along a muddy road in the Peruvian Amazon or jumping aboard a ferry with no idea of where I was going. I took it for granted that no assignment was too long or too dangerous—that the most intense ones were the best ones—and that my family would be there for me when I got back. That my wife would love me. That my children would miss me and hug me when I walked in the door again weeks or months later, and no one would ever feel abandoned and that I’d feel as much a part of their lives as if I’d never been away. That’s what I’d always told myself.

  But as the bus rolled down the highway toward home in the middle of the night, I started thinking about the price I’d paid. Going away, living the life I’d lived, had cost me. It was one thing to go away on a four-day business trip, another to be on a ship at sea in the Pacific for two months—and to leave three weeks later for another fourteen days in New Zealand, as I’d done, gone for more than 120 days that year. On this trip alone I’d been traveling for 159 days. My marriage had crumbled and I’d let it, even though I had told myself I was trying to save it. I’d let the duality of my life grow, without stopping it; while I constantly kept moving, Lindsey and I had barely taken a vacation together, just the two of us, in fifteen years.

  All those people I’d met on the road had made me think deeply about travel and human connection and escape. I had always prided myself on the connections I made while traveling, from the nutty Swiss guy in Mombasa to Fardus in Bangladesh to Moolchand in New Delhi. But all those interactions were fleeting, shallow—I couldn’t kid myself that they had been otherwise.

  In places like India and Indonesia, where people almost always travel together and I was a freak alone, I had finally started to understand the value of deeper connections, especially as I cruised through the night toward home in this bus of lost souls. Only connect, wrote E. M. Forster—one of those famous literary lines that’s now a cliché—and as humans that’s what we all craved perhaps more than anything else. To be known, to let your guard down, was scary; how ironic that so many of us fled instead, that we didn’t allow ourselves the very thing we wanted in our deepest souls. The lure of foreign countries and cultures has always been escape, but also transformation, redemption, discovery. People who felt like they didn’t fit in had long sought escape in the exotic, but maybe that was because in those foreign lands they didn’t have an excuse—they could never be really known in the first place, never have to take that risk of opening up and trusting. We passed another McDonald’s and I thought of my father, who’d never remarried after divorcing thirty-five years ago. Today he was living in Thailand with a woman whose command of the English language was shaky at best, and it was his longest relationship in years. Did they get along because they connected so deeply, or because they barely connected at all and she couldn’t ask him any of those pesky emotional questions? There’d been a time when I’d had all of those connections at home, but I’d let them lapse, had cruised through a great chunk of my life without thinking about it, working as if on autopilot, until it was too late.

  In the end, I thought, as we pulled into Frederick, Maryland, at four in the morning, escape
was less the answer than its opposite—that wrapping yourself in the cloak of otherness for a brief time was a form of hiding behind a costume. That being the lone Western face in a crowd of attentive exotics was no substitute for love and its sometimes daunting and irritating bonds.

  Maybe there were certain kinds of journeys, assignments, I didn’t have to take anymore. The really long ones alone. The ones to war zones or frozen, windswept plains in northern Greenland in which food ran low and the tents blew down and the intensity was so high that they separated me from the world. I thought of Afghanistan. Things were heating up there, and I’d read in the paper of firefights reported by writers and photographers on the front lines. For a moment I felt jealous of them; I should be there! I thought. But they’d all pay a price for those stories, those experiences. At its most expensive, some would die or be kidnapped, leaving behind spouses and children. Even if they returned safely, though, they would be people apart, people carrying experiences that were hard to share with anyone who hadn’t done that same thing.

  We pulled out of the station and the bus stopped. Lurched forward and stopped again. A smell of smoke, of burnt rubber, wafted through the coach. The driver got out, came back in, got back out again, and came back in. “We have what’s called a breakdown in service,” he announced. “The brake lines is froze. I’ve called the company and they’ll send another bus, eventually.”

  Forty miles from home, it had come to this: the only conveyance in five months of traveling that had failed to get me to my destination was a Greyhound bus. We were supposed to go from Frederick to Baltimore, then on to D.C.; who knew how long we might wait? And I was so close. I called Lindsey, woke her up. Asked if she could pick me up. “I don’t want to,” she said. “Can’t you take a taxi?”

  Which I did, nestled in the back of a Chevy Caprice a few minutes later, speeding in quiet and warmth down the interstate toward home. I had been looking forward to the bus pulling into the station, the hydraulic swoosh of the doors opening, and stepping out into the dawn of where I’d started, greeted by my children, Dad stepping off the bus triumphant after so many miles around the world. Instead, I climbed out of the taxi at 5:00 a.m. in front of my empty apartment.

  Only this time it was okay. I had seen the world and myself afresh. I had left in order to find my way home again—and I had, even if it was a new and different home. The journey had shown me all this. As a young man I pursued opportunity and career and adventure; I couldn’t see any other choice at the time. It was only later, with success and when a price had been paid, that I could reckon the cost, acknowledge it. I had to forgive myself and start again. I remembered that train rumbling into the station in Mali and thinking, How in the world can I throw myself on that scarred, battered thing? Sometimes you just had to close your eyes and board, to travel to things and not just away from them, and of course I could see that because finally I had, in fact, gone away on this journey. I walked up the stairs and through the door, and slipped into bed, the world and my life jangling in my head.

  APPENDIX

  I asked Fred Kilborne, a veteran insurance Actuary in San Diego, California, to calculate the actuarial risk of my 159-day journey. Here are his findings:

  MORTALITY RISK ON THE LUNATIC EXPRESS—OBSERVATIONS

  The attached tables indicate that, if Carl had taken both of his trips 1,000 times, he’d have about a 50% chance of being killed en route. This follows from the combined cumulative risk of 481,070 per billion trips, according to the tables. The mortality risk can also be expressed as 5% per hundred such combined trips. This strikes the observer as being extremely risky, relative to traveling the 50,000 miles at home in the U.S., but a good deal short of being flat-out suicidal.

  The entire exercise rides, of course, on the selection of the index factors. Reasonably good statistical data was available concerning the risk of getting around in the United States, and the blended risk of one death per billion miles traveled is supportable. Some data is available for international air travel, and the selected indices are probably conservative (i.e., they may be high). Only sketchy data could be found, on the other hand, for such conveyances as ferry and matatu, and the index selections were highly subjective and may in some cases be greatly inadequate. Consider, for example, traveling by bus in and around Kabul. The assigned index of 96 is very substantial, but are we really satisfied that traveling a million miles in that vicinity would bear only a 10% chance of being killed? I’d be inclined to yield my seat to Carl.

  The tables address only mortality due to accidents on the given leg and conveyance. Some consideration was given to the risk of terrorist attack in Afghanistan, but none to the chance of being stabbed by a crazed fellow matatu rider in Kenya or being consumed by a crocodile after slipping off an Indonesian ferry. Death could also result by reason of contracting leprosy in India or mad-cow disease in Canada. There is also a force of mortality at work on all of us even if we lie in bed at home, of course, but we won’t blame that on Carl’s trips.

  We’ve discussed only mortality risk so far, but the actuary (if not the adventure traveler) must also consider morbidity and robbery and all manner of untoward events. I pointed out to Carl that he might have been sickened by the peanuts on the flight to Bogotá, or broken his leg jumping onto the train to Dakar, or been kidnapped for ransom while strolling in Lima, or convicted of espionage in Ulan Bator, or mugged on the bus to D.C., and more, and worse. It turned out that he had already considered some of these events and was nonplussed about the others. This in turn led me to conclude that “The Lunatic Express” was an apt name for Carl’s trips.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I traveled alone and wrote Lunatic alone, but neither would have been possible without the help and support of many people.

  For her unfailing love and friendship over twenty-seven years and too many months away, I cannot ever thank Lindsey Truitt enough. I wouldn’t be who I am, have the family I do, or have been able to flourish as a journalist without her, and without her support and hard work. Lindsey also thought of the name; it’s fair to say that without her The Lunatic Express would not exist.

  For their love and patience over too many assignments, I thank Lily, Max, and Charlotte; I love you without reservation.

  I owe a huge debt to my agent, Joe Regal, for professional and editorial insight over two books and a decade.

  Lunatic would never have been more than an idea without Charlie Conrad, my editor at Broadway, who took a risk and jumped on The Lunatic Express from the start, and whose editorial guidance made a much better book. For helping shepherd Lunatic from raw manuscript to final book, a huge thanks at Broadway to Jenna Ciongoli, David Wade Smith, Julie Sills, and Laura Duffy.

  I thank Alex Heard for sending me to the Congo and with whom subsequent conversations planted the seeds that led directly to my book proposal.

  For reading early drafts of Lunatic, and for their friendship, I especially want to thank Clifton Wiens and Keith Bellows.

  For their friendship, encouragement, and patient listening, I thank Scott Wallace, Lisa Ramey, Liz Hodgson, Nick Kuttner, and Geoff Dawson.

  For their support over the past few years, keeping me busy, I thank Susan Murcko, Adam Rogers, Jim Meigs, and David Dunbar.

  I’m extremely grateful to veteran actuary Fred Kilbourne for the painstaking job of calculating the risk of my journey; I know it was more work than he thought.

  In Lima, Peru, a huge thanks to Tyler Bridges and Cecelia for their care and feeding, and a few days of the comforts of home.

  For their hospitality in New Delhi, I thank Jeremy Kahn and Victoria Whitworth; sorry I stayed so long!

  And last, but in no way least, The Lunatic Express never derailed, sank, or plunged off a cliff because of Melissa Bell. Her keen editing made Lunatic sharper, tighter, and more nuanced than it ever could have been without her. I owe her much, and many thanks.