Only figuratively, not literally, a flight: the first Greyhound trip longer than two but shorter than seventy hours I have taken in over a decade. It’s not so bad, save for the wacky-shack suspension of the vehicle and apparent recklessness of our driver. I don’t believe she has slackened speed for a single ramp, off or on, and we are left with the feeling of teetering terrifically, as if on an antique roller coaster, perilously, seat beltlessly, hurtling ever forward. Also, we almost hit a transport truck. No big deal. The eighth-grader beside me asks, “Have you ever shot a real gun?” and proudly unfurls for me the poster-sized target of Osama Bin Laden that he has at some prior date dutifully riddled with bullet holes, and now carries rolled up with his carry-on. It is more charming than it sounds. He’s bussing from Reno to Seattle, wants to play college basketball, and I notice by discreet glances at his iPod that he has been listening to a lot of Boys II Men.
I had been in Reno for three days to interview some scientists (long story). I learned a few things, kicked a piece of cactus, ate at a pizza place called Pie Face (had a highly alliterative but not unpleasant slice topped with pecorino, peas, and prosciutto, maybe?), and tasted country gravy for the first time. The gravy was part of a rather liberal riff on a plate of eggs Benedict, a hot, heavy brick of a breakfast for a hot, dry, desert day. The server congratulated me with a rough jocularity for not getting it all over my face, for which I had in silence already been congratulating myself, but I appreciated the recognition. It was a nice breakfast.
There are moments in life when one gets the feeling that the pace of things is being artificially interrupted, that by one’s actions one is somehow moving just out of step with what should be the natural tempo, producing a hiccup in an otherwise well-described arc. Sitting curbside in front of the Reno bus station, I found myself wondering whether I shouldn’t have taken a later bus. It would be a difference of only a couple of hours, but what could I have made of them? Barely had I wrapped up the business that brought me to Reno and I was hotfooting it out of town. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was rushing something, missing something. I could take another bus, sit down, and dangle my feet in the river that I had only just discovered. Everybody uses the river as a reference point in Reno, and somehow it hadn’t occurred to me earlier to go take a look. It’s safe enough to swim in; people are swimming in it right now, I thought, right in the middle of town. I could have splashed around for a half-hour in a river in goddamn Reno while on my working vacation, chatted with the barista at Java Jungle, next to what I can only assume is its sororal wine bar, Jungle Vino, maybe had a mojito with that nurse I met on the way back from the university.
They have a twenty-five-cent Ms. Pac-Man machine in the Reno bus station, and though I marvelled at the anachronism, even if I didn’t already have a marked disinterest in Pac-Man (Mr. or Ms.), I was warned away by the advice of a surly child—“Don’t put money in, these machines are a crook. They’re busted. I’m looking for the number so I can call someone.”
I comforted myself, a coward’s comfort, with my old maxim from a more transient time: it is better to leave a place feeling like you shouldn’t. Better to leave a place wistful, so it can live a little life in your mind, rather than drag yourself out with the sickening feeling that you have stayed too long. But this amounts to what? Enshrining in a general principle that it is better to regret something you didn’t do than something you did? Better to keep something alive as a dream, a fiction, a fond remembrance, than potentially ruin it by actually seeing it through? Better the one that got away? It is a rationalization made for gazing out a bus window, but that is some cold shit.
Whatever, Reno was dry. Reno was making my nose bleed.