White Bus Black Dog

Well, the bus is having troubles. We’re parked out back of a gas station along a highway in Charleston, South Carolina. We’ve been here since Saturday evening, and the service station doesn’t open up until 8:00 am on Monday morning. I spent several hours this morning roaming the town on foot in an attempt to find a mechanic who works Sundays, but the only one I found refused to look at the bus because we’d converted it to run on waste vegetable oil.

“Boss won’t let us touch ‘em,” he said.

So Muddy and I walked further along US-17, past closed Chevrolet and Ford dealerships, bustling Sunday morning post-church pancake houses and massage parlours.

It poured all last night, and it’s hot and humid today. We’ll sweat out the rest of the day on the bus, and then hopefully we’ll be able to find someone tomorrow who’ll fix us up and get us on our way.

The problem is this: the bus shuts off suddenly. Three times yesterday we were driving along the road when, out of nowhere, the bus turned off. No sputtering, no warning lights, no heaving or sighing or screeching. The engine goes quiet, the steering wheel locks up, the brakes stiffen until they’re unusable, and so we flick on the four way flashers and try to edge over to the side of the road. Once we got stuck right in the middle of two lanes of traffic, at rush hour no less.

It has been pretty trying on the old enthusiasm; it’s difficult to stay excited about the next day’s travel when the threat of mechanical problems looms so large.

So, at this point in time we’re forced to reconsider our plans. If the bus is going to continue to give us trouble, should we really try to cut a diagonal from Savannah, Georgia, up through deserts and over mountains in an attempt to make it to Vancouver by the start of July? We’re questioning whether or not this is still a wise idea.

Right now, the most attractive alternative is to just throw in the grease towel and park the bus in a warm, friendly locale for June and July, then slowly make our way back up the coast and over to Halifax for the start of September. Anyone know friends or family looking for subletters or house sitters in Georgia or South Carolina?

Forget the police and their pay-by-the-tow rescue, we said. Diesel leaking onto my feet, we ramped the bus up to 100 km/h and headed for Ontario. I imagined us as a couple of bandits in an old car chase movie where the misunderstood and ultimately righteous villain speeds into the sunset, seeking refuge from the law over the closest state line.

But nobody gave chase. We limped into Cornwall and pulled into a truck stop an hour or so after steering our leaking, greasy bus back onto the highway in Montreal.

Parked safely in the shadow of a truck stop diner, we attempted to re-evaluate our situation. The facts were these:

1. Our bus was still leaking diesel, and the severity of the leak seemed to be increasing with each passing hour on the road.
2. We hadn’t burst into flames yet, which made us wonder if it might be best to just keep driving into the night in order to seek out a mechanic in a familiar town first thing the next morning.
3. We were out of filtered vegetable oil, so if we wanted to run on that less combustible fuel, we’d have to spend some time filtering it – a process which is both time consuming and messy.
4. We were hungry, thirsty and tired.

We sat in the truck stop parking lot batting around ideas about how best to navigate the mess in which we’d found ourselves. Ultimately, hunger and weariness won out.

We drove into town and stole some water from the washroom of St. Lawrence College. Then we snaked our way through downtown Cornwall and out into the outskirts where the road wound along the St. Lawrence River. As the sun dipped down toward the river, we filtered some oil and cooked dinner for ourselves on a grassy patch in the shadow of a small, crane-topped barge. Then we boiled a little water and drank coffee while looking out at the slowly puttering boats and bent-backed fishing couples along the shore.

Having not seen any good places in Cornwall to boondock for the night, as the sun set we made our way back to the truck stop and bedded down.