First transit fuck up

I recognized it about 45 minutes ago: the bus was moving south away from my destination, but the fountains of irrigation systems out the window lulled me into a pacified state so that by the time I came to it was too late to get off and reorient myself. So I pocketed my Garrison Keillor – only a social shelter to begin with – and smiled at miles of tilled land. First transit fuck up; it’s always cute at the preliminary haul. It’s only when you number in the teens that you really start to feel the cold irk – like sitting for hours in a puddle of your own urine – of misdirecting yourself yet again. But the sensation is still young and the view is still new enough to keep me pleasantly entertained. Leaving Yuma, through Sommerton, into San Luis. We slide past endless sections of agricultural land – to the left are fields in seasonal use, to the right the ground is an eerie grey-brown. Looking straight ahead is like being hemispherically colorblind – to the left we have a Pink Floyd laser light show, to the right a screening of Gone with the Wind. Occasional oases crop up every two miles or so, lined with tall palms and bushes in bloom. W county 16^th street takes a sharp turn and the bus slows enough to let me peer in-between tree trunks: the houses are roofed with thin metal, windows made of cellophane. Not the vision in royal purple I had imagined.

The other passengers are all crossers, letting their heads slide against the blotted windows for a moment of rest before the 45 minute standing wait to get across the border. Cars pile up for nearly 3 miles in line to customs – 3:45 on a Friday; Satan laughs in his infernal lay-z-boy watching the good people of Yuma County-San Luis suffer so. Rows of white school buses inch alongside us, Growers Union spraypainted in blue, packed with dark sweaty faces. We make our final turn and all passengers (sans your kindhearted narrator) pour off. The busdriver shoots me a perplexed look, I shrug and smile and he turns back to check the new group as they slide bills into the ticket slot. Backtracking through the cities seems to pass quicker than the way there – isn’t that a curiously consistent feature of life? I spend a quarter of the time watching the old woman six rows ahead of me mop up sweat from under her shirt, lifting her long slivered braid from her neck as her yellowing rag works across her neck and back. The other ¾ of the journey I spend laughing with a San Luis native about my fear of horses and his fear of other people – we traded sunflower seeds for 2 minutes of my phone. “No eres de aca” he notes, and I drop my jaw in shock at his astute observation. Bus Route 95 weaves back into familiar territory. Walled off subdivisions and mobile-home parks. Suddenly I pine for other places – all of them that I ever called home. The walkable ones; spaces where I could dance aside a six-lane road and not get mimics or smiles. Spaces with quirk, or places where no one gave a quarter-shit. Places where my whiteness wasn’t novelty, my smile wasn’t sex. My affinity to rain wasn’t endearing and my positivity pissed people off. Places that were bigger and brighter and overcharged for a pint of beer, places with multiple centers and hidden cavernous neighborhoods. Perhaps places where affluence was a standard and abounding urban poverty was tolerated. That liberal elite in my pounds the inner caverns of my heart screaming “let me out of rural quaintness you manipulative masochistic bitch!” Places that birth other places, meta-places, sub-genres festering beneath the subsequent layers. I tug on the yellow cord and descend, heading for a bar. Next stop – city please.