HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS! The green flyer on the campus bulletin board promises the greatest little cross-country bus "ride ever. There's no bus terminal, though. To get a reservation you have to shove $10 and a return address under the front door of an anonymous San Francisco connection. Even then, just where or when to find the bus remains a mystery. A note in the mail a few days later tells you to turn up, with a sleeping bag, at an intersection in the Haight-Ashbury district by sundown Wednesday. Says a friend: "You might end up riding with a bunch of goddam freaks!"
The intersection turns out to be an entrance to Golden Gate Park. At sundown 40 people are crowded around a beat-up purple and white bus. Jeez, how will they all fit? Adam, a frizzy-haired, forlorn-looking grad student in an orange serape, says at least six passengers can bunk in the luggage racks. It begins to rain, and soon sleeping bags are turning to mush. There was no receipt for that $10 either. Will there be a seat? The woman was pretty evasive on the phone. All this secrecy, the whole scene, in fact, brings back college days in 1967 when you jammed a rug under the door and opened all the windows before you lit a joint.
A young black woman named Sapphire needs three friends to drag aboard a heavy wooden crate, a cross between a coffin and footlocker. Just in from Sonoma, Linden Brolin, a skinny, blond woman in jeans and a black T shirt, with her three-year-old son Bjorn in tow, keeps asking around for a place to park her camper till she gets back from Tucson. "You won't believe this," she confides, "but I'm 37." You were about to guess 35. Laid-back Dennis Watkins says he's "going to Baja to see the whales."
As passengers climb aboard, the driver collects their $65 balance. In cash. "Travelers checks are too hard to handle," the voice on the phone had said. Only 20 people get on; the rest are waving goodbye. Instead of regular rows of seats two sofas face the aisle up front. Beyond that, amidships, is a card table, one side supported by a length of nylon rope tied to a metal ceiling rack. A long, cushioned sleeping platform, raised about 2 ft. off the floor, fills the whole rear half of the bus. The ponytailed bus driver (there are two drivers aboard) tells people to take off their shoes, so the sleeping platform will stay clean. He says his name is Monk-see and he even spells it out. He also explains there is no smoking on the bus and no Interstate Commerce Commission license, so please don't tell anyone along the route you are a "paying passenger." The brochure promised that the drivers never drink or take drugs "while behind the wheel." It also made clear that passengers travel at their own risk. Bjorn is already swinging like a monkey from the luggage racks, while 8-year-old Leah, bound for North Carolina with her mother, purrs and mews to imitate a cat.