Three Days of Going West
by Nathan Munn
As we settled in on the Greyhound bus, the driver, a sturdy-looking woman in her 30s, got on the PA: “I’ll be your driver until Winnipeg. We’re going to be on this bus together for a couple days, so we need to treat each other with respect. There’s no drinking, no smoking, and no drugs on the bus. We’ll stop every few hours for a break. You need to be on the bus when we’re ready to go or we’ll leave without you,” she said, empathetic but firm.
It was the fall of 2008. I had shoved my acoustic guitar and an overflowing pack stuffed with my worldly possessions—some clothes, a pillow, notebooks—in the luggage bay under the bus at Montreal’s central station a few moments before: in the front window in big block letters the sign for our destination read VANCOUVER, some 3350 miles away. I took a last glance around at the autumn leaves and the bright blue sky and climbed aboard. The coach, with its retro-’70s upholstery decor and low incandescent lighting, would be home for me and a couple dozen strangers over the next three days as we crossed the vast expanse of Canada.
“Have a good trip.”
It wasn’t a happy departure. I’d spent the previous seven years playing avant-garde punk music in Montreal, scraping by on welfare while playing shows in crumbling lofts, dark clubs, and rowdy bars, kept spiritually afloat by fleeting and cathartic shows across the Atlantic in Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris. As the bus honked its horn and rumbled out of the station, headed for the Trans-Canada Highway, fractured memories of the flashes and sensations of performing onstage were all I had left of what I’d thought was my life.
Keep us breathing fire!
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