A window on to American decline

If the automobile is the symbol of American freedom, what is the Greyhound bus?

In 2006, Joanna Pocock set out on a 2,300-mile journey from Detroit to Los Angeles, riding the cheap, long-distance buses. In a country as vast and as car- and plane-friendly as the US, you only ride the Greyhound because you have to. So, as Pocock travels, it isn’t unusual for her fellow passengers to be criminals or patients who have recently been released from institutions, far from where they have friends, family or a vehicle they can use. At stations, she regularly observes adults crying, whether because of a lost ticket or simply their life circumstances. More than once, she is a passenger on a bus where even the driver is taken off and arrested.

The journeys the Canada-born, London-based author describes in Greyhound, her second book, are arduous: always long, often delayed. Yet these experiences provide fascinating material for a writer as non-judgmental as Pocock, who sees the Greyhound network as a place of “fragility”, a rare public space where “anarchic, communal, bus-wide conversations” offer a window on to an America you’d never see if you only travelled by car.

Pocock made the trip, aged 40, in the wake of the death of her sister and multiple miscarriages. “I was running away from grief ... from my sense of failure as a woman,” she writes. But she resists the temptation towards a conventional narrative arc, not least because this already intriguing story is complemented by an account of a 2023 trip following the same route, allowing Pocock to see how the places she travelled through 17 years prior had changed. Greyhound is a skilful intertwining of these two journeys: part travelogue, part environmental treatise, and utterly distinct.

There is something intrinsically political about the way lengthy bus journeys push passengers up against the reality of modern life. During the second trip, it means the author sees even more poverty, homelessness and addiction than the first time: “Everyone around me felt more desperate, more angry, more prone to violence.” Pocock, whose previous book, Surrender, details radical environmental movements in the American west, here chronicles how our reliance on oil and gas has devastated so many of the landscapes she sees. Everywhere she travels through – Detroit, Amarillo, Tulsa – there is a story about a hazardous chemical spill, a nuclear waste dump, the prevalence of toxic faecal dust, and the long-lasting impacts on wildlife, public health and Indigenous people’s land.

For Pocock, who has, on principle, never learned to drive, travelling by Greyhound is a protest against big oil and the individualism that feeds capitalism. But on her 2023 trip she notices the bus-wide conversations have stopped. “Most people were now plugged into their devices, barely aware of the passengers around them.” The overhead lights that previously enabled Pocock to read after dark no longer exist, presumably because passengers are expected to be on their phones instead. Worse, bus stops have been relocated to the outskirts of towns. “I kept wondering how on earth a bus company could think it was a good idea for people to wait along a six-lane road in Phoenix with no access to a bathroom or a water fountain before boarding a bus for a long journey,” she writes angrily, as she waits by the kerb in the US’s hottest city.

This ambitious book asks important societal questions and is astute in its depictions of public living. “Watching passengers board and scan the bus for a free seat, or even better a free pair of them, was a kind of anthropological study,” Pocock writes. “Each person measured up who might be OK with taking their belongings off the seat next to them to make room and who might protest and cause a scene.” Traversing urban metropolises and desert vistas, Greyhound is an erudite study of how living among others became a dying art.

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Joanna Pocock