In Transit: From S.F. to L.A. via Public Transportation

A man with a fishing pole joins me on the 55 Monterey Express bus and whips out a cellphone. A painstakingly detailed discourse on the nitty-gritty of angling ensues. He describes the locales he fished, camped, and "drank beer and stuff" in Shasta County; the weekend's weather conditions; his strategies in selecting bait — even sharing what manner of worm he deemed appropriate. His monologue stretches past a quarter of an hour, and he still hasn't caught anything yet.

A familiar sensation comes over me. Just as every time I watch a production of The Merchant of Venice, I think maybe this time — surely this time — Shylock will emerge victorious, I begin to pull for the rainbow trout on the angler's line. It is, as ever, a futile endeavor. Shylock will always finish a forced convert and broken man, the fish end up in the frying pan, and the angler yammers unceasingly at 7:55 a.m. It's in the script.

Mark Ulriksen

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See more pictures from Joe Eskenazi's bus trip, and see his route on Google Maps.

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The 55 rolls through San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy before depositing passengers at the Prunedale Park and Ride, a smallish parking lot tucked among a eucalyptus grove, the freeway junction, and a cracked, weedy street. There are no restrooms in sight, so I ask the Caltrans crew towing a traffic cone-orange Porta-John if I can use theirs. "What for?" the foreman asks. This question catches me off-guard; there are only so many things to do in an outhouse. After admitting my need for the facilities, permission is granted. I was asked only because "one time a guy put graffiti in there." Ah. That had not occurred to me. But, if it had, I probably wouldn't have answered the foreman's question by stating "I intend to vandalize your Porta-John."

The 29 Salinas glides up at 10:02. After not quite six hours on the road, we've traversed just about 100 miles. A handful of men emerge from the shade of the bus shelter to board. Most of them are toting bags stuffed with clothing; well south of San Francisco, we have solidly passed the point where passengers are riding transit because it's convenient or environmentally responsible. This is the trip of last resort.

Tony Perez's car broke down, and he has taken a series of buses from Los Banos, where he lives with his wife and three children. He's toiling in a Coca-Cola warehouse near Salinas and crashing with family during the week. His story is interrupted by the HAL 2000 monotone of his cellphone: "Excuse me, boss: You have a text message." He wanders off the bus with his gym bag slung over his shoulder. To his right is a store adorned with an unintentionally ironic sign: "HEAVEN ON EARTH. Everything on Clearance."

When the driver cuts the engines and staggers off to use the john at a Soledad Taco Bell, a pair of tangerine-sized furry heads squeeze out of Kim Rodriguez's purse. A friend discovered the weeks-old kittens abandoned on the railroad tracks, their eyes still shut. But an auto body shop is no place for a pair of mewing kitties, so Rodriguez is stuck babysitting cats on the bus. Again. "Always I'm the one who gets abandoned kittens," she says wearily. "I'm the one climbing a tree or hearing them crying under the truck. Always." Sparky and Astro are the only male animals on the bus, and Rodriguez is the only woman not clutching several small children and bantering in Oaxacan. The driver emerges from the Taco Bell restroom, which he presumably did not vandalize. The kittens are hurriedly crammed back into the bag.

Grapevines give way to brambles, which surrender to pavement. The large bus navigates ever smaller streets in ever smaller towns. At one point, we enter a strip mall and actually drive through the alley behind it, inching past flattened cardboard boxes and apron-wearing men smoking cigarettes.

The coach eases past the cemetery, the trailer court, and the electric blue tent of the visiting Circo de Mexico. It shudders to a halt in front of the dialysis center at Mee Memorial Hospital in King City at 18 minutes after noon. According to the schedule, I should be finishing my journey in Los Angeles exactly 24 hours from now.

The signs marked "Downtown" lead me past several blocks of taquerias, carnicerías, and other establishments ending in "-ia." Downtown abruptly ends, however, at a massive corrugated iron warehouse featuring a large clock stating the time as 6:20 — which it will be, in some six hours. The site once hosted a train station where Errol Flynn and other Hollywood notables used to roll into King City to hobnob with William Randolph Hearst; the media titan once owned Connecticut-sized tracts of land nearby and maintained the "Hearst Hacienda" in the Valley of the Oaks. Now, according to an orange-helmeted worker, we are standing at a washing facility for the plastic boxes used to transport crops from the field. When asked how long the clock has been broken, he cocks his head. "The clock is broken?"

My itinerary calls for a four-hour layover in King City, which prompts the question: "What do you do for four hours in King City?" If you're me, you head to City Hall and ask to speak to the folks in charge. Queried where King City got its name, city manager Michael Powers and finance director Jim Larson point to a portrait of Charles Henry King, a white-bearded gent bearing a resemblance to Frank Morgan, the actor who played the Wizard of Oz. Yet neither administrator could explain the significance of the rather odd artwork directly across from King in City Hall chambers: an oil painting depicting a dilapidated two-story house. "That's just pretty," Larson ventures.