The Great American Bus Ride: An Intrepid Woman's Cross-Country Adventure

As the Greyhound ticket clerk in Memphis quickly discerns about the middle-aged woman with a British accent: ``Y'all travelin' fo' the adventure.'' To which this New Jersey-raised expat of 30 years responds: ``I like the bus.'' And indeed Kurtz does, as amply evidenced by her exuberant, knowing, witty, human-scaled journal of a recent meander through America's heartland. Comprising 65 bus changes and a span of three months, the fall trip took her across the northernmost reaches of the country to Seattle, down the West Coast, east along the Mexican border, then back to her Manhattan starting point. Among her fellow passengers, Kurtz observes ``varieties of pathology . . . as well as poverty, madness and exhaustion''; she overhears conversations about ``wonky ventricles'' and male complaints of women who ``know all about the bedroom but not a damn thing about the kitchen.'' The travel could be rough. One episode lands Kurtz in an isolated, frigid depot waiting for an already two-day-overdue bus to Duluth; another time, impulsively deciding to visit Dinosaur National Park (in Utah), she disembarks on a nighttime roadway only to discover she is alone in the back of beyond. But always she soldiers on, reveling in freedom ``with no strings attached,'' in the pleasure of a journey that has no purpose but itself. The ingratiating Kurtz, who writes the Cosmo ``Agony Column,'' even convinces one that touring America by Greyhound is akin to ``doing the Nile on a barge or joining a caravan across the Sahara.'' Photos not seen by PW . (Sept.)