Joanna Pocock
When I told friends about crossing the US on a Greyhound, many seemed alarmed. Wouldn’t it be dangerous? Lonely? Depressing? In 2006 I had found the communal experience uplifting. In 2023, it was indeed depressing at times. Many of my fellow passengers were strung out and looked to be barely hanging on. In the intervening years, the internet had also taken hold: life has become more divided, more fragmented, less stable, and the people I was riding with were the very same that society was trying hard to ignore. Many Greyhounders were travelling by bus because they had recently been sprung from jail, had addiction issues or physical disabilities which meant they couldn’t drive, or they simply didn’t have the cash for a more comfortable mode of travel.
There are, however, remnants of the positive experiences on a Greyhound – the conversations, the kindnesses shown by complete strangers, the humour – and these feel all the more meaningful now because they exist against such heavy odds.
Simone de Beauvoir’s focus in America Day by Day was not solely on the state of women in the US, but some of her observations on this trip germinated more fully in her ground-breaking book The Second Sex, published two years later. She was surprised, for instance, at the lack of independence shown by American women compared to those in France. While having dinner with two “pretty and intelligent” career women whom de Beauvoir met on her tour, she lamented that, “For the first time in my life, a meal with women seems to be a meal ‘without men’.”
I had encountered this attitude in 2006 when several people I met on my travels asked, “Where is your husband?” while others suggested, “He must really trust you to let you travel without him.” The subtext here being that I needed to ask permission. These questions shocked me. In 2023, no one asked about my lack of husband or his permissiveness. Perhaps a 59-year-old woman, having lost her youth and reproductive capacity, is simply not considered valuable enough to be a loss to anyone. Or perhaps it’s become more acceptable for women to travel alone. Or maybe a combination of the two.
On a more profound level, travelling solo with the invisibility acquired with age grounded me in the now. It transformed me from observed to observer and gave me a vantage point from which to unobtrusively watch and listen closely – a gift for any writer, and one that I had never had the pleasure of accepting until age thrust it upon me. “Will I manage to reincarnate myself?” de Beauvoir asked as she embarked on her journey. Perhaps this is the key to moving through the world as an older woman. Not only do we get to travel incognito, we also get to reincarnate ourselves into the shape we need to be to fill the spaces we want to inhabit. From now on I won’t think of myself as old, I will simply see myself as a phantom slipping into places to covertly to bring back the reports. What writer would not welcome this?
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock is out now, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
