Overnight bus from Montreal to Boston for the hundredth time. Couldn't wait til morning, just had the get the hell out of Dodge (for the thousandth time).
About 4am, White River Junction. I wake up when we stop to pick up some more passengers.
Onto the bus strides a man who looks out of place in Vermont. Big black suede cowboy hat. Leather boots. He stops at the row where I'm sitting and looks at the empty seat next to me.
"Mind if I sit here?". He has an accent that makes him sound like someone from TV trying to sound like a tough cowboy.
He sits next to me. He is wearing a manly fragrance. A sensory distillation of some epiphenomenal esthetic comprised of leather and wood and skies at beginnings and ends of days.
He is simultaneously talkative and terse. "Just lemme know if I'm keepin you awake," he says, and then he keeps me awake, talking softly. Minimalist narrative.
He's heading to Oklahoma, via Manchester then Cincinnati. "My daughter's been fightin with her old man, so she wanted her daddy around for the holidays." It's not clear if he is being summoned for comfort or protection; he doesn't elaborate.
He was a professional rodeo rider. He did two hitches in the service, starting in Vietnam. He has traveled around the country and talks to me about the places we've both been. He speaks so softly I often can't hear him. When he takes off his jacket, I see that he has a tattoo stretching the length and breadth of his forearm. It is dominated by brilliant shades of red: hearts, blood, snakes. The stacked sheets of muscle underneath the image were earned through work, not cultivated.
It is still dark when we stop at the little airport in New Hampshire. He stands and puts on his jacket.
"It was nice talkin to you," he says.
A minute later I watch him walk towards the terminal, shouldering a tightly-packed green canvas duffel bag. We haven't exchange names, so I use this image to mark his place on my list of temporary, unique path crossings.
An hour later, I'm waking up again as we arrive in Boston, this time to dawnlight and the orienting proximity of ocean and remembered architecture. My first thought is to draw some type of contrast in my mind between Christmas spent on horseback in Oklahoma and whatever familiar, illusory refuge awaits me in my equivalent geography.
