A Rural Public Transit Odyssey

Across New York's North Country by Rural Transit Bus

If, in all my miles and years of traveling, I could soundly say that I have learned anything at all, it is this: the easiest way is usually the most boring way. This is true of most things — but it is especially true of travel. Because in all my miles on the American road, I’ve found that the most interesting routes, roads, trails, and methods are basically all tedious, unorthodox, obscure, and time-consuming.

There are times when ‘boring’ is quite good, of course. As ‘interesting’ as it could be to travel to the hospital by way of a donkey cart when one has broken a leg — most people would far prefer the sane, simple, clear comforts of an automobile or an ambulance in such a case. But outside of the most dire emergencies and the most mundane sorts of tasks, it is always my policy to choose the least convenient, most ridiculous, circuitous route to travel from point A to point B.

For this proclivity of mine, I am always amply rewarded. In fact, the more inconvenient, difficult, and strange my route — the better.

When my wife and I began our journey southward to grandmother’s house for Easter Sunday dinner, we sought to do a thing that I have never heard of anyone doing before — we aimed to cross the northern quadrant of New York State using only local rural county transit buses. No driving automobiles, no Amtrak or Greyhound, no coach bus or taxi if we can help it; not even any real walking, cycling or hitchhiking. I’d searched out and found schedules for about a half-dozen obscure and mostly unknown rural bus routes, and strung them together into a bizarre and dirt-cheap long-distance traveling route.

This is much easier said than done. Each county’s transportation department seems to operate independent of the counties adjacent to it, and none of the schedules have been designed with intra-county transfers or long-haul transportation in mind. Moreover, these routes are not generally on Google Maps — in many cases, if they can be Googled at all, whatever digital footprint these bus schedules have is obscure, difficult to find, and often outdated. To find them, you must occasionally leaf through old, grainy PDF files of scanned schedules — some of which are unreadable, corrupted, or ‘dead links’. Very often, you simply have to call the office and see whether a route is still in operation or not; it may take numerous attempts to get them to answer the phone. Once you’ve done this, you must arrive at a stop at a certain time and begin planning which bus is next. Sometimes, to get to the next bus, you must walk miles and miles — or even stay overnight — all to cover a distance that, in a regular automobile, might take just a short while to travel!

For obvious reasons, no one does this. In fact, that it could be remotely feasible is not an idea that seems to have ever crossed the minds of the men and women who drive these rural transportation buses. On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation — a genre of public works that generally seems to go unseen, unnoticed, and often seems to be chronically underfunded. This is now and then true even in regions where the demand for such services is surprisingly substantial.

When I said that I’d write about it afterward, she said “maybe your article will get people out there to realize just how important these services really are. We need all the good publicity we can get.”

In a sense, rural public transit feels not only like an essential service for hinterlanders around the country, but like some last gasp or ember of a former, more "third world" America. To board these buses is to enter a world full of characters, where the clock runs a little slow, days are sleepy and long, and the map is totally imprecise.

The bus stops are often just tiny little shanties in the middle of nowhere; sometimes, they are only a sign nailed to a telephone pole and nothing more. The actual routes are cockamamie and often improvised — and the exact bus fare is occasionally vague. One bus we regularly use has a rider who seems to pay in car wash tokens; the driver said "yeah, by next month, I should have enough to get the bus washed!"

Sometimes, the check engine lights on the buses are blinking as we rattle down the backroads, but it doesn't stop the drivers from gunning those old buses up the mountain roads. The riders themselves vary from ex-cons fresh out of prison to Amish families to DUI guys, junkies, elderly farmers, developmentally disabled folks, impoverished families, and oddball eccentrics. Sometimes they bring things like pies to sell in town, 4-stroke engines, or even crates of live chickens. (The chickens are tolerated, by the way, not as livestock but as “emotional support animals” under ADA law!) You truly never know what you're going to see, who you're going to meet — and you never know just when you'll arrive at your destination.

For the long-haul local bus traveler, this delightful imprecision can also pose a real risk: it means one can very easily find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere. Many of the towns these buses pass through are bereft of alternative transport options, taxis, coach bus stations, Amtrak, food stores, or motels — meaning if you miss your connection, you’re either hitchhiking or you’ve got to find a place to “stealth camp” until the next bus, and you’d better hope you brought snacks. Some routes only serve a particular stop once a day — or in certain cases, just a few times a week. There are even a few bus routes I’ve see that operate as infrequently as once a month.

But all of this just means the stakes are higher — and a journey that would’ve been a simple, boring ride in a car, train, or coach bus has been converted into a thrillingly strange kind of adventure.

From the Deep Woods to the County Seat

Knowing all of this, we rose at the crack of dawn and shouldered our packs to embark on a little experiment. From our home in our little village in the wilderness, we walked down the road to meet the bus at the senior center. “Come inside,” the driver told us. “I’m not leaving for a while, but we’ve got coffee.”

To be young in a place like this is to be a kind of celebrity. Conversations stopped as we entered, and all eyes turned toward us, wordlessly saying: “Look — Young people!!” Old Vietnam veterans eyed us with a smile; ladies looked up from their crossword puzzles and excitedly asked when my wife — who was and remains very visibly pregnant — was due. Conservation flowed freely, ranging from discourses on whether the blackflies will be bad this year, to which drivers were substituting for Dave next week, to whether local officials would finally tear down the old decrepit buildings on Main Street. Though we’d come early so as to ensure we’d be on-time for the bus, time seemed to lose its relevance; and when the clock struck a seemingly random note, the driver rounded us up and welcomed us aboard his bus.

Our local route is not what they call a “fixed route” service — it is instead a “demand service” route, meaning it offers flexible door-to-door service in outlying regions of the county. Because of this, the bus could get us to the County Seat (population ~5,000) in as little as 30 minutes — or the trip could take an hour and a half or longer. As a result, passengers have no real way of knowing when they’ll arrive except in the vaguest sort of way. Daily bus users seem to have achieved a kind of indescribable “flow” with this chaotic process; to understand what the bus might do on a given day, one either needs to be wholly plugged into the wider organism of the route and its regularities, or they would need a sixth sense. In lieu of these, the only option is to sit down and resign oneself to not caring what time it is, where the bus goes, or when they’ll arrive.

On this particular day, the bus served some of the most outlying areas of an already remote county composed largely of wilderness. The bus sped down dirt roads, some of which struck me as only barely passable by the large and ponderous bus-van. Eventually, we were so deep into a network of unmarked and unpeopled dirt trails I wondered if the driver was simply riding around out there for the hell of it — until we came to a dilapidated old trailer home where a 79-year-old man lived. He rose from the door of his home — which appeared to have no electricity of any kind, though the man was not Amish — with a spunky step and a giant, toothless grin. An old farmer who’d sold much of his land to build himself a kind of retirement fund, he was too old to drive, and probably too poor to afford a car anyway. But judging by his bright affect as he boarded the bus, he didn’t seem to mind it one bit.

The driver greeted him and spoke up: “Bill, have you got any land you’re selling? This fellow in the hat is looking to buy a woodlot and I’m betting you might have a few acres for him.”

Apparently our bus driver had heard that I was in the market for a few acres of land, and was already working to broker a deal. But, having sold all of his holdings save for the acre he lives on, Bill had nothing for me. No matter — the conversation shifted toward how dairy farming has changed for the worse, and then to the Vietnam War, in which our driver had served in the United States Marine Corps.

“Yeahp,” he said, “when I came home it was 1973, and they called me a baby-killer. That was the same year they legalized abortion, too. So I’ve always wondered who the real baby-killers were!”

As he spoke, we veered back onto the blacktop road, and woods gave way to fallowing farm fields, small dairies, and Amish homesteads. Passengers began to filter on, each being scooped up at odd intervals. At a desolate crossroads, a young man emerged from the bush, out of nowhere — he was on his way to work a shift at Burger King. From behind the ruins of a collapsed barn, a woman in cut-off “Lilo & Stitch” pajamas limped up to the bus, smoking a cigarette. Amish men waved their arms along the road, where the driver would pull over with a sudden, jarring stop to let them board.

In listening to the passengers tell the driver where they wanted to go, they seemed to be speaking in a kind of local pidgin — “Upta Patsy’s, yup,” or “The mart by the Crisis Center” or maybe just plain old “hilltop.” The driver knew all of these locations, many of which were quite strangely positioned along the way, resulting in a cockamamie route. Finally, however, we pulled up to the bus stop at the County Seat — a wooden shanty in a desolate parking lot, where freshly-released convicts from Upstate Correctional Facility were waiting in clean white T-Shirts, holding feed sacks containing their belongings. They were waiting for the 8-hour-long Coach Bus ride to New York City.

“No, boys,” the driver chuckled as the convicts sidled up to the opening door of his bus — “this ain’t the bus to New York City!” As the door opened, we got off. Checking the clock, we realized it had taken roughly 90 minutes to cover a distance that takes only 30 minutes by car. “Then again,” I reasoned aloud to my wife, “you don’t hear people driving cars talk about how much faster it’d be to take a helicopter!”

Now, we had roughly four hours to wait for our next bus — The North Country Express. This is a bus that I have written about before:

We lounged at a nearby gas station to wait, sipping tea and reading the local newspaper. There was something very “old world” about this — here we were, in the largest town in our county, dressed well, idling with a purpose. Leafing through that newspaper, dipping the teabag up and down in my hot paper cup, watching the traffic, nodding at passers-by; we were in town on official business, and yet we were doing exactly nothing. I realized as we sat that this way of doing things used to be a great deal more common — that train stations, courts, libraries, street benches, barber shops, and so on simply used to have a lot more people waiting publicly. In an era of drive-thrus, overnight Amazon delivery, and on-demand conveniences — our stint at the gas station cafe tables felt downright archaic in the best way imaginable.

Soon, the bus arrived, and we sped westward into torrents of violent rain. For most of the way, we were the only passengers on the bus. Our driver fell silent; the rain and wind whipped the bus all over the road, and though the awful driving conditions made me rather nervous, I felt myself slipping into a kind of “liminal state” one only ever finds on empty buses speeding through the pouring, blustering, flash-flooding depths of grey and aimless northern infinity.

The droning of the bus fans and the whine of the transmission — the rhythmic slapping of the windshield wipers. A black figure along the roadside, huddled over a woolen shawl with one solitary, wet arm raised against the ravaging storm — the way the sideways rain shot into the bus as the door opened and the Amish woman entered, alone. It is in moments like these when some internal choir of angels begins to harmonize in the far-flung depths of my mind, and all the grave burdens of worldly concern evaporate completely. These are moments of such profound “nowhere-ness” that the sheer weight of this heavenly nowhere nestles the body down like a comforter, and the eyes sleep without sleeping, staring their glazy, gauzy stare out the fogged up windows…

Then, the bus’s arrival in Potsdam shocked me awake — and we walked through the soaking, fog-wrapped streets of that sandstone city, shambling about with our raincoat hoods hanging like monastic garments, drifting toward the light of the Stewart’s gas station like lost moths pulled to neon by instinctual magnetism. A bottle of iced tea, a slippery hot dog, a long and wordless look at my wife as the rain calmed to sunshine and birdsong outside the windows — it was nearly sundown, and we proceeded to walk up a hillside to a boarding-house, where I’d rented us a cheap bed.

Southward Miles — Energy Math

To walk more than one-hundred miles is no small task, and on this matter, I am well-qualified to speak. On several occasions I have walked distances in excess of this amount, if only to test myself, or to travel in the simplest, most natural manner available to me — to make my way upon my God-given feet. Each time I’ve endeavored to travel far distances by foot I’ve learned to marvel at the incredible speed with which most human beings now travel, whether by boat, automobile, bicycle, plane, or train.

A distance of just ten or fifteen miles might take a man the whole day to walk, depending on the conditions. For the motorist traveling in an automobile, of course, such a distance could be covered in less than fifteen minutes on the highway. Should the driver wish to spend his entire day piloting his car down the road, he could cover a distance of perhaps 1,000 miles — the walker could, at best, cover twenty.

Yet, being the consummate cheapskate, I have to wonder about all the wisdom of all this ‘motoring’ that Americans like to do — the Bureau of Transportation Statistics claims that the average motorist spends $0.81 per mile in total expenses for the privilege of such easy travel. This estimate figures not only the cost of gas, but the expense of insurance, maintenance, initial purchase, registration fees, and so on. Even if the BTS has gone far off the mark, or if an automobile owner is exceptionally frugal, driving must cost, at a minimum, $0.25/mi or more in all.

This figure is probably lower than what the long-distance walker pays to travel, once the extensive caloric needs of walking are taken into account. Three-thousand calories, heavy in fat and protein, carried, cooked, and consumed by the roadside — it is difficult to walk whole days for less than $20 per day unless one subsists on what they can pull from the dumpster. Cycling and canoeing involve the same problem, and so it is that the motorist can sit in his car, smiling at his relative good fortune and thrift.

Yet as he drives, a bus whizzes past him at a far cheaper price per passenger mile. To book a Greyhound bus ticket from New York City to San Francisco can still be done for a price below $250 per ticket — $232 is the lowest price I’ve lately seen. To make way across the 2,902 miles, from coast to coast, then, can be achieved at a cost of about $0.07/mile. And the Amtrak is not much more expensive; a $441 ticket results in a figure of $0.15/mi. It was this exact mathematical inspection of the various modes of transportation that ever led me to think more seriously about buses and trains to begin with.

These numbers can, amazingly, be improved beyond all belief, especially so far as regional transportation is concerned. For example, to travel from the US-Canada border at Akwesasne via Saint Lawrence County Public Transit, one can travel as far south as Gouverneur, some 70 miles away, for a single $2 bus fare (with free transfer included). This form of travel costs $0.02 per mile — a stunningly cheap figure, far cheaper than even a walking man could achieve under normal circumstances. If, then, a series of buses could be concocted from town to town across vast swathes of the countryside — bus to bus, stealthily camping overnight when needed, filling the ‘gaps’ either by walking or by the use of a folding bicycle, it could altogether result in the absolute cheapest mode of transportation imaginable in all of human history.

We marveled at these ideas as we boarded the bus at dawn. True — we were not operating under the most ideal circumstances just yet; what we were doing now was only a rough draft. We’d paid for a room the night before, which drove the cost up; we had not brought our folding bikes along, either. And worse, owing to a major lack of public transportation in Jefferson County, NY, a large “gap” in the transit systems exists. There is no obvious ‘bridge’ between the Saint Lawrence and Lewis County transit systems; and so we rose at dawn to ride a one-hour, $12 coach bus from Potsdam to Watertown. It rolled along the hoary steppes of the northlands in the darkness, stopping and stooping low by the steps of Clarkson University. The driver took our tickets and we embarked.

Next time, it will be different, I remembered. Rumor has it that the Saint Lawrence County system will soon be operating a $2 bus all the way to Watertown — where the Lewis County system takes over, offering service clear to Utica. At Utica, the private Birnie Bus system runs daily service to Syracuse, and from Syracuse, routes exist as far as Albany and Oswego. Going east, Birnie Bus runs to Little Falls, and another eleven miles of walking or cycling leads to Saint Johnsville, where a bus to Amsterdam runs daily, and from Amsterdam, the CDTA system totes passengers to Albany seven days a week. Next time, we could even make it as far as Ohio or Maine…

The possibilities are limitless, and they lilted upon the surface of our minds as we rolled southward in that giant bus, finally arriving at a Byrne Dairy gas station in sleepy-eyed Watertown, where the slatelike blue-grey dawn hung brightly in a moody display. We schlepped up a small hill to Jefferson County Community College, where Lewis County’s “JCC Connector” bus runs M-F service to Lowville for $4.

We were early; we ambled through the empty, silent corridors of the little college hall, sipping cups of tea, staring off into the distance. The bus wasn’t due until 9:30am — but I told my wife we might just as well wait outside sooner, and so we stepped out at about 8:50.

Thank heaven we did — the bus came thirty seconds later, and did not linger or tarry to its scheduled time of 9:30. We were shocked and grateful that we happened to flag the driver down at the right time; if we’d missed it we’d have been stranded in Watertown for another night. And, I realized — if we’d been here on a Friday and missed it, we’d have been trapped in Watertown until Monday! Lesson learned: always stand out at the bus stop as early as you can tolerate on strange adventures such as these, even if it is chilly, rainy, or dark.

The twenty-six mile route cost us $4 apiece, or, expressed per mile, it cost us $0.15 per person per mile — a figure that even a very cheap automobile could not boast. The Lewis County bus was larger than the others; a heavy, long, low kind of bus that swooned and careened smoothly over the long bluffs below the country asphalt. We sped by the frost-covered fields and farms, eyeing collapsed barn after collapsed barn — casualties of a rough and wild winter, where more than twenty-five feet of snow fell this year, decimating countless barns, structures, and homes.

There were no other passengers on the bus except one young man; a homeless fellow who was living at a motel in Evans Mills. The driver seemed to have a motherly attitude toward the fellow — asking him how he’s been doing in a particular tone that suggested she knew of some awful plight he’d only recently overcome or conquered. Perhaps drugs, perhaps abuse, perhaps abjection and poverty or all of the above — whatever his story, it seemed somber in its shape, and certainly, that little bus was his only mode of transportation and his motel room his only home.

“I applied for a job in Tennessee; maybe if I get it I don’t need to do no more of this winter shit again…” He slugged back from a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew as he spoke, slinking down sleepily into the warmth of his hoodie, one hand resting on his belt buckle.

At Lowville, we disembarked and bid farewell to the driver. Now, we had many hours to kill — the bus to Boonville wouldn’t come to the Dollar General in town until 2:30. We wandered around in the misty village, swinging up to the Stewart’s gas station for a doughnut, having a sub sandwich at Jreck’s, and finally decamping at the village library for a spell to read and relax. Again, here we were — idling with a purpose, reading the newspapers, waiting for our stagecoach to take us southward for the holiday.

Where the morning had been only kind of chilly, and without wind, the afternoon brought wild, cold, harsh winds that kicked garbage across the streets of the town and sent the crows doing barrel rolls over the park. My wife donned a windbreaker, cinching the hood tightly around her face; we stared up at the second and third floors of the downtown buildings — all of them strangely abandoned and devoid of life. I couldn’t help but think of what lovely apartments they must’ve made for in former days; with great big windows overlooking this happy, bustling, cold little farm town. Some part of me has always adored Lowville as a kind of haven of sanity and peace — the final bastion of wholesomeness in the far-flung American steppelands; the kind of place with a good diner (Lloyd’s), a splendid stone Church (Saint Peter’s on Shady Ave), and even an annual Cream Cheese Festival. Yes, someday I could see us taking up residence in one of those apartments, throwing the windows open each morning to sing to the denizens of this last ember of a smiling, industrious little America…

The bus came on time — Route 631 to Boonville, our final bus in this strange journey. And it was the strangest bus we’d taken yet; for where usually, these buses are either packed with Amish folks, or are half-full with the sons of the “country poor,” or are now and again totally empty — our fellow passengers constituted, in this case, a totally new demographic of transit users. Every single passenger on the 631 bus was, excepting ourselves, a little… special. Developmentally disabled “individuals” (as the State system calls them now) filled practically every seat, and as we boarded, the driver, passengers, and the sort of ‘warden’ for the passengers all seemed at least a little leery of us. In Lewis County, it seemed, young, vigorous people all drive automobiles. The only people who are on the bus are either poor, old, or are… a little ‘special,’ and we did not appear to fit squarely into any one of these categories.

But the sensation of being strangers in a mostly unseen world of transportation was made all the stranger by the cockamamie route the bus traveled on. Like a scene from a harebrained sequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, our driver turned a drive that normally takes just thirty minutes into a high-flying, county-wide odyssey of unprecedented proportions; an hour-and-forty-five-minute fever dream involving practically every road, paved and unpaved, of southern Lewis County. Often, we drove in circles on weird roads I’d never seen before in my life — we backed into the driveways of old Victorian-era estates that had been converted into sanitariums for the intellectually disabled. The wheelchair ramp deployed out the back of the bus while our seatmates whined and groaned and stared and belched; the bus did another backcountry figure-eight as one fellow in Velcro shoes clutched his lunchbox, shooting a suspicious, paranoiac glance in my direction as though I had a thought to deprive him of it. Outside the windows, the misty rain blew in reams of 38-degree air in the sunless woods; until finally, after some part of our souls seemed to have evaporated into clouds above an unknown Valhalla — the bus dumped us off at the Tractor Supply in Boonville, where my grandmother was sitting, smiling.

We had done it — we had made it across the North Country for Easter. We’d proven that this odd, unlikely, dirt-cheap mode of travel is not only possible, but may be one of the most ravishingly beautiful, enjoyable, edifying forms of travel we have ever discovered.

My New Favorite Way to Travel

That this journey of ours was a kind of experiment or ‘pilot’ has already been mentioned; and as far as experiments go, we count this one as a raging success. With this journey under our belts, my wife and I agree that we have many more trips of this nature to take — our ambition is now to ride as many local bus systems as we can, on routes that extend as far as it is practically possible to travel, and for sums that seriously may constitute the very cheapest kind of travel that is possible in North America. For while the expenses associated with this particular trip were not as low as they could’ve been, I am now confident that they can be refined to the maximum — and that with a little know-how and planning, we can cover vast distances for practically no money, without the expense of owning an automobile, nor the precarity and danger of hitchhiking, nor the physical exertion of walking, cycling, and canoeing.

In all, this trip’s expenses were as follows:

1. Local bus to the County Seat: $3/pp

2. North Country Express to Potsdam: $2.50/pp

3. Room in Potsdam: $49

4. Trailways Coach from Potsdam to Watertown: $12.65/pp

5. JCC Connector Bus from Watertown to Lowville: $4/pp

6. Route 631 to Boonville: $4/pp

TOTAL: $101.30 for the two of us.

Possible reductions in cost:

1. Stealth camping instead of renting a room (-$49)

2. New Potsdam to Watertown Route, $2/pp (-$10.65 x 2 = -$21.30)

3. Use of folding bikes from home to North Country Express (ride 7mi on bikes to save $3/pp County Seat route, AND reduce North County Express fare to $1/pp instead of $2.50/pp = -$4.50 x 2 = -$9)

NEW TOTAL (pending new bus route to Watertown): $22 for both of us.

That the route is 146 miles in all, the cost per mile for both of us would then be $0.15/mile for the both of us, or ~$0.08/mi for a solo traveler. So far as I understand it, there is no other form of travel that can compete with these numbers — no automobile, bicycle, canoe, or walking route that I know of could result in a cheaper option.

But the cheapness is only a kind of ‘game’ I like to play — it is, to me, a satisfying puzzle to make such calculations as these. They would, of course, all be worth nothing if the experience itself was not so incredibly enriching. To fly low along the farm roads, staring vacantly at the overcast above, silently rattling down the highways by the cornfields and forests, ‘hidden’ in a realm of deep, calming obscurity — ‘gunkholing’ through the margins of the margins, rolling along with the car-less in an automotive world… it reminds me that the world is not quite so ‘flat’ as it may seem on it surface. There is not only one way to live; there are other worlds contained within ours that are seldom seen. Some are not even detectable except by great effort — yet once the traveler breaks into them, he is nourished, and the gravity of this country’s modern-era homogenization is lifted from him as the bus jostles down the rainy roads and drops him into tired old villages to wait for hours…

I am also a hitchhiker at heart; and so I relish the randomness of rural public transportation, for much like hitchhiking — one never knows with whom they will ride. It could be a quiet ride, or a wild one; it could be with twenty other chattering men or with no one but the silent driver. And, like hitchhiking, there is also an element of risk — one never knows if they will get stranded, forgotten, lost, or if the driver will fail to adhere to the route or pull over for a stranger when he hails the bus. In such far-flung places as these, where there may be no train or coach bus or taxi — the stakes feel just high enough to tickle the side of me that craves a touch of real risk in traveling. To take these buses, then, is truly to wander and to move with delightful degrees of imprecision. It is this very imprecision that has proven to me, again and again, that there is still a taste of romance on the long American road, so long as one is willing to embrace inefficiency, slowness, and vagary in large measure.

Until next time, my friends,

A.M.H

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