The Long Journey Home

Proceedings of the Academy of TDBP Studies: Polynesian Chicken

During the period of devastating war that saw a rapid descent of Rapa Nui civilization into famine and ritual cannibalization, some tribes would topple the moai of rival tribes as a means of psychological warfare.

Most authorities appear to agree that the original inhabitants of Easter Island arrived from Polynesia, and Thor Heyerdahl's theory of a Peruvian discovery of Easter Island seems largely discredited. Interestingly, some people believe that the chicken may hold the key to the mysteries of the spread of humans through the Pacific and into South America. Apparently, scientists have traced the genetic lineage of chickens and determined that chickens, which originated in Asia, and were carried by the Polynesians through the Pacific, arrived in southern Chile in the 12th century -- before the Spanish -- suggesting that Polynesians arrived in South America before the Spanish, and perhaps brought masonry techniques and the sweet potato back with them to Easter Island.

The TDBP is officially complete. What follows are merely postscripts and annotations on the original text. Like the mysterious Rongo Rongo texts left by the Easter Islanders, the TDBP will be an object of study and scholarship for generations to come. Our understanding of the TDBP, its meteoric rise, its sudden collapse, with meals left warm and half-eaten, projects dropped incomplete, is only at a beginning. There are important lessons to be learned by close study of the TDBP and its lasting effects on all who came into its orbit.

Also, we will have to do some investigation to determine the Evacuee's final whereabouts, as she has chosen, for reasons of her own, not to inform us of her final destination.

The End

According to the Rand McNally trip calculator I covered somewhere in excess of 6000 miles. According to the Greyhound website, it would have cost me $970.50 to do this individual ticket by individual ticket.

When I was maybe 14 I spent a lot of time in comic book stores. I had a family member who was a collector type. I enjoyed it, and it made my acquisitive impulses kick in hard. So in the 99 cent bin I looked around. I found U.S. 1. It's a comic about a trucker driven by the tragic loss of his (trucker) brother Jeff to a villain known as the Highwayman. It features aliens, mind-controlled trucks, and a wide variety of bad puns. It's also a maxi-series; I assume the good folks at Marvel were not ready to permanently invest in a trucker comic. 12 issues; over and done. Without trying to compare Thirty Day Bus Pass to U.S. 1, because that would be ridiculous and prideful, I like to think of it as a little maxi-series of its own, with a future that now consists of Incredible She-Hulk guest appearences.

This, rather than Mission Control's previous post, is the official end of TDBP.

Expirations, Exits

This is Mission Control saying a big fat ¡Hola! from Santiago, Chile, where it´s currently chilly. Hahaha. That was a joke from the famous CHANCHOW, to give credit where credit is due.

It´s winter in June here in Chile, although the weather is L.A.-like. Tomorrow, Mission Control will be leaving Santiago on a special operation to Easter Island.

The Thirty Day Bus Pass is now officially finished. The National Library here tells me that we now have one minute left on this terminal. So, this is Mission Control signing off from South America.

¿The End?

I Just Had To Pay For A Ticket

When you are not at your final destination but realize that your bus pass may (or may not) have expired the previous day, and you sneakingly do the math in your head and discover that, in fact, you have been travelling for 30 days on the bus, you have two options.

You can pretend that the possibility of expiration never crossed your mind and try to use the pass and get really pissed off when/if somebody points out that it's expired and throw a fit and try to talk them into giving you the extra day because you didn't know.

Or you can go up to the ticket window and say that "Hey, I was wondering . . . ."

The advantages of the second option are: a) you are more likely to have an amiable conversation with the person helping you, which may make them more likely to make your case for you, and b) you feel slightly less shifty. The advantages of the first option is a) they may not notice that your pass is expired and b) it puts you in a better arguing position.

I chose the second option. It didn't work out so good, although I had the single most helpful ticket person in the history of the Greyhound organization (technically, I guess, she worked for Vermont Transit). She sat on hold for a good half hour, and called something like three numbers, all the while joking with her daughter, who had dropped in, and was in a coma a couple of months ago, and is now germ-phobic.

A Boat Called "Agitator": An Account Of My Weekend

I woke up in Portland (ME) at 6:30 a.m. on Friday and checked out bus schedules and campgrounds. I picked, pretty much at random, Keene's Lake Family Campground in Calais (pronounced "callous"). There was a bus leaving at noon. It sounded good. I went back to sleep, and woke up at 10 a.m. I packed and found myself, for no apparent reason, a little panicked. As though there would be severe penalties for missing that bus. As though staying in Portland were a fate worse than death.

To get to Calais I took the bus from Portland to Bangor. I took Concord Trailways, because I thought it was a through bus. In fact, I had to change buses in Bangor. Concord Trailways gives you bottled water and pretzles when you ride its buses. Everybody was white on Concord Trailways.

I had an hour in Bangor. I ate a lobster roll and purchased supplies for the campground (lots of Spaghetti-Os, a couple of oranges, some wine in a box). To get to Calais, I took West Bus. The Discovery Pass doesn't work on West Bus. You have to pay cash to ride West Bus. It was a small bus. Midway through, the bus driver stopped to pick up his kid. The bus driver said that we were the quietest group of passengers he had ever had. We all appeared to be smokers.

Everybody but me got off the bus in Machias. I had no idea where I was. When we got to Calais at 7 p.m. the bus driver pointed out that Canada was right across the river. I was surprised. I had dinner at a road house (scallops) and took a taxi out to the campsite. I should say here that both taxi drivers that I used in Calais, as well as the West Bus driver, had the radio going loudly in the background. I feel there may be some sociological significance to this.

It was 8 or 9 p.m. when I got to the campground. Hard to tell, because my cellphone kept flickering to some later, Canadian, time. It was raining. But they told me I could still go swimming in the lake, and so I did. The lake was grand. I floated on my back and looked up at the sliver of moon. Later, on the phone, someone told me that it was the perfect opening to a horror movie. That made me a little uneasy.

The campground was mostly trailers. It reminded me of the vacation spots of my youth. The owners had been there for five years; the patriarch was an ex-firefighter from Mass. who had always dreamed of owning a campground. He said that a lot of people kept their trailers there year round, and would come down for weekends in the summer. He said everybody moved closer to the lake as spots opened up. Some had been coming for twenty years. Most of the regulars were Canadians, he said. We talked about Canadians a little bit. From my cabin, I could hear the couple at the next site switching back and forth from English to French. They had their fire going; I watched the father try to start it while the kids kept running around, calling his attention to things: rocks, bugs, animal imitations. I bought wood and a starter log at the store myself, and, for the first time in my life, tried to build a campfire. It didn't work out, but not in any kind of interesting madcap way. The logs smoldered a bit and I sat there and tried to arrange kindling. It was a pretty fun way to pass time, actually.

I'm back in Portland; tomorrow the bus pass comes to an end. I suspect it may not work anymore -- the pass says Expires May 25. But one way or another, I'll be heading back to Kingston (NY). I'm feeling a little at sea.

Maine, by the way, is every bit as beautiful as it is popularly supposed to be, and I highly recommend it.

TDBP: Week in Review

There's an elephant in India that robs motorists. People can now change television channels with their minds. Whales evolved from land mammals (like hippos), and that's why they have horizontal tail fins, while fish have vertical tail fins. Tonight Mission Control tried to gather a gross creepy bug scampering through the guest room in a paper towel in order to gently catch and release him outside, but we were clumsy. We saw a greenish gooey spot on the paper towel as we stood outside trying to shake the bug free. The price of corn is predicted to rise precipitously this year. And, yes, your eldest sibling is in fact smarter than you.