Public transports of delight


At 5 0’clock on Tuesday evening the only sound in the Palmerston North bus station comes from the carpet - a screaming cocktail of seventies psychedalia. The cafeteria is barred and shuttered and, apart from myself, the sole occupant is a frail-looking elderly woman with a red woollen scarf.

I’m hungry so I attempt to purchase a bag of ready salted crisps from a vending machine. I’m not good at these things and, after several attempts, end up with a Snickers bar.

I eat the chocolate bar and gaze out the window. In the past 20 years I have travelled in New Zealand by bus only a handful of times. Those years have seen public transport in heartland New Zealand eclipsed by the automobile. Where once the railway stations and bus depots took centre stage they now huddle on the fringes.

In Palmerston North the view from the bus station includes a Kut-Price car yard, a workshop and a row of flats. On this Tuesday evening a small circus has pitched up on a grassy area across the intersection. A row of lightbulbs marches uncertainly up the ridge of the circus tent.

The Intercity coach pulls in on time. I gather my bag and follow the elderly lady with the red scarf onto the platform and up the steps. The bus is newish and in good condition. I note the Designline logo.

Rising fuel prices have not yet driven the people of Manawatu back to public transport: only 6 of the 50 seats in the coach are occupied.

The driver bustles aboard, the only purposeful figure in the landscape, and prepares to depart. As the door shuts a long arm in a greasy brown raincoat reaches through and signals to the driver. The driver leans towards the door, there is a short conversation with the arm, money is exchanged and suddenly the arm and its attendant body are settling themselves in the seat across the aisle from me.

As the bus pulls out the new arrival snorts and writhes his way into his seat. He is large and infinitely greasy. He fixes a look at me and reaches his hand across.
“Quintin,” he exhales and the bus fills with the alcoholic residue of a hundred public bars.
“Peter.”
It’s like shaking hands with a cold meat pie.

After a time Quintin releases my grip but continues to peer boozily at me.
“Do I know you?” he charges.
“I’m not from around here.”
“So you’re from Wanganui?”
“No, but I’m going to Wanganui.”

For a moment this satisfies Quintin - but only for a moment.
“They wanna put an ‘h’ in Wanganui. Do you put an ‘h’ in Wanganui?”
I reply that I do not.
“That’d make it ‘Fonganui.’ The day they start saying Fonganui’s the day I stop going there. Yep.”
Quintin sags back into his seat.

For better or worse, I reflect, public transport brings us in contact with each other in ways over which we have no control. Perhaps that is why we fled to the isolation of private cars as soon as economics permitted. These experiences are often revealing, if not always pleasant.

Quintin snores as we pull into the Mobil station at Bulls. The driver announces he is ‘taking on’ fuel, like a steamship bunkering coal.

Quintin is galvanised by this and flails back to consciousness. He peers at his surroundings and snorts fiercely.
“Bloody Bulls again.” He turns to me, his interlocutor, once more. “I grew up in Bulls and d’you know why I left?”
He waits. I do not know why he left.
“I got sick of the jokes.”
“Jokes?”
“About Bulls. All sorts of jokes. My father…” Quintin is settling down for a serious chat now, “…my father owned a takeaway bar. You know what he called it? ‘Food on the Hoof’. Then this guy opened another takeaway bar across the road. He called his ‘The Udder Food Bar’. It was always like that. I buggered off in the end.”
“Where did you go?”
“Down the road, to Foxton.”

Exhausted by this effort Quintin collapses into his seat.

I wonder if Foxton has the ‘h’ problem.

I have travelled in countries where long-distance bus trips are a chaotic and colourful microcosm of society; where bodies sweat and jostle, chickens flap, mergers are sealed or broken and everybody talks at once. Will the looming energy crisis bring New Zealanders to that glorious state? Or will our transports of delight remain essentially Quintin-esque?

The Wanganui bus depot is a shopfront on the riverbank. We arrive in darkness. Small round taxis appear from nowhere and scurry about like tugboats. Looking back at the coach I see Quintin fast asleep in his seat. The driver is leaning over him talking gently into his boozy, dream-filled face.