The Old Man and His Noodles

I woke up in a shabby hostel in Boston and watched the morning news with the volume cranked up too high.  A city councilman named Wayne drove me to the bus station in a kidnapper’s van.  He was bald and sported a gray-haired pencil mustache.  The engine sputtered.  Along the way, Wayne pointed out where the Bruins play ice hockey and where the Boston strangler claimed his first victim.

“You see them boarded-up windows?” he said.  “Right there.”

He rolled the windows down, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.  We passed a panhandler with a limp arm.  Wayne slowed down and greeted the man.  Then he turned to me and said the panhandler suffered a motorcycle accident. 

“Poor guy,” he said, shaking his head.

Wayne dropped me off two blocks from the bus station, and I slipped five dollars into his tip jar.  He shook my hand and said I was the customer of the month.  He probably said that to a lot of people, but he was a charming man, and his compliments seemed genuine. 

On the bus I listened to country ballads and watched the sea recede as we sped through the southeast corner of New Hampshire and into the marshy woodlands of Maine.  An old man hauled a black trash bag full of his belongings and plopped into the seat in front of me.  Fuzzy white hair sprouted on his face, and he dressed like a vagabond.  His charcoal slacks were faded.  His blue shirt was frayed on the breast pocket and stained tobacco-yellow on the collar.  He yanked open a package of Ramen and ate the brick of noodles like it was a granola bar.  He constantly crinkled the plastic wrapper.  Shards of brittle noodles fell from his bruised lips and scattered onto the floor.

We stopped for fifteen minutes in Portland.  I ran across the street to buy a sandwich.  When I returned to my seat, I saw the trash bag, but the old man was gone.  I looked out the window to search for him and realized my passive concern for this stranger, who was running out of time.  As the bus driver pulled away from the station, a woman behind me shouted, “We left someone behind!”

The old man stood in front of the glass doors holding a grocery bag. 

“What did I say, sir?” the bus driver yelled. “You weren’t listening.”

The driver was a man who operated by the books.  He followed his route and recited his lines and respected the schedule.  He opened the door begrudgingly, and the old man boarded with a frantic look on his face.  He nearly lost his bag, which I assumed held all his possessions.  The old man did not address the driver or seem perturbed by his condescending tone.  He changed his seat in favor of the row across from me. 

This gave me the opportunity to observe his behavior more closely.  On long Greyhound rides, there is usually very little to do, as the Wi-Fi promised to you doesn’t work.  Fortunately, one can usually rely on a spectacle from one of Greyhound’s oddball customers.  I noticed a debit card sticking out of the old man’s long sock and a tuft of nose hair hanging from his nostril.  He opened a box of maple sausages and ate them raw until he consumed the entire package.  Then he donned a pair of reading glasses and sewed the handle of his duffel bag. 

The old man got off at Augusta, and I stepped off the bus in Bangor at a truck-stop diner along the highway.  A GoogleMaps search revealed a five-mile walk into town, but I didn’t want to lug my two heavy bags, which contained nearly all my possessions.  Nor did I want to Uber into town and back to the bus station, where a shuttle would pick me up in three hours and take me to the dormitory in Acadia National Park, where I will be living for the next six months.

 

I had three hours to kill, so I went inside the diner and hoped I could milk this experience by being indecisive and eating at an agonizingly slow pace.  An ancient Ford model lay parked in the dining room, and the trunk was piled with loaves of homemade bread.  The wooden chairs were ribbed and had backs shaped like arches.  The wall was adorned with pictures of misty lakes and wading moose.  The waitresses wore jeans and ponytails, and they leaned on the tables as they scratched orders onto their green-paper pads. 

My waitress had braces and blushed a lot.  I told her I was in no hurry and had nowhere to go until my ride showed up at six.  She didn’t ask me any questions, and I explained I was moving to Acadia National Park and at this table I had nearly everything I own and was it okay if I waited here for longer than usual?  Her answer didn’t assure me of her understanding.  She nervously took my order.  I noticed her Apple Watch and asked her if she tracked her steps and how many miles per shift she walked. She started this job a few days ago and didn’t conduct sufficient research yet.

 

A group of rambunctious high-schoolers ordered breakfast at the adjacent table, and a trucker in front of me asked me about the chicken pot pie.  He noticed my luggage and inquired of my destination.  He made jerking motions with his thumb in all the cardinal directions.

“Acadia,” I said, “Where you going?”

He named a town I never heard of.

“Where is that?” I asked.

He pointed left with his thumb and said, “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

I considered ending this conversation because the outcomes were limited, but he was staring right at me and I could not help but be in his field of view.  Besides, I was enraptured by the foreignness of this homely environment.  This was white-bread, blue-collar small-town America where the waitresses call you “hun” and serve slices of pie known for miles around.  This is a place for living slowly and passing the time.

 

“I’m from down near the border,” the trucker said when I asked him where he was from.  I was confused, given our proximity to Canada.  I assumed he referred to the closest border, but, no, even in Maine the neighbor on everyone’s mind is Mexico.

 

“How long have you been trucking?”

“Long time,” he said, paused, and repeated, “A long, long time.”

He paid, wished me good luck, and headed through the door.  The bell clanged against the glass, and I struggled to finish my amply portioned meal with a side of cole slaw and baked beans.  The waitress stopped by frequently to measure the ebbs and flows of my mood.  My contentment hadn’t changed.  Eventually I pushed my plates to the side and requested a refill of coffee and a twenty-minute break to decide between a guilt-free conscience and dessert.

 

After spending so much time in Europe, I had grown accustomed to dining slowly.  The restaurant was getting busier, but several tables remained empty.  I reckoned if I tipped the waitress double then I could justify clogging up her table and denying her another rotation.  As I was writing in my notebook during my recess, a manager approached me.  Her curly brown hair didn’t reach her shoulders.  The expression she wore suggested years of stasis, but she didn’t take shit from anybody. 

“Are you waiting for a ride?” she asked.

I nodded and said it’ll be here in about thirty to forty minutes. 

“If it’s not here by then, I’ll have to move you to a closed table because you can’t take this table up.”

My bubbly feeling dissipated.  The aura of northern friendliness was shattered.  I assumed I was welcome and could stay as long as I wished.  I could have argued that I was a paying customer.  I could have asked her for pity.  Between this booth and the next restaurant lay miles of interstate, and I had nowhere to go.  I could have said I’d make it up to the waitress financially, but I didn’t feel inclined for an argument.  Instead, I conceded to her motherly demands and ordered dessert to justify taking up space. 

I ate until I was over-stuffed and uncomfortable.  I tipped handsomely to the blushing waitress, who was accustomed to the gratitude of truck drivers.  I bought a map of the state of Maine at the travel shop and waited for my shuttle in the rear parking lot.  The truckers’ engines hummed, and the cold wind blew.  A sign on the door to the bus station said no loitering after six o’clock, but there was nowhere to loiter.  No bench or pavilion, just a beige patch of concrete and a metal trash can.  

The van arrived.  I set my bags in the trunk, and we headed south to Mount Desert Island. In the middle row sat a quiet woman from Slovakia, and riding shotgun was a man with flamboyantly blonde hair a la Justin Bieber.  He talked at length to the driver and rattled off the specific times of his connecting flights.  His tone suggested that the details of his anecdote were of utmost importance.  I put my headphones on to drown out the dreadful airplane stories.  The further we drove, the bars of cell service disappeared one by one.  It was dark by the time we reached the dormitory.