Change Of Pace
This is not a New Age experience. There are no meditation rooms, no gurus to lead you to Nirvana. This is retro communal existence crossed with a summer-camp, Outward Bound sense of discovery. A kibbutz on wheels. It is the Green Tortoise adventure and there’s nothing quite like it.
Twenty-one years ago Gardner Kent had an accidental vision. At the time he was driving a bus; a 40-foot, decrepit, cross-country carrier owned by the Gray Rabbit bus line. The unfortunate condition of his vehicle forced him under the hood as often as he was behind the wheel.
Kent saw a peculiar thing happen. The mostly college-age passengers, instead of being incensed by the periodic delays, looked out the sliding windows and discovered the countryside. They swam in watering holes along the road and they visited dinosaur parks and shrines to Elvis. They talked to one another as well. Friends were made and a few people discovered themselves in the process. Gardner Kent knew he was on to something.
Two decades later the Green Tortoise - last of the gypsy carriers that hauled hippies and beatniks from coast to coast in the 60s and 70s - is flourishing. Kent bought out his final legitimate competitor, the Gray Rabbit, in 1981, thus putting a fitting end to the Rabbit and Tortoise tale.
Green Tortoise operates 12 buses out of its headquarters in San Francisco. All but the four newest vehicles were purchased from municipalities, a few for less than $1,000. The muni-transit buses are typically refitted for $30,000 at the Tortoise’s repair shop in Lowell, Ore. Rebuilt engines are installed, and the interiors are gutted.
When the work is completed, a Tortoise bus takes on a life of its own. All of the vehicles are given names, the exterior is painted a distinct shade of green and yellow, and the message “Arrive Inspired, Not Dog Tired,” is emblazed on the rear of the bus.
An expansive futon-covered platform takes up the rear quarters, and the center is islanded with two convertible tables that give way to even more couch space that extends all the way to the driver’s seat. Fixed hardwood bunks are suspended from the ceiling along both side walls.
The buses are outfitted with stereos, and music - from the Gypsy Kings to the Grateful Dead - is a constant background in daylight hours.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were lounging in your own family room. Except, of course, for the other 40 passengers sharing the sofa with you.
If you don’t have time for one of the 3- to 30-day Green Tortoise adventures - trips that might take you to Alaska in summer, Mardi Gras in February or Guatemala in winter - the easiest way to capture the Tortoise experience is to travel on one of the year-round West Coast commutes. If you have two days to spare and at least $69 in your pocket, you can trek from Seattle to Los Angeles in absolutely original fashion.
Abiogenesis, the bus named for the concept of bringing an inanimate object to life, arrived in Eugene, Ore., 40 minutes late. As the vehicle eased to a halt, 37 riders choked the doorways. Most were looking for a restroom. Three young women wanted directions to the closest bar. The last person off the bus was a man with a long blond ponytail, an easy smile and a clipboard clutched under his right arm.
He started barking directions to the uninitiated straight away. “Separate what you need - needles, backpacks, teddy bears, smokes. The rest of your gear goes to the back of the bus. Line up over here to pay your way, we’re running late and I’ve got time to make up.”
We left Eugene within half an hour. The missed-his-flight-home cross-country bicyclist, wearing an “Auto Free, One Less Car” T-shirt, had strapped his Cannon touring bike to the top of the bus and was already asleep in a back niche of the futon. Jeff Gonzalez, a 27-year-old college student from Santa Cruz with a skateboard strapped across his back, was practicing his college major, the study of oral tradition, on a modish passenger with jet black hair, lipstick and wardrobe to match.
There was something peculiar about this woman. She loathed to be looked at. Talking to her outside a Denny’s restaurant in Florence, Calif., as she danced in hyperkinetic circles, we found out her name. Julie told us she was a professional dancer.
“Ballet,” Jeff asked innocently?
“No, stripping, goin’ to San Francisco to make some money.”
Looking around the balance of the bus, I estimated the average age to be about 30, the mean raised by 52-year-old Marilyn Alice Wilding to my left, grandmother of five and admittedly nervous of what she had just gotten herself into, and a gray-bearded man who couldn’t have been a day under 60. He had his pug terrier, Zippy, tethered to his ankle with a neon pink strap.
Within 10 minutes we had buddied up. Mark Richards, the driver with the clipboard, had turned down the hillbilly-rock long enough to offer another kind edict: Find two people to entrust your immediate life with, since they may be the only thing between you and a long cab ride to San Francisco. (He was warning against straggling too long, undiscovered, at one of the every-other-hour rest stops.)
Conversations continued, randomly, a few with intent as we drove steadily south. We were soon approaching the 117-acre Cow Creek compound just north of the OregonCalifornia border. There was a clear sense of anticipation, the experienced Tortoisers hinting at the wonder of the place we were about to visit.
When we arrived, most of the passengers proceeded to disrobe. The creek and sauna facilities were two minutes up the gravel road and only a few passengers missed the chance to shed their clothes and wallow in the cool water. There was something liberating about standing naked before the world and absolute strangers, rejoicing in a common experience.
A conversation I had with Lawrance Rico, a French teacher at the University of Oregon and three-time Tortoise Adventurer, was ringing in my ears as I settled into the work line aboard The Hungry Tortoise. We were chopping vegetables, stirring gravy, cooking the fresh fish for dinner, nine of us in all, in a converted bus cum kitchen facility that most commercial kitchens would be envious of.
Ms. Rico, 29, had described the essence of the Tortoise experience. The Magic were the words she had used. Something transcendental occurs during the adventures. A giving up of the self to sometimes trying events, conditions; the melding of a group of strangers into a sharing, selfless mass, with a common identity. But the odd thing about the trip, she went on to say, is the identities that people assume in transit - it’s as if they can be anyone they might wish to be.
“The man that became my boyfriend of many months was a banker. On our Baja trip he was totally carefree, passionate, introspective. I think he went on that expedition to discover himself, or to see what he was capable of in a totally neutral environment. I assure you he was not the same person in his real life.”
She suspected that others had done the same thing but she was vehement in her support of the Tortoise experience. Without the selflessness that comes from a willingness to experiment, everyone would have been at each others throats, for sure.
Eric Gerrick, the 41-year-old general manager of Green Tortoise, agrees. “Gardner Kent saw the potential in people to discover things, whether a road less traveled or themselves for that matter. After a day or so, this ‘magic’ would occur. The personal bubble space breaks down, you get used to someone else’s feet in your face for hours on end and you learn to feel like a kid again.”
He continued, warning that “once in a long while it just doesn’t work. If there are too many people aboard that are needy, people that come looking for friends that they couldn’t find in their own life, or those people that just can’t adapt to the summer camp spirit of the trip, then the whole thing becomes a flaming fiasco.” Gerrick assured me that the magical tortoise experience occurs roughly 29 out of 30 trips.
After two hours of rest, swimming and an excellent meal we were back on the road. San Francisco was an overnight away. The bus would stop every hour or so en route, for a collective stretch or to let off a passenger. We performed the Miracle - a conversion of living space that would allow 40 people to sleep through the night in a rolling bus - at a rest stop just into California.
At dawn we were rolling across the Bay Bridge, the sun coming up over the hills, pooling blood-orange across the water. Pairs and threes of Tortoisers chatted about the beauty of the day, the dreams they had had the night before, how they would like to be back at Cow Creek for a quick dip in the water.
There was a quiet appreciation of what we had all just been through. As we said goodbye to one another, exchanged addresses and phone numbers outside the bus terminal, I sensed that most of the people wished the trip were not yet over.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO The Green Tortoise travels far and wide. The bus line makes about 90 Adventure Trips per year, as well as West Coast weekly commuter runs. Food is not included in the trip price. Everyone contributes to a food kitty which adds up to about $6 a day on adventure trips, and a flat $3 on commutes. The food is unlike anything you ever had at summer camp. The ingredients are fresh and thoughtfully prepared. One driver, of years past, was known to trade stacks of Playboys for fresh shrimp on the Baja runs. Most passengers on the Green Tortoise Adventure trips are women, especially on the cross-country runs where the female-male ratio is 80/20. More than half of the adventurers are foreigners. For information on schedules, prices, and reservations, contact Green Tortoise Adventure Travel, 494 Broadway, San Francisco, California, 94133; 800-TORTOISE.