Joanna Pocock on Greyhound and America as the Ailing Motherland

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When I was nineteen, I spent two months in America, and I remember my parents laughing at my naivety when I thought my main mode of transport would be to catch the Greyhound or hop on the Jitney. I had always attached a symbolic fascination to those words.

Did you also have a metaphorical understanding of what the ‘Greyhound’ was to American media, and did that change significantly when it became a very real way for you to traverse the country? 

Gosh, that’s a really good question. It would require a whole essay unto itself, I think, but of a few things I can touch on one is that growing up in Canada, the romance of the road feels very American. It’s not something that exists in Canada’s literary canon or in our cultural collective mindset. Maybe illicit is the wrong word, but there’s something very attractive to a Canadian about hitting the open road, and it does conjure a narrative, a problematic narrative – this idea of driving out into nothingness, or driving from east to west, following the search for the frontier.

It’s a very rich metaphor. And I guess for me, what I was really keen to explore was to look at how it’s been documented. Not to judge it in any way, but just to really immerse myself in it, particularly during the Covid years when I couldn’t travel. I read Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and Steinbeck and Kerouac and James Rorty and William Least Heat-Moon. And then the three women authors, Ethel Mannin, Irma Kurtz and Simone de Beauvoir. I immersed myself in the literature of the road as a way of trying to answer the question you just asked. What is it about this road trip narrative that still holds a sway over us? Why are we fascinated? 

Which of those texts was your favourite reading experience? 

I’d have to say William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. He really manages to combine a lot of threads that I enjoy in a work of literature. His trip came out of a sense of loss – his wife left him, and he lost his job. I can’t remember how he words it exactly, but he says something like, when things aren’t going right, at least you can go. This idea that somehow moving can assuage one’s grief or sadness. 

You describe your first road trip as ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later, it seems you found even more absences and omissions in the American landscape – in every payphone ripped from the walls, in every cow slaughtered, in every tree severed. What was the pain of discovering this loss?

I guess because I work in environmental writing, my sort of milieu is then also very much an ecologically aware one. I’m a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain Project, which is geared towards art and writing around ecological and societal issues, as well around the idea of the limits of civilisation. So I was kind of primed for a lot of what I saw. 

I love the fact that Americans are still working out concepts like, what is freedom?

But the thing that surprised me, really, was just the levels of – I don’t even know what to call it – of sadness in the people I was travelling among. I was expecting the environmental devastation. I wasn’t really expecting the societal devastation, and so many people who just seemed so strung-out. The substance abuse seemed to be quite rampant. And I guess, if you have a certain mindset where you think that humans are a part of nature, the fact that we’re poisoning the earth and we’re also allowing humans to poison themselves, it’s all part of this greed and a search for profit over looking after the earth and the humans on the earth. It’s all connected. 

Do you consider America to be the epicentre of this global crisis, both environmental and social?

I don’t really know. I’m fascinated by the United States, partly because I grew up really close to the border, partly because I have a lot of family there. I’ve lived there. I have loads of friends there. And I love the fact that Americans are still working out concepts like, what is freedom? What does freedom look like? Is it libertarian? Is it a socialist thing? Is it more of a free market thing? They grapple with the big things. And a lot of what is being fought out there is being fought out everywhere. But I think the thing to keep in mind is that it’s an extraction economy – much of this extraction takes place elsewhere, so they are still functioning as colonisers in that sense. In South America, in Africa, huge swaths of continents have mines that are poisoning whole cities, whole states, and the money is going into the pockets of people in Toronto and Calgary and Texas. So I don’t know if it’s an epicentre, but I think a lot of what’s going on there is probably being replicated in other places. It’s just maybe more obvious in the US. It’s louder there.

Another stark contrast between your two trips is the presence of technology, which seems to be unavoidable. You describe a tension on the bus, in the lack of human connection and people being glued to their mobile devices. Did you perceive this more as a coping mechanism, or a symptom of modern life?

I think it’s more of a symptom. We’ve all kind of sleep-walked into this situation that has seen us grow divorced from our bodies, divorced from the natural world, divorced from each other with this promise of being connected, yet mobile phones do the opposite. I mean, obviously technology has its place. I’m not advocating that we all ditch our phones – although wouldn’t it be great if we all did? But I think what is happening, and going back to something I said earlier, is this idea that growth and profit are really what matters in market driven economies like Canada and the United States. The technological boom is taking advantage of that by selling us apps. It’s selling us things that we get addicted to. 

Maybe it’s also worse post Covid. There are the remnants of feeling safe behind a screen because you’re not physically close to someone, you’re not breathing in their aerosols and so on. And I think the Covid years really ramped up our dependence on social media and on the appification of travel, as I call it. For some companies it’s easier to fire people and then tell customers to download the app, which is what is happening everywhere. And it drives me insane. I think it drives a lot of people insane. But what can we do about it? 

And actually, on the first trip you took back in 2006, you make references to a greater sense of community, and shared experience. It would be very rare in the UK for someone to move across the country on a coach, and much rarer to strike-up conversation with a stranger while on one. Do you think that the kind of conviviality you experienced is a specifically American one? 

It’s something I remember after doing the first bus trip – I was calling it Greyhound Bus Syndrome – this thing of strangers having really in-depth conversations about their marriage or their divorce, or their kid who is a truant. Really personal stuff. And it would be for sort of eight hours and then they would get off the bus and head in their separate directions, never to see each other again. There’s something almost confessional happening on a Greyhound, certainly in 2006 much more than now. Now it feels much more cursory. It doesn’t go as deep. 

The image of the America traveller and adventurer is historically that of a man. There are notable exceptions, as you’ve mentioned, but it felt particularly illuminating to read about this journey from your perspective. Was there an element to which your understanding of ‘the maternal’ was being mapped onto the environment, as something that is not being looked after? 

Oh, that’s such a lovely question. This is something I think about and I find it very hard to talk about because I have a bit of an inner hippie and it sounds quite flaky when I talk about it. But in many cultures the Earth is considered to be a woman. Someone who read an early draft of Greyhound called the book ‘an eco-feminist travel log tracing the ragged edges of America’, and I quite like that. 

Are women more likely to want to nurture the earth and new growth? I don’t know. These are things I think about a lot, and I don’t have any answers. All I can say is that for me, my body and the earth have always been connected. I’ve never seen or felt them as separate things. 

You might disagree with me, but in reading the book I felt like there was an absence of fear in your writing, and that came across to me both as you described your experience and in the precision of the prose. Did this latest trip and the process of writing the book embolden you in any unexpected ways? 

The thing is I do have fear, but I tend to be afraid of things that other people aren’t afraid of. And I tend to not be afraid of things that a lot of people are afraid of. I don’t really feel afraid when I travel on my own, but what does terrify me is plastic in the ocean, the erosion of soil, the heating of our planet, wildfires. Those are the things that keep me awake at night. I just can’t bear what we’re doing to the earth. But, after doing the second trip I did feel like, you know, woo hoo! I’m a 59-year-old woman, I’ve just backpacked across America on a bus. I did it. It was great. Physically, it was quite hard and uncomfortable. There were a lot of long journeys and a lot of schlepping a heavy bag along dark roads. I did feel a sense of achievement. 

Language brings a responsibility with it but ultimately, it’s actions that matter most.

I wasn’t documenting the first trip for anyone’s consumption other than my own. And even though I was following a fictional character for a novel I was writing, I wasn’t documenting the trip to be part of anything. This second time, because I was documenting it as I was experiencing it, I did find that really, really difficult. There were often times sitting on the bus when it was pitch black and I was trying to scribble in my diary – I didn’t record people, I just did it all longhand – and I couldn’t really see, and I was trying to get the torch on my phone to illuminate the page while trying to listen to what people were saying while also transcribing their words. I was inhabiting this weird space of trying to be present but also trying to document, and I found that exhausting. 

This book, in many ways, is about the destruction of a natural environment, and yet you linger on an image of hope. The metaphor of planting seeds stuck with me – a small but rebellious act in the face of potential paralysis. I’m interested in any other kinds of ‘seed planting’ you partake in? 

It’s really funny because when I wrote Surrender there were several Q&As where people asked, what advice have you got? You put work out there, and then people want to ask you questions, which makes sense, but I don’t always feel like I have the answers. I would definitely say though that for me, doing things at a local level is what keeps me sane. Because we can’t go out into the Pacific and remove all the plastic from it. The problems that we have and that we’re facing are too big, and paralysis is not the answer either. 

I’m a volunteer at a nature reserve and I just love the people there, it’s a real community. And I guess, in a way, religious people talk about prayer and really believe in the power of prayer. I’m not such a person, but I understand it from the point of view of getting together with people, planting seeds, nurturing, working in a medicine garden, making salves and making products from these medicinal plants that then get handed out on the street, which is one of the things that is done in the place where I volunteer. It’s not curing all the ills of the world but it is part of the solution. I believe in this sort of mycelial connection. If enough people are stewarding the earth – even in small ways – the little root fibres they create are going to extend and intermesh with each other. That’s the kind of image and those are the acts that keep me going. And also writing about it helps me navigate it.

Which leads really nicely to my final question. Nomenclature is also an important consideration with this text, and its surrounding environment. What do you think the responsibility of language is in regards to our changing planet? 

There’s a lot I could say about that. Going back to this idea of names, of naming things, of who gets to name things. Obviously traditionally, just looking at North America, the Europeans went there, catalogued loads of plants and species, and now we use those names. Those names also existed for Native people and First Nations people but the ones we use today are the ones that have been superimposed on top of those names. So, I do think language matters an awful lot. 

I also think that language brings a responsibility with it but that ultimately, it’s actions that matter most. Sometimes we feel that language can function as a placeholder for actions and that’s such a difficult one. I don’t like this idea that art, even if it’s non-fiction, should always have a message. I really think there’s a place for writing that just is, you know, about two people falling in love or about someone discovering something important to them. Maybe there’s politics in there, but also maybe there’s just human desire and a story that is perhaps not connected to things that are going on in the world. So, I’m loath to say that I feel that writing should have a message or should lead people to think a certain way or do certain things. But of course, it can. For me a text is the beginning of a conversation, not the final word.

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Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US, and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship. Greyhound is her second book.

Emmeline Armitage is a writer and musician originally from West Yorkshire, now living in London. She graduated from The University of Oxford before completing her Masters in Literary Non-Fiction from Royal Holloway, and her work has since been featured in The Bedford Review, The Line of Best Fit and Wonderland, as well as on stage at Hay-On-Wye and Out-Spoken. She is signed to indie hip-hop label Lewis Recordings, most recently having opened-up for The Streets on tour, played the global music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, and being named by the Guardian as ‘One to Watch’.

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