The Greyhound bus continuing on to San Francisco was now even more filled with passengers than before, because more new passengers had boarded the bus at Salt Lake City than had gotten off the bus there. Another continuing passenger had re-boarded the bus in Salt Lake City before I did and moved into the seat on the bus seat where I had previously been sitting before arriving in Salt Lake City. So I had taken one of the vacant seats across the aisle, near the window, for the remaining highway journey to the West Coast.
As more and more new passengers got on the bus, the vacant seats near the front of the bus began to completely fill up and the vacant aisle seat to my left near the back of the bus became one of the last remaining vacant seats that a new passenger could locate. So when a blond-haired white woman of average height in her 20's, wearing blue jeans and with a large backpack on her shoulders, who most men would likely consider physically beautiful, stepped on the bus, the vacant seat that was next to where I sat was to where she walked with her big backpack.
"Is anyone sitting here?" she then asked me, in a voice that reflected a German accent, as she stood in the aisle.
"No one's taken this seat yet. So it's O.K. for you to take this seat," I replied with a smile and in a friendly voice.
The young white woman passenger then took off her big backpack, placed it on the baggage rack above the seats, and sat down in the seat next to me.
"How far are you going?" I then asked.
:To San Francisco," she answered.
"Where are you from?"
"From West Germany."
"What brings you to the USA?" I asked with a smile.
"I never was here before and I thought I would be able to see a lot of the the country with the pass I bought from Greyhound. But all I mostly get to see when I'm riding the bus is jut a lot of highway that looks the same everywhere."
I laughed and replied: "Sounds like the capitalists that control Greyhound fooled you. That's what happens when the U.S. government doesn't run transportation companies in a non-profit way like they do in Europe."
With a look of surprise, the young West German woman said with a smile: "You sound like you're a socialist."
"Of course, I am. Aren't you a socialist?" I asked.
"Yes. In West Germany every young person I know is usually a socialist, because our parents have always voted for the Social Democrats and brought us up to be socialists. But we're all told that in the United States "socialism" is considered a dirty word," she answered.
"It's still considered a dirty word. That's one reason the USA is more militarist now than your country is now," I replied.
Having grown up in the United States during the 1950's McCarthy Era, most people in their 20's and early 30's during the 1970s in the USA were--despite their anti-Vietnam War sentiments and the campus and off-campus activism of the New Left student movement and Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s in the USA--still generally both anti-socialist and anti-communist in their political views; and to the degree that some were anti-capitalist in their political views, they were were much more likely to define themselves in the 1970's as hippy-anarchists, rather than hip socialists or hip communists. Within the off-campus 9-to-5 straight work world in the 1970's, "coming out" of the political closet openly as either an anarchist, socialist or communist in front of other workers still generally caused other U.S. workers or U.S. supervisors at most workplaces to begin viewing you with suspicion and marked you, in their eyes, as being some kind of politically deviant, unpatriotic subversive.
But European youth in their 20s and early 30s who had grown up in Western Europe in the 1950's in contrast, besides being anti-war, were generally only anti-communist, but not anti-socialist in the 1970s. One reason may have been because the anti-communist Social Democratic parties' leaders often managed their economically advanced capitalist society's welfare state apparatus, on the basis of democratically-elected parliamentary majorities (as well as, sometimes, because of the covert funding of some of these anti-communist Social Democratic parties received from the CIA); and these Social Democratic parties still identified themselves as socialists in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
So, not surprisingly, after a few minutes more of conversing with the white blond West Germany beauty sitting next to me on the Greyhound bus ride from Salt Lake City to the West Coast, I began to feel that she was both much more politically aware than nearly all the non-socialist or anti-communist U.S. white women in their 20s with whom I had conversed in the 9-to-5 world and post-1972 campus world in the 1970s, and closer to me, philosophically. And she struck me as someone I could easily fall in love with.
We spent most of the daytime on the bus moving west over the Rocky Mountains and into Nevada talking with each other to make the time go faster, and laughing together when some white Western men in cowboy hats and cowboy boots, who seemed kind of right-wing, though not dangerous, boarded the Greyhound bus at one of its stops in the middle of Nevada, off of Interstate 80. Much of our talk was about how U.S. militarism in Vietnam and elsewhere was continuing to threaten world peace.
She seemed to agree with my observation that because most people in the U.S.A. hadn't personally experienced the effects of World War II as had most people in Europe, this might be one reason why people in the U.S.A. were still less pacifist in their political sentiments than were most people now in West Germany and other Western European countries. We also discussed possible reasons why U.S. society seemed so much more crassly materialist and consumers in the 1970s than even West German society had become.
When the Greyhound bus finally arrived in Reno, Nevada in the early morning darkness, both the young West German woman and I looked out a side window of the bus more intently to get a better view of the blinking neon lights outside the Reno casinos that were nearest to the bus station; while the cowboys we had picked up in the middle of Nevada, with excitement, hurriedly exited the bus to, presumably, either gamble on the slot machines or at the tables in the casinos, that were open 24 hours each day, or to try to pick up women or prostitutes with whom to spend part of the day.
Both the West German woman tourist and I found the Reno part of our bus ride more interesting to view from the bus than the time on the Interstate 80 road. But the Greyhound bus stopped only for about ten minutes in Reno, just to drop off passengers and pick up the new passengers who were traveling from Reno to Sacramento and on to San Francisco. So there was no time available for the West German woman and me to get off the bus and explore Reno on foot.
By the time the Greyhound bus reached Sacramento, California later in the morning, the sun was shining and it was daylight. And by that time, the young West German woman seemed to feel that she was too tired to continue conversing since, like me, she had only slept on and off, in-between the conversations we had had on the ride from Utah and through Nevada. So when half of the passengers left the Greyhound bus in Sacramento and two empty bus seats behind the two we were sitting on became available, she stood up from the seat next to mine and went to stretch out on the now two empty available seats behind me' in order to try to get an extra few hours of sleep on the bus, before it finally pulled into San Francisco.
At the same time that she dozed off behind me, I also stretched out across the now-vacant seat next to me and was able to sleep a bit more until the bus reached the Greyhound bus station in Oakland and before it headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and into San Francisco later in the day.
I found it exciting to look out the window as the Greyhound bus headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and felt happy when I realized that, after first longing to see San Francisco and California in the early 1960's as a teenager, I was now finally able to satisfy this longing. But because the West German beauty had given me the vibe and impression before shifting to the seats behind me on the bus that, despite enjoying our conversation, she wasn't into either exploring San Francisco tourist sites with me during the next few days or exchanging names or addresses to remain in contact after our trips were over, I felt slightly disappointed when we said goodbye to each other after leaving the bus at the Market Street station and going our separate ways: she to some San Francisco hotel or hostel and I to the Bay Transit Terminal, in order to make my way to Berkeley for the first time.
Yet I also reminded myself that, if I hadn't been lucky enough to have had both the young African-American woman sit next to me in Omaha, Nebraska and the slightly older West German woman sit next to me in Salt Lake City, the whole bus ride from New York City to San Francisco might have been a much less interesting trip for me to experience--especially since the scenery outside the window on Interstate 80 eventually started to look the same for miles and miles and traveling via interstate roads--rather than on the old U.S. highways that went through Western town main streets and downtown districts-- provided bus riders with less of a sense of what the cities and towns you bypassed, rather than passed through, looked like.
