The Wrong Bus to Nowhere in Particular

Now, I want to be clear that I did not plan this trip. That is the whole point of it. It was 1987, and I was going to San Antonio for a library conference, the kind where you sit in hotel ballrooms and take notes you never look at again. I was thirty-nine years old and traveling alone, which I was comfortable with by then. I had my tote bag, my conference folder, my sensible shoes. I had everything arranged. And then I got on the wrong bus. I don't know how it happened exactly. I had been reading, which is always how these things happen to me, and I looked up somewhere around Seguin and realized the landscape was not doing what I expected it to do. I asked the woman across the aisle where we were headed and she said, "New Braunfels, hon," in a tone that suggested she'd seen this before. I told her I was supposed to be going to San Antonio. She said, "Well, you're going to New Braunfels first." Her name was Gloria Reinholt, and she was seventy years old and going to visit her daughter and she smelled like Chanel No. 5 and mentholated cough drops, which is a combination I now find enormously comforting. She had the kind of silver hair that looks intentional, like she'd decided on it years ago. She took one look at me, clutching my conference folder, completely at sea, and patted my hand and said, "You'll love it, I promise." I did not love it at first. I stood in the New Braunfels bus station for twenty minutes calculating what I'd missed and whether I could still make the afternoon panels. And then I walked outside, because the station was stuffy, and the Comal River was just right there. Lord knows I had never seen anything like it. I'm a Gulf Coast woman. I know water that is brown and serious and means business. This river was green and clear and moving fast, and there were people floating down it on inner tubes in October, which seemed crazy until I understood that the water stays warm because it comes up from springs underground. I stood on the bank and watched them go by for a good half hour. I stayed two nights. I called the conference hotel and told them I had a family situation, which wasn't a lie because I had become briefly attached to Gloria Reinholt and her daughter Linda, who fed me venison stew and showed me their grandmother's quilt and drove me out past Gruene to see the old dance hall there. The floors inside were worn down to practically nothing from all the years of boots on them. I asked Linda how old it was and she said they weren't entirely sure, which is the right answer. I went to the Sophienburg Museum by myself on the second day, which is the local history museum, and I spent three hours in there looking at photographs of the German families who had settled the hill country in the 1840s. They came because someone sold them a pamphlet describing Texas as a paradise, which it is, partially, depending on the month. You could see in their faces that they had found something harder than they expected and had made their peace with it. I thought about that for a long time afterward. I finally took a correct bus to San Antonio on the third morning and arrived in time for exactly one panel, which was about the Dewey Decimal System, and which I could have missed entirely. The thing about that trip is that nothing large happened on it. I didn't have a revelation. I didn't meet the love of my life or find myself or whatever it is people are supposed to do when they end up somewhere unplanned. I just watched a river for a while, ate some venison, looked at old photographs, and talked to a woman named Gloria until she fell asleep in the armchair. But I have thought about that river more times than I can count. Something about the color of it. The way it moved like it had somewhere to be but wasn't in any hurry to get there. I still have Gloria's phone number written in my conference folder. I never called it. I probably should've. That's the other thing about unexpected trips. You don't know what to hold onto until it's already behind you.