Bumps in the Road
We awoke at sunrise, and crawling out of the bus, found ourselves on the shore of Lake Michigan. Chris was already awake and practicing yoga, his palms pressed flat on the grass, one leg stretched up toward the sun. Jeremy sat meditating on a boulder by the shore. The rest of us ran passed them through tall grass down to a beautiful unpeopled beach.
We greeted the day swimming out into the lake, splashing in the shallows and taking an overdue bath. The sun rose higher and we didn’t see another soul on the beach or in the fields, save for a few hurrying joggers.
After a long recess, we drove to South Station and picked up Nick. Ethan bumped a fire hydrant backing up, but the bus barely felt it. We left Chicago celebrating Nick’s arrival with beating drums.
As we rumbled across Illinois and into Iowa, the bus began to stutter and stall. Restarting it drained our old batteries again. We stopped at Iowa 80, “The World’s Largest Truck Stop!” After checking out the slot machines and medieval weaponry display (apparently there is a market for spiked maces and broad swords among truckers), Ethan and I navigated through the labyrinth of tractor-trailers to the auto shop and bought a new battery.
We had the bus running again, but felt something more was ailing her. On the advice from the truck stop’s mechanics, we drove back east a few exits to Hawkeye International Trucks in Davenport, Iowa.
The mechanics at Hawkeye International thought our fuel pump was cracked. They couldn’t fix it, and a new one cost about three thousand dollars. But there was a fuel pump 
specialist in Grand Island, Nebraska. We decided to press on the 450 miles west to Grand Island.
The bus began to stall every time the RPMs fell and would no longer start without assistance. When we stalled out at stoplights, and in the middle of intersections, Cat and I would jump out, pull open the hood, open the air intake and spray WD40 and ether down the bus’s throat while Ethan turned the ignition and pumped the gas pedal until she roared back to life.
As we rumbled across Iowa, Cat and I searched our minds for an appropriate name for our vessel, something a little more personal than “the bus.”
“It’s pretty clear to me that the bus has the reembodied spirit of a brontosaurus, and it’s an herbivore you know,” I said.
“Yeah, it feels like a sleepy old maternal figure, like, Nana, the St. Bernard from Peter Pan,” Cat mused.
”I like that: She groans, and tires but ultimately takes care of us,” I said. 
“But maybe something a little more…’Nanasaurus’?
“What about Busosaurus?”
Her eyes lit up, “Busosaurus!”
The name stuck; Busosaurus roared across the plains.
Stopping for grease outside Des Moines, we found a Chinese restaurant stuck in mini mall with. In the parking lot we met a singing telegram dressed in sparking silver dress and tiara. She sang a vaudeville rendition of “Happy Birthday” to us in the parking lot before leavining to deliver the message to the rightful recipient.
We broke down in Omaha, coming to rest in an empty church parking lot. Before long we’d attracted some interested folks: a veteran burner who told us about his old bus and past journeys to Burning Man; and a local young hip hop artist who invited us to an upcoming show, “Beats for Peace.” A guy named Toma offered to give me a ride to pick up some fuel filters in his van. He sipped on a can of “Sparks” energy drink and told me about his life as we rode across Omaha. He played freestyle Frisbee, usually by himself, throwing into the wind. He spoke of his love for his daughter, but how he wasn’t going to marry the mother just to create an unhappy household like his and his friends’ parents. He described how Omaha was racially and economically segregated,,
“Yeah, the South side is all Mexican. You gotta know Spanish if you want some tacos or somethin’. The north is black, east is lower class white, and west is bourgeoisie.”
And after just a glimpse into Omaha we were gone, on the road again.
That night, after taking a wrong turn and nearly getting stranded down a lonely road carved between massive cornfields, we made it to Grand Island. The bus sputtered and gave out; we rolled to a stop in the junkyard behind the garage. We weren’t going anywhere by bus until the shop opened, so Nick, Ethan, and I freed our mounts from the roof to explore Grand Island by bike.
Grand Island is an island amid a sea of corn, an agricultural trading post spread out among long fields, straight roads, and empty parking lots. Nick, Ethan and I found a warm pool of water, empty of swimmers, but it was inside a Hampton Inn, and the woman working at the hotel preferred that the pool remain empty. Escaping into the night, we peddled down a dirt path walled by tall stalks of corn. Back at the bus, we found the rest of our squadron lying out on the roof.
Nick mixed up some kalimodxo (a Basque word, pronounced ‘calimucho’), a concoction of Coca Cola and wine, he discovered whilst in Northern Germany. We sat across the roof, quaffing kalimudxo, looking out over the scattered lights of Grand Island, musing and laughing over the chain of events that had brought us there: Three years ago Ethan’s life revolved around basketball. Since stepping off the court, he has read a lot of Noam Chomsky, been in and out of love, traveled around the world, and now finds himself in a junkyard in the middle of Nebraska atop his vegetable oil mobile with a wonderfully motley crew.
The next morning, while mechanics inspected the bus, Chris and I peddled off to find food supplies and procure a connecting nozzle to link our travel stove to the propane tank. We rode around a town of one story ranch houses and grain elevators. Unable to find local 
produce, we returned from “Super Super Savers” with eggs, rice, beans, and avocados, plus the missing link to the stove. We set up our kitchen on an weather-beaten wooden pallet and cooked breakfast for the eight of us.
The mechanics reported that the fuel injector pump was cracked and lacked the pressure to send enough fuel to the pistons— that’s why we couldn’t idle and couldn’t start her up without ether.
“How quickly can you fix it?” Ethan asked.
“Well, I’d say ‘bout a week.”
We could not wait a week. Our team sprung into action, on phones, palm pilots, and the shop’s computer looking for new fuel injection pump. We found a part that could arrive in two days. As much fun as we had had the previous night, we did not want to spend two more days in Grand Island. We could have the part shipped to Colorado and wait for it in Boulder, but we’d have to risk leaving a place that could fix it for a fair price, to drive 600 miles to Boulder in the ailing bus and see if we could find a mechanic there to install the pump.
Until then, Ethan had paid for the bus entirely on his own, and was hesitant to take the additional risk. All of us agreed to split the labor cost of whatever mechanic we found, push on to Colorado and have the fuel pump meet us there. I decided then that I would to commit as a bus partner with Ethan, and buy the $1200 fuel injector pump. We set off for Boulder.