In a world filled with cultural irony, you can’t get much more ironic than the Reagan revolution giving rise to the Green Tortoise.
Ronald Reagan never rode the Green Tortoise because he wasn’t partial to hippie bus lines. The pot-smoking and open sex that marked the line’s early years just wasn’t Ronnie’s scene.
But Reagan played a huge role in maintaining the Green Tortoise when he deregulated the bus industry. That helped turn the line from an underground cult phenomenon to, well, an overground cult phenomenon.
It wasn’t entirely by choice. The change began on the night in 1986 when federal agents raided the Tortoise just as it was launching six buses bound for Mardi Gras. Yes, the bus line had a few problems, like no insurance, improper licensing and generally ignoring the rules, nothing unusual for the hippie underground bus companies operating out of San Francisco in those days.
After the raid, though, the Green Tortoise went legit and left its days of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, of Hippie comic-book fame, in the past. Now fully certified and federally approved, the Tortoise operates 13 buses on adventure travel trips throughout North and Central America.
“It’s by no means just a hippie bus anymore,” said Lyle Kent, a Green Tortoise vice president who was 6 when his father, Gardner Kent, started the line in 1974 with a converted school bus.
Today the Green Tortoise attracts people from many walks of life, though many are still hippies in mind, dress or both. And while it’s no longer an underground operation, the Tortoise has by no means lost its counterculture convictions. Does any other bus line, after all, promise a trip “back through time to an era when exploring and embracing humanity was more valuable that conforming to the status quo?”
Despite its emergence into the establishment world, the Green Tortoise remainsnearly invisible to mainstream America. Ask people on the street whether they’ve heard of the Green Tortoise and chances are you’ll get blank stares, even in San Francisco, its home town.
Yet it offers one of the lowest fares anywhere–$79–for a trip between Los Angeles and Seattle. Greyhound, by comparison, charges $80 one-way from Seattle to L.A. But more than that, the Green Tortoise is America’s last hippie slumber party and a connection to a colorful era.
“I feel like I’m on Jack Kerouac’s bus,” Cliff Coleman, 48, owner of a Berkeley, Calif., skateboard company, said while riding home from Eugene, Ore.
It is, the company motto says, the only trip of its kind. Indeed. There are only three rules, which the drivers announce before each trip: no smoking, no drinking and no shoes on the beds.
Much of the bus is filled by a platform, about knee high, covered with mattresses and sheets. Passengers sit with their backs to the windows. As soon as they board, the platform turns into a jumble of blankets, sleeping bags, books, day packs, all the accoutrements of travel. It gets a little like a college dorm room where they haven’t figured out how to use the washing machine. That’s why drivers air out the bus on long breaks.
Riders, in general, look earnest, many decorated in a rainbow of colors, long hair, a variety of body piercing and the scent of patchouli oil. Some seem a little suspicious, their eyes switch from optimism in the human condition to vague unease at spending too much time in the real world.
On board, there are reading lights and controls for the stereo speakers scattered through the coach. Couples doze in each other’s arms. A young woman in a sari, purple head wrap and glittery makeup says little but knits furiously. Another couple works on a quilt, occasionally glaring at an 11-year-old, about five years past the age of cute, who parades up and down the bus attempting to play a piccolo.
The music, mostly selected by the driver, ranges from U2 to Mozart to James Brown. An equally eclectic collection of books emerged, including “Another Roadside Attraction,” by Tom Robbins, “Ecstasy” by Irwin Welch, “Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture” and “Be Here Now,” by Baba Ram Dass. One rider switched between “Moby Dick” and Thrasher magazine.
But talking is the best pastime on the Tortoise. Unlike the solitary experience of riding Greyhound, you can’t help but get to know your fellow travelers. It gets even cozier at night when the bus converts to a sleeper for as many as 42. You get mighty familiar with strangers but it’s workable and can mean wonderful unexpected encounters.
The big attractions of the Tortoise, riders say, are the camaraderie and the different way of doing things.
“It was this or Greyhound or drive, and when you drive, you have to pay attention,” said Josh Littlefield, 24, of Monte Rio, Calif. “Anyway, I like the whole ethic of the Green Tortoise. Everybody comes from the same form of thought: a little bit liberal.”
“I love the Green Tortoise,” said Wendy Kendrick, 29, a holistic healing counselor from San Francisco who has ridden the line a dozen times. “I’m more comfortable.” Her comfort zone recently was sleeping in a convertible luggage rack above the seats.
Many but not all the riders are in their 20s or 30s. Victor Cerutti, a 74-year-old retired butcher from Daly City, Calif., doesn’t fit the mold. Clad in a classy cowboy hat, he looks more like a retired rodeo rider than a citizen of the Green Tortoise. He prefers the line because of its activity.
“I hate Greyhound,” he said. “There’s nothing to do except sit there.”
There’s a lot more to do on the Green Tortoise than sit. Today, its 13 buses make treks to Alaska, Baja and Central America, western national parks, Mardi Gras and the redwood forests. It operates coast-to-coast in the spring and summer, to Death Valley in the winter and up and down the West Coast year-round. The general public sees little of the Tortoise because it usually stops right along the interstates.
In the last few years, the Tortoise opened hostels in Seattle and San Francisco. But not a lot of expansion is in the works for 1998. The Kents have been pleased with the reception of its new weekend jaunts to Yosemite and may add similar quick trips. But they don’t want the line to get much larger.
“Any bigger and we lose what it’s all about,” Lyle Kent said. “The social interaction–that’s a special thing.”
This isn’t Greyhound. The buses stop for hikes, to cook, for swimming, campfires, waterfalls and occasionally mud yoga. It seeks out-of-the-way stops, like the secluded beach in Baja. The twice-weekly trips between Los Angeles and Seattle stop here, along Cow Creek, at the 120-acre parcel the company owns in rural southwestern Oregon, on the slopes of the Coast Range. It’s a beautiful, forested spot, with a sauna.
Soon after stumbling off the bus at Cow Creek, drivers deputize passengers for kitchen duty. Within minutes, the bus, converted to serve as the kitchen, fills with passengers scrubbing potatoes, cleaning salad and chopping vegetables. A recent dinner included baked fish, fresh vegetables, salad, mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy and homemade pies. Others wander off to the sauna or gather at tables around the campfire. Southbound travelers pay $4 for dinner and northbound riders pay $3 for breakfast.
This laid-back adventure is pretty much what Gardner Kent had in mind when he started the Tortoise in 1974 while living in the Star Mountain commune in Sonoma County, Calif. His first bus was a school bus used for family trips to Mexico.
It was one of several flourishing hippie bus companies operating under the generic name of Gray Rabbit. But soon the elder Kent broke off and formed the Green Tortoise and, of course, the Tortoise outlasted the Rabbit.
The Tortoise’s first trips were coast-to-coast but gradually Kent added the West Coast and Mexico.
“It was very much underground,” Lyle Kent said. “But one of the reasons it was underground was because busing wasn’t deregulated. You couldn’t get a permit.”
Searches by police weren’t unusual but have slacked off, except maybe in the Midwest or the East.
“Police and the highway patrol hardly know who we are,” Lyle Kent said. “You get lost on Interstate Highway 5. And generally, when they do stop us, cops don’t know how to deal with it. They’re mind-boggled.”
Relics of the past remain, however. Some buses still have pee holes, though unused. Employees today talk about the sex and drugs of the past more with amusement than wistfulness. The past, though, isn’t far from their minds.
“If you’re inclined to smoke something that may not be entirely legal, please do so away from the bus,” a driver cautioned riders. “We have enough problems.”
RIDE ON
A demographic look at the typical Green Tortoise rider:
– Gender:
Women: 60 percent
Men: 40 percent
– Age:
Oldest: 96
Youngest: 3 weeks
0-25: 54 percent
26-35: 30 percent
36-50: 11 percent
Older than 50: 5 percent
– Riders’ nationalities:
U.S.: 32 percent
Europe: 30 percent
Great Britain: 13 percent
Australia: 12 percent
Asia: 3 percent
New Zealand: 2 percent
Ireland: 2 percent
Other: 6 percent
Source: Green Tortoise
