I was emerging from the forest by the road, but my scarf had caught in a bush just as I had thought I was out. As my hands worked at the tangle of branch and scarf I looked up the embankment at the man who had stopped in passing to stare at me, silhouetted partially against the dull gray march sky. I got free and scrambled up to the road under his gaze.

The man wore a black cloth windbreaker and dark jeans. He had gray tinted glasses and his dark hair matched his mediterranean skin. We looked at each other a moment but before something could be said he turned and resumed walking down the road. It was the direction I was going so I fell in next to him. I wanted to tell him what I was doing in the woods, what a difficult shortcut it had been, and how I hoped to catch a bus which ran along this road. But it was hard to begin to try to start a conversation with this indifferent companion.

Suddenly, after one of the many times he looked back at the oncoming traffic, he began signaling one of the vehicles with a unique wave. It was a bus, not one of the long blunt public transit busses but a short school bus. It wasn't yellow though, it was painted a dark chocolate color and didn't have the flashing lights on the front.

"What is it?" I asked, watching it cut across lanes to us.

"It's a special kind of bus," said the guy, hands now back in his jacket pockets. "Only very hip people know about it."

It rolled to a stop on the shoulder in front of us. The door was opened. The driver was a stout man with penetrating blue eyes, blonde hair and mane-like beard, and wore a seasoned leather outfit that looked like, but not quite, medieval armor. He leaned on the door handle. I asked him: "Are you going by the University?"

"Sure," he said after a moment's hesitation. "We can go through there. Hop in"

I climbed on and he closed the door and pulled away smoothly.

"Hey, what about the other guy?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh him He's not a very hip person," said the driver matter-of-factly. This caused me to wonder if he would not believe me to be by the end of the trip. I was not dressed in any particularly unique way. There was only one other person on the bus. He was dressed rather punkly: heavy black boots and leather pants, a multicolored shirt leaning towards the purple with 3 heavy chains across the front, like bars of a band uniform. He had unkempt brown hair, a mustache, brown eyes, and an earring made of a feather and wires hung on his left ear. The driver introduced him to me with the name "A." (The driver later revealed his own name to be "Peter".) Peter and "A" seemed to know each other well, and they talked and joked with each other.